As both a member of the crowd and a performer at music festivals, Chrissie
Hynde has been around the block more times than she cares to remember — and
she doesn’t remember a lot. But that, she believes, is what festivals are
for. “They’re all about three days of abandonment,” the Pretenders singer
says. “The whole point of them is that your memories should be sketchy.”
Hynde’s earliest experiences included an event in her home state, Ohio,
headlined by Alice Cooper. “There were helicopters dropping fresh underwear
on the audience.
I remember lying face down in the mud, wearing paper knickers.” When she came
to Britain in the early 1970s, Hynde went to see bands such as the Who at
Crystal Palace — she describes standing next to Keith Richards backstage
there as “terrifying”. Later, as part of the bill with her own band, she saw
it from a different perspective: for the acts themselves, she says,
festivals are like “doing a recce”, hanging out with other bands and, she
admits, staying up far too late and generally misbehaving. “And nobody took
that more seriously than Joe Strummer,” she continues. “He’d give everyone a
‘festival’ name. It was like a tribal thing.” At Glastonbury one year, she
recalls, the actor Keith Allen dragged an upright piano out into the
artists’ sleeping area and began bashing away as the sun came up, “just as
people were finally getting their heads down. It’s a miracle he’s alive”.
The Pretenders are hitting the festival train again this summer, beginning
next month with an appearance on the same bill as Neil Young at the Hard
Rock Calling jamboree in Hyde Park. Since forming the band 31 years ago,
Hynde has toured pretty much every year, and at 57, shows no sign of
stopping. And that’s not all. A new Pretenders record, Break Up the Concrete
(their first in seven years), is about to be released in the UK. The album
marks Hynde’s first whole-hearted foray into Americana, which she mixes up
with some typically messy rock’n’roll. It’s a raucous affair that tears out
of the traps, and serves as a reminder that few women in American rock have
worked with the base materials quite as instinctively as the great
Pretender. “I’ve even got a pedal-steel player,” she laughs, in mock horror,
“which is kind of an up-yours to me, because I’ve been avoiding country
music all my life.”
The album’s success is, she insists, all down to the people she surrounded
herself with. “I don’t have the skills, I’m not a player; I can only lead
them to glory. And they pulled it off — under the worst circumstances. I
don’t think you could have found four people in a room that were more
hungover, for a period of about 11 days. It was shocking. Shocking.”
Working with great musicians remains, she says, the biggest buzz she can
get. “For me, being in a band on stage is not going, ‘Hey, everyone, look at
me, look at how cool I am.’ I mean, that’s a given. No, seriously, my real
pleasure is setting up the guitar player, the bass player, and turning them
loose. That’s bliss.”
The new album is paired with a hits collection, Best, about which Hynde —
famously averse to performing much of her back catalogue — is altogether
more ambivalent. When I query the decision to place Talk of the Town, the
classic 1980 single, first in the track listing, as opposed to the band’s
breakthrough hit, 1979’s Brass in Pocket, she grimaces at the mention of the
latter, and barks, about the running order: “Was that a mistake?” No, it’s
my favourite track, I splutter, before burbling about how, even now, it can
make me feel both uplifted and bereft.
“Well,” she shoots back, “it’s making me feel sick, so can we just move away
from it?”
She doesn’t say this anywhere like as aggressively as it sounds. But Hynde
likes to shoot first, from the hip, and maybe — if she's in the right mood —
ask questions afterwards. “Never explain, never apologise” might have been
coined for her: losing two original members of her band to drugs; her
relationships with rock stars (she had children with both Ray Davies and
Simple Minds’ Jim Kerr); a passionate and an almost lifelong commitment to
the animal-rights movement; her status as a true rock survivor. She’s earned
the right to be cussed, and it’s not, she says, as if it’s a recent
development. “I remember my brother used to refer to my razor tongue when we
were kids. I think it’s like a defect, and I’ve had people say I have a bad
personality, usually guys that are pissed off with me. I can take it on the
chin. But outspokenness? What’s there to be afraid of? It’s something I’ve
been told so many times. Look, nobody likes a trappy woman — unless she’s a
laugh. You’re more likely to get into a rock band, though.”
As a student in Ohio — where she witnessed the Kent State killings in 1970 —
Hynde studied art, but music soon stole her heart. “Harry Enfield said
once,” she laughs, “when he was sitting in between me and Jeff Beck in a
bar, and called his wife: ‘Darling, I know it’s three o’clock in the
morning,but I got waylaid by rock’n’roll.’” When she moved to London, Hynde
began working at Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren’s infamous King’s
Road clothes shop, Sex, rubbing shoulders with bands such as the Sex Pistols
and the Clash. By accident, she ended up writing for the NME. “I didn’t know
anything, I was still wearing bell bottoms, and had spots, straight off the
boat from Ohio. And they said, ‘Okay, we want you to interview Brian Eno.’
And I totally took it for granted that I could be hanging off the ceiling in
bondage gear while I interviewed him, and they actually said yes. I made
stuff up, I totally blagged it. I sold Julie Burchill her first typewriter,
so what does that tell you?”
On the new track Don’t Lose Faith in Me, Hynde sings: “The artist on the cover
is a phoney and a crook.” Is that about her? “Yeah,” she answers, without
hesitating. “But everyone feels like that. I know I’m a phoney, I never said
I was anything else. The whole thing is a bluff. It’s like confidence.
Everyone says, ‘Oh, you look so confident up there.’ Really? That’s because
I’m 8ft above you, on the stage; you know, use all the props you can get.”
She remains as tight-lipped as ever about her private life, not least, she
says, because people might struggle with the difference between the public
image and the reality. “You know, I’m trying to get laid here, I’m not
trying to put people off — and it’s not getting easier.” In
America, she has developed a shock tactic to deter overenthusiastic fans she
suspects of wanting her signature chiefly to make some money on eBay. “I
mean, I’m happy if they do. But don’t take the piss; one each, that’s fine.
So, what I do is, I go, ‘Do I look like a c***?’ And they’re like in this
freeze frame, so I make my getaway. And it’s such a lovely word.”
She couldn’t not make music, she says, or turn her back on the lifestyle.
“That’s not this girl. I have to be out there, being part of the road crew,
hanging out, sleeping rough.” So she’ll be watching Neil Young perform at
Hard Rock Calling after her own band have left the stage. Handy location,
Hyde Park, I suggest: easy to get home from, as you only live up the road.
“In theory, yes,” Hynde says. “But you never know with me.”
Break Up the Concrete/Best is released on Rhino on June 1; the Pretenders
play Hard Rock Calling on June 27
