Why did Chrissie Hynde date one of the Hells Angels who raped her?
She enraged feminists by blaming herself for the attack. But the full story’s even more shocking
off bikers, it seems, as a boyfriend in those years was the ‘sergeant-atarms’ of its London chapter. Nor had she stopped taking the most stupid risks with her personal safety. During a brief period living back in Ohio, she cadged a lift from a motorist in a dodgy part of town.
The driver gave her some mescaline, a powerful psychedelic drug, and the next thing she knew, she found herself naked in a grotty hotel room whose door her new ‘friend’ had blocked with a wardrobe.
He threatened to strangle her with a lamp cord if she tried to escape, and they ended taking a shower and going to bed together, with Hynde tripping badly throughout.
He eventually took her home — after stealing all her money — but she is shocked now by her reckless- ness. ‘It was grim but it was my own damn fault: what kind of idiot jumps in a car with a stranger?’ she writes.
Finally, she found the success she craved after joining up with three Englishmen in 1978 to form The Pretenders. But the band were quickly undone by drugs.
Pete Farndon, the bass player and Hynde’s lover, was sacked from the group in 1982 over his drug-taking. Two days after he left, the band’s guitarist, James Honeyman-Scott, died of heart failure following a cocaine overdose. Farndon himself died the following year, drowning in his bath after overdosing on heroin, a needle still in his arm.
Hynde insists she has never got over losing Farndon. ‘I’d taken him into my reckless world and lost him there,’ she writes. Although she delights in relating what she regards as the highpoints of her life — such as her brief dalliance with her idol, Iggy Pop, while they were both on tour — she doesn’t neglect the lowpoints.
These include her ill-fated twoyear relationship with Ray Davies, lead singer of The Kinks and father of her daughter, Natalie, now 32.
Hynde and Davies, a manic depressive who has also struggled with drink and drugs, had a tempestuous time together — once, she threw his clothes out of a hotel window and they were picked up by a passing tramp before they could be retrieved.
They arranged to get married at Guildford register office in the early Eighties. For the big day, Hynde wore a white silk suit with matching white, button-up ankle boots. ‘Ray wanted to have the ceremony in Guildford. I wanted to get a cab there — you know, a little bit of luxury on the day, with me all decked out in my suit under a raincoat — but he wanted to take a train so we got the train,’ she writes.
When they got there, she says, ‘the guy in the register office took one look at us and suggested we come back another time.
‘I guess mascara smeared all over my face was the giveaway. Even a stranger could tell we were making a mistake, but I’ve never heard of anyone getting turned away before’.
They took separate trains back to London.
Although the later years are not covered in her memoir, Hynde married Simple Minds lead singer Jim Kerr in New York in 1984 after they met while touring in Australia. She says she was attracted to him by his vegetarian lifestyle — the marriage lasted five years and produced her second daughter, Yasmin.
By then, she had become a selfstyled ‘militant vegetarian’, calling for killing animals and eating meat to be outlawed — she insists she could never so much as kiss a man if she knew he had been eating meat.
Hynde was also a supporter of the Hare Krishna movement, regularly visiting their temples and inviting devotees to her home.
She was persuaded to put her life down on paper by her old friend John McEnroe. Whenever he played at Wimbledon, she’s said, he would get in contact. ‘He’d always call me because he knew I had pot. He used to come around and hang out.’
However, celebrating drugs is the last thing she wants to do in her book, she insists.
Now that so many of her hardliving friends are prematurely dead, she is today anything but a fan of rock ’n’ roll excess.
The ‘moral of my story’, she writes at the end of it, is that drugs ‘only cause suffering’.
Like her blunt, battle-hardened views on rape, it’s an opinion her liberal admirers may find hard to stomach.