…Pretenders make their chart debut
FEBRUARY 1979
FEBRUARY 10
Pretenders’ debut single Stop Your Sobbing – a cover of a Kinks song from 1964 – had entered the UK charts at a respectable Number 60. In the weeks that followed it would rise higher, eventually peaking at Number 34. Success was calling, but no-bull singer Chrissie Hynde retained her sang-froid.
She did, though, admit to one swell of pride this month. On the February 26 episode of BBC2 comedy Fawlty Towers, titled The Psychiatrist, the rakish Mr Johnson (played by Nicky Henson) repeatedly read the February 17 edition of Melody Maker with Hynde on the cover, headlined, ‘The Great Pretender’. “[It] really did give me that rush,” she told her friend Nick Kent a month later. “I just went, Wow – that got me.”
She’d been preparing her arrival for some time. Born in Akron, Ohio in 1951, she’d got the rock’n’roll bug early and moved to London in 1973. With a nose for where the action was, she began writing for NME and worked at Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s King’s Road boutique SEX. There were trips back and forth to France, the US and UK, and, as punk began to motor in ’76, discussions on where to go next with Motörhead’s Lemmy, manager Tony Secunda and McLaren. Musical endeavours including Big Girl’s Underwear with The Clash’s Mick Jones and Masters Of The Backside with members of The Damned went nowhere, but in early 1978 something more concrete began to happen.
There was interest in her melodic, nuanced songs from Real Records’ Dave Hill, and by spring she finally had her own band, with speedy young guitarist James Honeyman-Scott and quiffed bass veteran Pete Farndon, plus drummer Gerry McIlduff. The line-up demo’d tracks in April 1978 at Regent’s Park Studios, and played on the
single version of Stop Your Sobbing produced in a day that autumn by Hynde’s pal Nick Lowe. “It shows what I knew,” Lowe told Canadian journalist Shaun Conner in 2017. “I didn’t really think Chrissie’s songs were very good… the one song that jumped out at me was this Kinks song.”
Drummer Martin Chambers, from Hereford like Farndon and Honeyman-Scott, completed the classic line-up soon after. With a melodic jangle that foresaw The Smiths and a tough rhythm section, Hynde – who had rocker attitude and an emotive vibrato which expressed strength and vulnerability – could now start putting her plan into operation, band name notwithstanding.
“We couldn’t think of a goddamn name,” she told Mark Williams in the Melody Maker whose cover she graced on Fawlty Towers, adding that she’d considered, for a millisecond, calling the group The Ceilings and The Kitchens. “In the end it’d got as far as [manager Hill] ringing us up the day the label was being printed and asking us what the hell we’d decided on. The Pretenders [after the 1955 Platters hit The Great Pretender] was a last-minute job, but it’s good.”
There was a BBC Radio 1 session for Kid Jensen on February 5, and an appearance on Top Of The Pops on February 15 alongside Gloria Gaynor, Skids and The Dooleys. The
“We couldn’t think of a goddamn name.” CHRISSIE HYNDE