Chrissie Hynde

Chrissie Hynde: The Voice That Refused Training

On 4 May 1970 an art student at Kent State University was on campus when the Ohio National Guard opened fire. Four people died; one of them was the boyfriend of a close friend. Three years later she left for London with no plan and no money, and by the end of the decade she was fronting a band of Englishmen with a number one single. Chrissie Hynde has spent fifty years being the least sentimental person in any room she is in, and it is not difficult to work out where the habit started.

Akron, and What Came After

She was born in Akron, Ohio, on 7 September 1951 and grew up in Cuyahoga Falls, the daughter of a part-time secretary and a Yellow Pages manager. She has never pretended the childhood was formative in any way except negatively. "I was never too interested in high school," she said, and her real attention went elsewhere — to the bands passing through Cleveland, and eventually to Kent State's art school, where she played in a group called Sat. Sun. Mat. alongside Mark Mothersbaugh, later of Devo.

She became vegetarian in 1969, at eighteen, and has called it "the best thing that ever happened to me" — a conviction that turned into decades of work for PETA and Viva!

London, the NME, and the Shop Called Sex

She arrived in London in May 1973. After a spell at an architectural firm she met the rock journalist Nick Kent and talked her way onto the *NME*, where she wrote what she later dismissed as "half-baked philosophical drivel and nonsensical tirades." Then she went to work behind the counter at Sex, Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood's King's Road boutique, which placed her at the exact address where British punk was being assembled.

What followed was four years of near-misses conducted with remarkable stubbornness. She tried to start bands in France, went home to Cleveland to play in an R&B group, and came back to London in 1976. She needed a work permit, so she asked the Sex Pistols to marry her: by her account Johnny Rotten agreed to go to a registry office and then withdrew, Sid Vicious volunteered instead, and they turned up to find the office "closed for an extended holiday." She auditioned for 999, played guitar in the group that became The Damned, performed with Johnny Moped and travelled with The Clash. She was in every important room in London and in none of the bands.

The Pretenders

In the spring of 1978 the manager Dave Hill found her a rehearsal space in Covent Garden, and she assembled the band herself: Pete Farndon on bass, James Honeyman-Scott on guitar and keyboards, Martin Chambers on drums. The name came from Sam Cooke's version of "The Great Pretender." The first single, a cover of the Kinks' "Stop Your Sobbing," reached number 33 in January 1979. The second changed everything. "Brass in Pocket" went to number one in the UK on 19 January 1980, the same day the debut album *Pretenders* charted, and the record went round the world.

The configuration mattered as much as the songs. Hynde was not a singer hired to front somebody's band. She was the songwriter, the rhythm guitarist and the boss, and she was an American woman running three English men — an arrangement almost without precedent in 1980. Madonna, who watched her play Central Park that August, remembered it exactly: "She was amazing: the only woman I'd seen in performance where I thought, yeah, she's got balls, she's awesome!"

Two Deaths in Ten Months

The band lasted two albums. Farndon was dismissed in June 1982; days later, on 16 June, James Honeyman-Scott died of a drug overdose. Farndon died the same way the following year. Hynde had lost her guitarist and her bass player inside ten months, at the precise moment the Pretenders had become a major international act.

What she did next is the defining decision of her career. She did not fold the band and she did not turn the grief into a public performance. She recorded "Back on the Chain Gang" with a caretaker line-up, rebuilt around Robbie McIntosh and Malcolm Foster, and delivered *Learning to Crawl* in 1984 — a worldwide hit and, by common consent, the equal of anything on the first two records. When Martin Chambers left before *Get Close* in 1986, she became the only original member, and she has appeared on every Pretenders studio album since.

The Long Middle

She kept working, and kept refusing to specialise. Her biggest non-Pretenders hit was a 1985 duet with UB40 on "I Got You Babe," which topped the UK chart. She sang with Frank Sinatra, with Cher and Neneh Cherry, with Morrissey and INXS. The Pretenders made *Loose Screw*, *Break Up the Concrete*, *Alone* with Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys, and in 2020 *Hate for Sale*, their best-reviewed record in years. Under her own name came *Stockholm* in 2014, an album of standards in 2019, and a record of Bob Dylan songs in 2021.

Her private life ran alongside it without becoming the story. She had a daughter, Natalie, with Ray Davies of the Kinks in 1983 — the two tried to marry in Guildford, where, she said, "the guy in the register office took one look at us and suggested we come back another time." She married Jim Kerr of Simple Minds in 1984 and had a second daughter, Yasmin; they divorced in 1990. She follows Vaishnavism and travels to India to study.

Why Chrissie Is Called a Genius

The claim is for craft and authorship, not innovation. Hynde did not invent a genre. What she did was fuse three things that rarely arrive in the same person: a distinctive contralto with a catch in it, a hard, economical rhythm-guitar style, and a songwriting voice that holds menace and tenderness in the same verse — "Brass in Pocket" is a swagger and a plea at once, and almost nobody writes that.

She has been explicit about where the voice came from: "distinctive voices in rock are trained through years of many things: frustration, fear, loneliness, anger, insecurity, arrogance, narcissism, or just sheer perseverance – anything but a teacher." The Pretenders entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2005, and Madonna's verdict has been echoed by three generations of women who fronted rock bands afterwards.

The counter-case is real. The essential catalogue is narrow — two albums and *Learning to Crawl* — and forty years cannot rest entirely on three records. Her instincts as a public figure have sometimes been poor: the 2015 memoir *Reckless* drew heavy criticism for passages in which she assigned herself responsibility for a violent assault she suffered at twenty-one, telling NPR that "technically speaking, however you want to look at it, this was all my doing." She was unrepentant, calling the reaction "almost like a lynch mob." Genius may be the wrong word. Great bandleader, better songwriter, and one of the most durable voices in rock is closer, and is not a smaller thing.

Legacy

Hynde holds dual American and British citizenship and keeps a flat in Akron alongside her London home, which is a fair summary of a career spent between two rock traditions and belonging fully to neither. Her real inheritance is structural: she demonstrated that a woman could write the songs, play the guitar, hire the band and take the losses, and that the resulting music would sound tougher for it. "The only reason that I'm here," she told NPR, "is because I made some records and I go on tour with the band. The rest of me isn't really up for grabs." Fifty years on, that has proven to be almost true.

Achievements

• Instruments: guitar
• Genres: rock music, new wave and punk rock