The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
Chrissie still rocks Jessamy Calkin has an audience with the formidable Chrissie Hynde
She’s madly into yoga and painting, and likes a quiet life. But does this mean Chrissie Hynde has put her rabble-rousing rock-star past behind her? Not a bit. The 68-year-old is still performing, still touring – and still has plenty to say, as Jessamy Calkin discovers
When Chrissie Hynde was eight years old, growing up in Akron, Ohio, she wanted to be a cowgirl. She had pigtails and striped T-shirts and corduroy trousers, loved horses, and never, ever wore a dress. Sixty years on, Hynde still refuses to do what’s expected of her. She still loves animals, and these days, she says, she can describe her style in one word: ‘roadie’.
Today she is wearing a black hoodie over a black T-shirt (which says ‘Love Milk Hate Slaughter’), Bella Freud tracksuit bottoms and a pair of Birkenstocks. I have not actually witnessed this outfit – current circumstances mean that she is in her flat in west London and we are talking on the phone. But I believe her.
And it’s pretty much the same thing, she says, that she would have worn 50 years ago.
An awful lot has happened to Chrissie Hynde in those 50 years: the Pretenders, the band she originally formed in 1978 (several different line-ups on), have made 10 studio albums and are about to release another: Hate for Sale. She has also made two solo albums, has been married twice and has two grown-up daughters (Natalie, 37, and Yasmin, 35) and twin grandsons. She has written a memoir, Reckless: My Life as a Pretender (2015), and at the age of 60 she gave up cigarettes, alcohol and drugs. Not that she was a drunk or a junkie or anything, but still – her book has a few hair-raising stories. In the early ’80s she lost two band members to drugs within a year – half the group – but unlike many of her friends and contemporaries, Chrissie Hynde has longevity.
‘Having kids gives you longevity if you’re a woman, because you have to take time off [she brought up her daughters alone] and that way you don’t bore the public with yourself, and then if anyone’s still interested, you’re glad to get back into it again – so there lies the longevity,’ she says. ‘Taking drugs and getting really f—ked up and drinking and smoking – that can give you short-gevity. But if you survive and you finally pull the plug on all that stuff, you feel like you did before you started, which for most of us was when we were 15, and that gives you a second wind.’
She’d been thinking about giving up smoking for 30 years, she says. ‘I tricked myself into thinking I didn’t smoke very much. But I smoked every day – I rolled my own.’ Of course she did – like roadies do. Allen Carr helped her give up. Not the comedian. ‘The Easy Way To Stop Smoking –it works! He bangs on about it so much that by the end you’re thinking, f—k it, I don’t even want one any more.’
She is pretty healthy now, which she puts down to being a vegetarian since she was a teenager, and doing yoga every day for the past 30 years. Chrissie Hynde doesn’t leave the house unless she’s stood on her head.
‘Drugs were the defining characteristic of my generation,’ she wrote in Reckless. Does she have an addictive personality? ‘According to Allen Carr there’s no such thing, so I’ll go along with him. Some people can be moderate, but my guess is that if you’re in a rock’n’roll band, you’re not one of those people.
‘Eventually everyone comes to the same conclusion – at a certain age you just can’t do that stuff any more. Look at Keith Richards, Iggy Pop – all the real caners in rock history – after about the age of 50 you just have to slow down.’
Her book is dedicated to ‘all my crazy friends (many now departed)’, but it chiefly refers to her guitarist James Honeyman-scott, who died when he was only 25, after taking too much cocaine. ‘He’s the one who really created the Pretenders’ sound,’ she says. ‘Whether I’d still be working with him or not – who knows? Chances are, after 40 years people aren’t still working together. But I’m very mindful of his musicality and I’ve kept it alive in his honour.’
Right now Hynde was supposed to be on a bus with her band on a tour of 60 cities in the States. She has mixed feelings about this being cancelled. ‘We were the support act [to Tyranny – a metal band popular in America]. If you support a big household name you are beholden to do a greatest-hits package because it’s not really your audience, so you kind of have to play what they’ve heard on the radio, and that is not very satisfying.’
It’s been postponed until next year. She is undaunted by the idea of such an exhausting-sounding venture because Chrissie Hynde is still such an out-and-out rock chick. ‘As soon as I see the scaffolding and the stage and the road crew, I just feel like I’m at home. Everything else in life is like a waiting game.’
Like many people who didn’t expect to, Hynde has enjoyed lockdown, savoured it even. She has been recording some Bob Dylan tracks over the phone with her guitar player, and getting on with her other obsession, painting: oil paintings, both figurative and abstract, which were recently collected in a book, Adding the Blue. It’s like a meditation to her, and she paints pretty much every day. She says she gets just as much satisfaction out of painting as performing. ‘It’s the sense of relief that you’ve done it – there’s nothing like it.
‘If you’re going to do a gig, you have to rehearse, you faff around with the set list, you’re nervous, your hair looks like s—t, you’ve been travelling, you didn’t sleep well. Whatever it is, by the time the show is over the sense of relief just pours over you like honey.’
But the main reasons she’s appreciated the lockdown are the obvious ones: the quiet, the birdsong, the lack of pollution. She says it’s rejuvenated London and made her fall in love with the city all over again.
Chrissie Hynde grew up in a conventional family in Akron. Her father was a former marine who worked for the phone company, her mother a glamorous housewife, and she had an older brother, Terry. Hynde was an unusual American teenager – she liked walking, in a culture where nobody walked, and she was a vegetarian in a land that was founded on hamburgers.
She was not academic (‘I was incapable of doing things I didn’t want to do,’ she says), but she was good at art. She went to Kent State University’s art school, but did very little work because she was obsessed with music. Bands were everything. She hung out in record shops, she saw the Stones when she was 14, and she was devoted to Iggy Pop.
‘The overriding thing,’ she says, ‘was that I just loved rock music. Everyone from my generation loved it, but people that actually got in a band took it one step further – it really got inside us and there was nowhere else to go.’
She had long been enthralled with the idea of London and its music scene, and arrived there in 1973, aged 21, with her friend Cindy and $200. They stayed in a cheap hotel in Bayswater and Hynde was disappointed to find that the reality was warm beer, Rothmans and floral dresses.
She sold handbags in a market until she
met the writer Nick Kent and started working for the NME. They didn’t care that she couldn’t write. ‘They wanted a pimple-faced loudmouth to push the male staff around,’ she says in her book. She wrote searing critical reviews of various bands until it occurred to her, at some point, that maybe she should get out there and do it for herself.
She worked at Sex, Malcolm Mclaren and Vivienne Westwood’s boutique in Chelsea, and was right in the thick of the punk revolution, becoming good friends with the Sex Pistols and The Clash. After a few false starts, the Pretenders were put together in the spring of 1978, from musicians she found along the way. Their first single, a cover of The Kinks’ Stop Your Sobbing, was released in January 1979 and went to number 34 in the UK charts. A year later Brass in Pocket went to number one, as did their debut album.
In 1981 – by which time they were properly famous – their second tour of America was derailed by alcohol and drugs. Bass player Pete Farndon had become an obnoxious heroin addict and Hynde’s own behaviour was out of control – she drank a lot and regularly abused her audience, and once she kicked out the windows of a police car after being arrested in Memphis.
In June 1982, James Honeyman-scott, her revered guitarist, died. Farndon died the following year after taking heroin and drowning in the bath.
Since then there have been long breaks and varying line-ups within the Pretenders, and Hynde has collaborated with renowned artists from Frank Sinatra to Emmylou Harris.
Hynde’s great strength is her voice, pretty much unchanged from the early days, which contains a sort of suppressed longing that is impossible to manufacture. This is evident in the beautiful solo album of jazz and blues covers she recorded in 2019, Valve Bone Woe, and in songs such as
I’ll Stand by You.
But it didn’t come easily. ‘I loved singing, but it took me a long time to feel like I owned it,’ she wrote in Reckless . ‘But I knew it owned me and always had.’
In 1980 she met Ray Davies of The Kinks, whose songs Stop Your Sobbing and
I Go to Sleep the Pretenders had covered and made into hits. It was a tempestuous relationship. When they traipsed off to the registry office in late 1982, they argued so much that the official refused to marry them. Nine months later they had a daughter, Natalie Rae Hynde. Her second daughter, Yasmin, is the child of Simple Minds’ lead singer Jim Kerr, whom she married in 1984 (they divorced six years later). She was also married to Lucho Brieva, a Colombian sculptor, from 1997 until 2003.
She’s mostly on good terms with all her exes, she says (‘I just reconnected with one recently. Cool dude. Guy in a band…’), but has lived on her own now for about 15 years. A lot of her songs are about loneliness, but she says firmly, ‘I’m not lonely. I’ve had the occasional boyfriend, but I now realise that I am a kind of lone wolf. And I like it. I can do what I want. When you live with someone a lot of time is spent socialising, which is fine, that’s why people want to be in love and have someone around, so they can share the mundane moments and turn them into something satisfying. But I have a lot of extra time to do stuff. I’m not advocating it, I’m just saying it works for me.
‘I don’t feel unloved,’ she continues. ‘There’s nothing better than being in love – everyone knows that – but it’s kind of a hassle, too. One bad text can destroy your whole day – and then if you’re away, there’s that gnawing longing to see someone and they’re not there. I like things the way they are. I don’t want to rock the boat.’
She has a lot of friends, and her daughters are not far away. ‘They’re adults now – and I see them a hell of a lot more than I saw my parents. I’m not a very touchy-feely type – we don’t have to see each other all the time – although I do love them and want to be there for them whenever they need me, but I also respect that they have their own thing.’
She is not one to rustle up big family meals. ‘That was never really my cup of tea. I’ve never made a big dinner and had people over.’ She usually gets takeaways, but lock
ON PAINTING ‘I’M NOT TRYING TO MAKE MY NAME AS A PAINTER. REALLY, WHO CARES?’