Rural thugs, smack, and the story of Chrissie Hynde’s eventual 1980 breakthrough
If you were a young person in the throes of London’s blossoming punk scene back in the mid-1970s, you were either in a band or you knew a multitude of people who were.
Whether it was the Sex Pistols and their defiant attacks on the establishment, the genre-defying political punk of The Clash, or the pioneering goth rock being laid out by Siouxsie Sioux, all the big names of England’s punk scene seemed to go on to do incredible, culture-defining things. Even during those early days, though, Chrissie Hynde couldn’t seem to get her foot in the door, either in spite of or because of her undeniable rock and roll talents.
In her memoir, Clothes, Music, Boys, The Slits’ Viv Albertine suggests the reason that Hynde couldn’t seem to foster much success in the early days of British punk was for the simple reason that she was too talented. In a scene populated by non-musicians learning their first barre chords and making songs up as they went along, somebody with the clear vocal and songwriting talents of Hynde was somebody to be viewed with suspicion, it would appear.
That would certainly explain why the American-born vocalist was sacked from a group as ramshackled and chaotic as Johnny Moped. In 1978, though, Hynde seemed to find a natural home among fellow outcasts, in the line-up of The Pretenders – a band who would soon eclipse the parameters of the punk realm itself. “I’d been in England five years and thought I was too old to be in a band,” the vocalist recalled to Uncut.
“But I finally met the right guys,” she explained, name-dropping her Pretenders bandmates, James Honeyman-Scott, Pete Farndon, and Martin Chambers, adding:
“They were these rural thugs from Hereford… Really, they were like the guys in Straw Dogs. That was the beauty of The Pretenders.”
Despite their thuggish background and Hynde’s extensive experiences within the punk scene, The Pretenders found an unexpected degree of mainstream success with their self-titled debut LP in 1980.
Featuring a number-one single in the form of ‘Brass In Pocket’, the record itself topped the UK album charts, immediately eclipsing the success of virtually all of Hynde’s early punk contemporaries, at least in a commercial sense.
“We had this image of being a nice pop band, but really we were pretty hardcore,” Hynde affirmed, refusing to let go of the band’s punk beginnings. “We liked melodic pop music, but we liked to get fucked. It was never a problem making that first album. It was dead easy, in fact.”
Ultimately, though, those glory days didn’t last forever: “It was only later on that it did become a problem, with Pete and Jimmy. But then it always does when people start getting addicted to smack.”
Both Farndon and Honeyman-Scott would be dead within three years of that debut album’s release, the former as a result of a heroin overdose and the latter resulting from cocaine abuse. The Pretenders continued on, of course, in the wake of those deaths, but the magic marriage of pop sound and punk sensibility encased in those early efforts was lost forevermore.
