The Pretenders

The Pretenders are a rock band known for innovative songwriting and charismatic performances. The original band consisted of vocalist and rhythm guitarist Chrissy Hynde, lead and rhythm guitarist James Honeyman-Scott, bassist Pete Farndon, and drummer Martin Chambers.

Hynde was originally from Akron, Ohio, and was a student at Kent State University during the time of both the killings there, and the first performances by the (at the time) angrily subversive avant-garde band, Devo (who became popular in the 1980s in markedly less threatening form). Hynde moved to London in 1973 and began writing for the weekly music paper, New Musical Express. After several years of false starts, including the band, The Moors Murderers, she moved definitively from writing to performing. The Pretenders formed during the tail end of the original British punk movement, in 1978. Hynde's eventual band comprised a set of acquaintances from provincial Hereford, near the Welsh border — talented young players with a pop aesthetic who had missed out on the punk explosion of 1976, but were eager to catch up. Farndon was the first to join the band, following a medium-noteworthy run with the Bushwackers, an Australian folk-rock ensemble. Hynde and Farndon were romantically linked. Farndon recruited Honeyman-Scott, at the time a clerk in a music store, while Honeyman-Scott recruited Chambers.

Following their signing to Real Records on the basis of a demo of the song, 'The Phone Call', the band quickly rose to critical attention with the single, 'Stop Your Sobbing' (written by Ray Davies and produced by Nick Lowe). It was followed in quick succession by the popular singles 'Kid' and 'Brass in Pocket' — the last regarded as a somewhat tame and commercial song compared to the rest of the band's early output, which nonetheless cracked the US market for the band.

The album, The Pretenders, was released in 1979, and was a great success in both the United Kingdom and the US, both critically and with chart-topping sales.

Hynde's surprising (early critics said 'riveting') girl group-influenced vocals were crucial to the band's success, although the early Pretenders were very much an ensemble: Musicians regard the early (Herefordshire) Pretenders as an exemplary 'great rock band' — adept at playing interlocking musical parts, shifting mood and tempo on cue, and responding to subtle cues from one another. Their recordings were mostly performed live in the studio, with only lead guitar and vocal overdubs. (Among the interesting features of the first two albums are casual shifts into odd time signatures, as in the 15/16-time 'Tattooed Love Boys' — notable [like the 5/4-time 'Mission Impossible' theme] in that listeners rarely notice how advanced the music is.) Another major element of the band's early success was producer Chris Thomas (famed, with engineer Bill Price, for the sound achieved on the Sex Pistols' album, Never Mind the Bollocks). Fans familiar with the band's US chart singles are often unaware of how loud and aggressive the early Pretenders could be, and how loose and experimental some of their early recordings were.

After several more single releases, the second album, Pretenders II, was released in 1981. Most critics at the time called it disappointing, although it is now universally considered a canonically great album. Pretenders II is more spread-out than the debut, and was underappreciated at the time due to high expectations — including the critics' notion that the band should be capable of four or five hit singles per album. Instead, they produced a collection of songs including the UK and US hit singles, 'Message of Love' and 'Talk of the Town,' the MTV video hit, 'Day After Day,' and perennial album-radio favorites, 'The Adulteress,' 'Birds of Paradise,' and 'The English Roses.' According to some critics (Hynde dated the major UK rock critic Nick Kent), 'Talk of the Town' is an unrequited-love song about Hynde's old friend John Lydon, a.k.a. Johnny Rotten.

A common musicians' tale concerns the player who thought that the leather-clad bikers he encountered were tough, but who gamely mouthed off to the vocal-harmony band wearing matching suits. (That musician ended badly. Moral: Fools often think it's the bikers who are the badasses, while it's really the matching-outfit, harmony-singing, pop music guys who are the dangerous ones. We'll return to this tale in one moment.

'Day After Day,' from Pretenders II, spins a common second-album narrative of unaccustomed celebrity, with the band rushing from gig to gig, hotel to hotel, head-spun from the swiftness of it all. The song ends suddenly, mid-guitar-solo, with the sound of a crashing fighter plane.

As if presciently, that was what happened to the Pretenders. The word 'tragedy' is overused, but in 1982, at the peak of the band's success and potential, Hynde kicked ex-lover Pete Farndon out of the group for drug problems — and two days later, Honeyman-Scott was dead of a cocaine overdose. While the band reeled and floundered, Farndon himself overdosed on heroin, leaving the original, critically revered (and much loved) Herefordshire Pretenders as the world's all-time leaders in the grim rock 'n' roll death index, after less than three years of fame.

Tales later surfaced of band members' unhinged and violent behavior (Hynde included, Honeyman-Scott and Chambers generally excepted), underscoring the common musicians' parable that it can often be the bands who play the most mannered and melodic music who are genuinely dangerous to be around.

Honeyman-Scott is now regarded as an important rock guitarist, while Farndon is widely-admired as a rock bassist.

Hynde's subsequent attempts at 'The Pretenders' never recaptured the band's original intensity, although the first comeback single, the death-haunted "Back on the Chain Gang," gave a reasonable facsimile. Hynde reformed the Pretenders with professional musicians Robbie McIntosh and Malcolm Foster. The band's first album with this lineup, Learning to Crawl, was released to respectful critical acclaim in 1984.

A long series of popular releases followed. Hynde's relationship with Ray Davies, leader of the sixties British Invasion band, The Kinks, and her ensuing motherhood, also had something to do with the change in the band's persona (Hynde later married Jim Kerr, of Simple Minds. Hynde became increasingly focused on political activism, vocally supporting the environmental movement and vegetarianism. Her social and political views were woven into more than one of the band's successful releases.

In the song, "My City Was Gone," Hynde expressed dismay at the devastation caused by industrial pollution and rampant commercial development in her home state. (The riff from this song would become the introductory music to Rush Limbaugh's popular talk radio program, despite the fact that Limbaugh despises the message of the song, and that Hynde despises the message of Rush Limbaugh.) "Middle of the Road", a song that attempted to recapture some of the group's earlier hard-edged sound (critics disagree that the attempt was successful), dealt with, among other things, the indifference of wealthy nations to the plight of the world's poor and the apathy of the wealthy bourgeoisie, as in the lyric, "When you own a big chunk of the bloody third world, the babies just come with the scenery."

Yet another new lineup including McIntosh, Hynde, and a bevy of session musicians, released Get Close in 1986, which returned Hynde's Pretenders into the charts with "Don't Get Me Wrong". The Smiths' guitarist Johnny Marr joined the Pretenders for a brief period after the Smiths' breakup in 1987. Record sales were often good, but excitement over the band was never high.

There was a long hiatus in activity for Hynde from 1986 to 1994, when she released "Last of the Independents" with limited success. Touring behind the album with original drummer Martin Chambers, in small venues around the US, she was given to interrupting shows with diatribes on her favorite causes, sometimes insulting the audience, to the chagrin of hired bandmates onstage. "All you hamburger-eating motherfuckers are gonna die!" was the peak of one such rant, delivered in front of a Boston audience in 1995, and reported unfavorably in the local music press. Later performances at Lilith Fair were high-energy and inspiring, featuring clashes between the resolutely un-PC Hynde and festival organizers. Critics have often expressed a wish that the music of the contemporary Pretenders could be as edgy and exciting as Hynde herself, with Hynde assuming the grande-dame status that Joan Jett has taken — uncaring of former celebrity, working to potential no matter the scale.

Critics have enshrined the original Pretenders (along with Cheap Trick and others) as among the "last of the original 'great rock bands.'" Viva el Amor was released in 1999, as was their collaboration with Tom Jones on the album Reload.

In 2005, the Pretenders were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Discography:

• 1980 – Pretenders (UK #1)
• 1981 – Extended Play
• 1981 – Pretenders II (UK #7)
• 1984 – Learning to Crawl (UK #11)
• 1986 – Get Close (UK #6)
• 1987 – The Singles (UK #6)
• 1990 – Packed! (UK #19)
• 1994 – Last of the Independents (UK #8)
• 1995 – The Isle of View (UK #23)
• 1999 – Viva El Amor (UK #32)
• 2000 – Greatest Hits (UK #21)
• 2002 – Loose Screw (UK #55)