Alone With Chrissie Hynde

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Doc on the great Pretender. ’No one to say: “You’re doing it wrong”,’ Chrissie Hynde sings gleefully over that trademark Pretenders sound at the beginning of this 90-minute Arena documentary. ‘I’m at my best. I’m where I belong. Alone… I like it!’

It’s all about the pose, the stance, the toughness. Chrissie Hynde is a rock chick through and through, always engaged, lively, questioning… talking about and shopping for clothes in Paris, eulogising Bob Dylan’s unaffected aesthetics. Obsession. Glamour. “None of the greats look like bums,” she points out, looking anything but.

Chrissie Hynde. She’s been through it all (or most all) and back again. “I’m a lone, hungry, irritable wolf,” she tells Sandra Bernhand in New York. “I’m a recluse, that’s what I am.” Elsewhere she peers at the rain through shutters in Maida

Vale, and takes a trip back to her home town of Akron, Ohio.

Alone With Chrissie Hynde is a moving, intimate portrait of one of rock’s great inspirations.

Everett True