How the Pretenders Came Back With a Vengeance
Catching up with Chrissie Hynde in lockdown as her band releases one of its hardest-rocking albums
IT’S A FRIDAY EVENING in mid-May, and Chrissie Hynde is supposed to be kicking off a tour tonight in support of the Pretenders’ latest album, Hate for Sale. Instead, she’s stuck in her London flat, singing Bob Dylan’s “Standing in the Doorway” over the phone to the band’s lead guitarist for a covers project the two are working on. Her life, like everyone’s, has been upended, but you wouldn’t know it talking to her. “I live alone and I don’t have any pets, so I have all this time to mess around,” she says later. “I feel like I’m 15: no responsibilities, no pressure. I can paint and play songs.”
In recent months, Hynde, 68, has reconnected with her saxophone-playing brother, Terry, who lives in Ohio, and she frequently speaks on the phone with her two daughters, who also live in England, Hynde’s adopted home after growing up in Akron. (Her accent remains remarkably Ohioan, though she calls soccer “football” and friends “mates.”) As a longtime vegetarian and environmentalist, she loves that lockdown has meant less smog and more birdsong around the world. “If I knew there would be no more flights, if we can get rid of all cars, I would be the first to sign up,” she says. She’s composed a couple of songs but only writes when she’s moved to. “I’m pretty lazy,” she says. “I like goofing off. That’s what I’m good at.”
Over the past four decades, Hynde has fine-tuned a seemingly unflappable exterior in the face of trouble. Her toughness helped her move through the male-dominated rock world of the late Seventies, helped her endure the drug overdoses that killed two bandmates early in the Pretenders’ career, helped her raise children at the peak of her fame. At times it seemed like her never-give-a-shit attitude suffuses her whole being. “Of course I give a shit!” she protests. “Someone told me the definition of a disorder is when [something that bothers you] starts to interfere with daily life. So I’m not going to worry myself or something where it starts becoming a disorder.” When I explain that never giving a shit is sort of a virtue, she laughs and apologizes. “I’m a sensitive person,” she says.
Tennis legend John McEnroe, who befriended Hynde in the early Eighties, believes that other than Janis Joplin, Hynde is the “greatest female rock star.” McEnroe witnessed her charisma firsthand. In the mid-Nineties, he accompanied her to see Jeff Buckley in London: “After the show, Jeff met Chrissie and said, ‘Oh, my God. I’m such a big fan. I know all your songs.’ And she said, ‘Do you want to come and jam?’ I remember carrying his amp to the studio, and the guy knew every note of every song they played. I’m sure it was inspirational to her. Sometimes you need to be reminded of the respect you have.”
Hynde worked hard to earn that respect. She felt lost during much of her adolescence, but ended up studying art at Kent State. After moving to London, she spent years on the periphery of the city’s music scene, writing reviews for NME and working in the Vivienne Westwood clothing store that launched the Sex Pistols. Eventually, she started playing in groups that featured members of the Clash, and the Damned, and in 1978 Lemmy Kilmister of Motörhead suggested she link up with a drummer improbably called Gas Wild.
He didn’t play with Hynde long, but he helped her figure out the first Pretenders lineup, which eventually included guitarist James Honeyman-Scott, bassist (and Hynde’s former lover) Pete Farndon, and drummer Martin Chambers. The original Pretenders would last for two albums and one EP. Within two years, both Farndon and Honeyman-Scott were dead of drug-related causes.
Hynde decided Honeyman-Scott would have wanted the band to continue, so for the next decade she led a revolving door of bandmates through hit after hit: “Don’t Get Me Wrong,” “Middle of the Road,” “I’ll Stand by You.” “I have been asked 10,000 times, ‘Are the Pretenders just you? Or is it a band?’ All I can say is, I’m not a solo artist. My
“I’ve been asked a thousand times, ‘Are the Pretenders just you? Or is it a band?’ All I can say is, I’m not a solo artist.”
position in any band that I’ve been in is to set the guitar player up to make a goal. It’s all about the guitar.”
Hate for Sale is the first Pretenders album to feature the rest of the band since 2008’s Break Up the Concrete; since then, everything Hynde has started wound up as a solo affair, including the Pretenders’ 2016 LP, Alone. Hynde says she never intended to abandon her band. “It’s the logistics of getting a band in one place,” she explains. “I don’t have a studio. So I go where the producer is. I’ve wanted to make the album we just made for 15 years.”
Compared to Valve Bone Woe, Hynde’s quiet solo album from last year, Hate for Sale feels like a gut punch, with hard-rocking tunes about bookies, junkies, and crying in public. This is thanks partly to guitarist James Walbourne, who joined in 2008 after Chambers spotted him playing lunchtime gigs at a local pub. “To me, he’s the definitive guitar hero,” Hynde says. The pair collaborated on every track on Hate for Sale.
When the album was nearly done, Hynde sent it to McEnroe to get his take. “She’d come full circle,” he says. “She’s playing songs that are quick and to the point. This record, to me, is one young musicians should listen to.”
Now that the tour has been canceled, Hynde wants to get back to her roots — and away from the band’s warhorse hits. “What I’d really like is a more ‘alternative’ bill with someone like Mark Lanegan on tour with us,” she says. “The audience I want is one where I can pull out any obscure Pretenders thing and say, ‘Here’s something you’ve never heard,’ and they’re like, ‘Oh, OK. Cool,’ instead of, ‘I think I’ll get some beers for us, honey.’ ”
She has no interest in “socially distanced” shows (“Where are you going to do it, in an airplane hangar?”) or come-together anthems. “Why do artists think that they’re going to heal everybody and their music is so important? It’s a little bit pompous.
“But who knows? If we’re locked down like this for another five years, I might be doing a striptease on Zoom. I don’t know how desperate people can get.”