Sat Sun Mat: The art school band featuring Chrissie Hynde and Mark Mothersbaugh
If ever there were a living rock ‘n’ roll legend deserving of one of those hyperbolic, royal nicknames, it would be Chrissie Hynde. The Pretenders frontwoman is not only an incomparable powerhouse in her own right but also boasts one of the most expansive networks of influence and collaboration over the past 50 years. Her Rolodex of friends and admirers spans from Lemmy Kilmister—one of her first pals in early 1970s London—to Ray Davies, her live-in partner during the 1980s, to Dave Grohl, who fan-boyed his way behind the drum kit as her guest drummer at Glastonbury in 2023.
Hynde could have made a rightful claim to the ‘Queen of Rock’ title if Tina Turner hadn’t gotten there first, and at the very least, should have been up for ‘Dame of New Wave’ or ‘Duchess of Alt Rock’. Instead, when you search “Chrissie Hynde nicknames” online, this is the actual horrifying AI-generated result you are greeted with: “Chrissie Hynde doesn’t have any nicknames listed in the sources, but here are some other facts about her: In 1985, Hynde sang on the British reggae-pop band UB40’s cover of ‘I Got You Babe’. The song reached number one on the UK Singles Chart and number 28 on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart.”
That should be all the evidence you need that artificial intelligence isn’t yet ready to deliver the curated rock ‘n’ roll factoids that the world needs. Fortunately, Far Out is up to the challenge, and thus, we can turn our attention to one of Chrissie Hynde’s very first and most intriguing collabs—one that didn’t lead to a single recording but still proved foundational for both Hynde and another future chart-topper.
Back in 1970, Hynde—a native of Akron, Ohio—was a wide-eyed teenage student at Kent State University, just outside her hometown. Kent had a lively arts and music scene, and Hynde was able to make some connections with some like-minded students, one of whom invited her to sing with his upstart covers band, called Sat Sun Mat (short for “Saturday Sunday Matinee”). That student’s name was Mark Mothersbaugh, a fellow Akronite and future frontman of the pioneering electronic post-punk band Devo.
“You don’t know if you can sing until you stand in front of a mic,” Hynde recalled to The Guardian in 2009. “The first time I did was traumatic. I was 16 and in a band called Sat Sun Mat. We played a few quirky covers, such as Traffic’s ‘Forty Thousand Headmen’, in a church hall. I wasn’t a natural-born show-off, at least not on stage, so I had to overcome that.”
It’s safe to say that nobody in attendance at one of Sat Sun Mat’s few gigs could have anticipated that they were watching the fledgling efforts of two of rock’s most influential voices. It’s also not clear how seriously Hynde and Mothersbaugh were taking the project. After the events of the spring of 1970, however, Sat Sun Mat became an afterthought, as the artistic priorities for both Chrissie and Mark were dramatically changed forever.
The May 4th Massacre, in which national guardsmen gunned down four Kent State students during a peaceful protest against the Vietnam War, became one of the defining moments of the anti-war movement, memorialised for audiences around the world in the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young song, ‘Ohio’. Neil Young had written the song based on what he’d seen on the news. For Hynde, Mothersbaugh, and other Kent students (including another future Devo member, Gerald Casale and future Eagle Joe Walsh), it was a day of personal trauma.
“The grassy, rolling common was teeming with students, I’d never seen it so packed,” Hynde later recalled. “Then I heard the ‘tatatatatatatatatat’ sound. I thought it was fireworks. An eerie silence fell over the common. Then a young man’s voice: ‘They fucking killed somebody.’”
In the aftermath, Chrissie soon opted to turn the page and drop out of college, moving to England and beginning her path toward the Pretenders. Mothersbaugh and Casale, meanwhile, were inspired to break with hippie idealism and channel a darker worldview into a new project about de-evolution.
These new pursuits would greatly benefit the rock landscape of the next 20 years, but there remains a curious hole where a fully realised version of Sat Sun Mat could have resided—perhaps with Chrissie Hynde, the High Priestess of Art Punk, strutting the stage in an energy dome hat.
