The devastating loss behind The Pretenders’ biggest hit in 1982
Tragedy is a constant of human existence, and the music world is no different.
In fact, the emergence of the punk rock spirit that birthed bands like The Pretenders in its wake was also responsible for a kind of ‘live fast, die young’ spirit that many of its devotees took far too literally.
Sonically, The Pretenders didn’t share a great deal in common with the punk explosion that first gave rise to its band members, with Chrissie Hynde exchanging the sound of her brief period with groups like Johnny Moped for something with far more in the way of mainstream appeal. It was with that more commercialised sound, after all, that the group scored mainstream hits in ‘Brass In Pocket’ and ‘Kid’ back in 1979.
Nevertheless, the fact that the band had all been involved, to varying degrees, in London’s mid-1970s punk explosion meant they maintained many of the attitudes and lifestyle choices inherent in that scene, namely a destructive ‘no future’ attitude towards life.
Drugs have always been prevalent within the musical realm, whether it was the LSD explorations of 1960s psych rockers or the heroin addictions of countless legendary jazz stars. When punk kicked off in the squats of London, its drug of choice quickly became heroin, with the likes of Johnny Thunders, Sid Vicious, and The Ruts’ Malcolm Owen being just a handful of the artists who were plagued by the addiction that ultimately led to their deaths.
The Pretenders were no strangers to the perils of the needle, either. In April 1983, the band’s bassist, Pete Farndon, was found dead at his home at the age of 30, having drowned in the bathtub while suffering a heroin overdose. Less than a year prior to that tragic passing, the band’s guitarist, James Honeyman-Scott, had also died, resulting from his debilitating addiction to cocaine.
There is no doubt that those addictions and untimely deaths affected the group, but you only need to look at their 1982 single ‘Back on the Chain Gang’ to see how they channelled that grief and hurt into art. One of the band’s biggest transatlantic smashes, the Hynde-penned single was recorded in the weeks immediately following Honeyman-Scott’s death, which coincided with the time that Farndon was sacked from the group due to his heroin addiction, which would claim his life some months later.
Hynde penned the song as a memorial to her former bandmate and comrade, as well as a means of exercising her own frustrations with a famously tumultuous relationship with one Ray Davies, whose child she was carrying at the time the song was recorded.
Seemingly, though, the pain and suffering at the heart of the song caught something in the public’s consciousness, as ‘Back on the Chain Gang’ ended up becoming one of The Pretenders’ most successful singles, breaching the top five on both sides of the Atlantic.
Earning a spot on the soundtrack for Scorsese’s The King of Comedy, the song went on to define the sound of the band as they entered an entirely new era, spurred on both by their newfound success and the line-up changes dictated by those tragic deaths.
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