Motörhead, The Pretenders and how LEmmy became “instrumental” to Chrissie Hynde
Long before she was famous, and even before The Pretenders played their first gig, Chrissie Hynde always seemed to find herself rubbing shoulders with the coolest people in whatever given room she happened to be standing in.
As a high school kid in Akron, Ohio, the random garage band she joined included future members of DEVO. When she moved to London in the early 1970s, she suddenly had a writing job at the New Musical Express and a humble retail gig selling clothes at Malcom McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s shop, Sex, which had only just opened. Later, she very nearly married several members of the Sex Pistols, but it was a different rock legend that she would later credit for playing a critical role in the formation of her own band in 1978.
“Lemmy was very instrumental in my history,” Hynde told podcaster Marc Maron in 2014, referring to the late, great Motörhead frontman Ian ‘Lemmy’ Kilmister. “Without him, the Pretenders wouldn’t have happened.”
Despite her entrenchment in the budding punk rock scene in the mid-1970s, Hynde had always been romantically drawn to a different London subculture: the bikers. Lemmy, who founded Motörhead in 1975 after getting booted out of his first band, Hawkwind, was very much part of that community.
“He hung out with all the bikers in London, so of course I gravitated to that,” Hynde recalled. “In fact, Lemmy, the first time I met him, I was in a shop on the King’s Road, and he walked up to me, he didn’t say anything; he just stuck this silver tube that hung around his neck on a chain in a bag of white powder and shoved it up my snout, and he walked away. I was up for three days.”
Hynde was very aware of all the musical influences feeding into the sound of London in ‘75, from the lingering effect of hippie culture and glam rock to the huge impact of reggae music and the Rastafarian community on the punk kids. When Lemmy formed Motörhead that year, though, it “kind of lived outside of it all,” she said. “You know, because it was Lemmy. And Lemmy is always Lemmy.”
Later, when Hynde expressed her desire to put together a new band of her own, she turned to her old pal. “I was kind of feeling sorry for myself because I’d been trying to get this band together for a long time,” she added. “Lemmy said, ‘Well nobody said it was gonna be easy.’ I was really shocked; I thought he was gonna be a little more simpatico.”
Eventually, Lemmy advised Hynde to “check out this guy named Gas,” referring to drummer Gas Wild. Chrissie followed up and met Wild, who was from Hereford, and he, in turn, introduced her to Hereford bassist Pete Farndon, who, in turn, brought in the guitarist James ‘Honeyman’ Scott; thus building the core of the band that would become The Pretenders.
It might be a stretch to fully credit Lemmy for making all of this possible, particularly since his original recommendation, Gas Wild, was replaced before the Pretenders ever entered a recording studio. But the spirit of the musicians Hynde found through that rabbit hole was one, like Lemmy, “completely outside of punk.”
“I had this idea that my band would be like a motorcycle club with guitars,” Hynde said. “You know, I thought I was a badass.”
The Pretenders didn’t end up reminding anyone of Motörhead in the end, but they similarly defied the trends of the period and carved their own niche; a nod from one badass to another.
