Pretenders
The towering talent of Chrissie Hynde.
CHRISSIE HYNDE has always gone her own way and, as a result, stood apart. Not for her a guitar, but a baritone ukulele when learning to play as a 14-year-old in her bedroom in Akron, Ohio. Still, the chances of actual success in a group seemed a remote possibility. “Like saying, ‘Wow, wouldn’t it be great to play baseball?’” she told MOJO in 2014.
Hynde moved to the UK in 1973, wrote for the music press, worked at McLaren and Westwood’s SEX shop, played with Johnny Moped and Mick Jones, but struggled to make inroads into the music scene, partly because her songs came from another stylistic place. “I was a little too musical for that punk scene,” she reflected. “I came here talking about Bobby Womack and they’d just seen Mott The Hoople.”
After she met Hereford musicians James Honeyman-Scott (guitar) and Pete Farndon (bass), the Pretenders were born, solidified by drummer Martin Chambers. The band found an audience with 1979’s cover of The
Kinks’ Stop Your Sobbing, followed a year later by their Number 1 Pretenders debut album.
When Honeyman-Scott and
Farndon both met drug-related deaths within 10 months in 1982-3, Hynde rebuilt the band. “I dealt with it the way people deal with things when they have no choice,” she offered. “There’s no point in saying it was brave. What else can you do?”
Hynde’s perseverance paid off with 1984’s Learning
To Crawl, but from that point on, the Pretenders became an amorphous outfit, or a trading name for Hynde’s solo career, officially launched in 2014 with Stockholm.
A freshly inspired new line-up featuring Muswell Hill guitarist James Walbourne has returned the Pretenders to top form. Their 2023 Glastonbur y set was a festival highlight, with Dave Grohl and Johnny Marr guesting and Paul McCartney admiring from the wings.
Although typically self-effacing about her songwriting and singing – despite having perhaps the greatest vibrato in rock – Hynde’s catalogue proves her to be a towering talent and dogged individualist.
“I was a little too musical for the punk scene.” CHRISSIE HYNDE