Article published in Record Mirror, 10th May, 1980
The Pretenders | Talk Of The USA | LAST YEAR’S “next big thing” rarely succeeds in becoming “This year’s model” with the ease with which the Pretenders have performed the feat in Britain.
They’ve made it from pretenders to contenders to reigning champions in the kind of flowing move with which a winning chess player removes five easy pieces in one easy move.
On the way to becoming the talk of the town, the Pretenders have seen rumour turn to gossip turn to downright bitchery. Nobody likes a success and everybody despises a loser; when the underdog becomes top dog they send the hounds after them.
Right now the hounds would need to pursue the Pretenders over the Atlantic and then over 3,000 miles of America and when they got there they’d be too late — they’ve done it again.
The Pretenders are currently achieving the most rapid rise to stardom in the US that’s been made in the last five years. By a basically British band, that is. They are sliding down the collective American throat a treat and there’s not a dissenting hiccup or gag in sight.
Billboard charts
The album’s Number 14 in the Billboard charts — “With a bullet.” adds manager Dave Hill. Unlike most new British bands of the more than bland variety, the Pretenders are having no problems with airplay.
In fact Chrissie Hynde would seem to be the DJ’s new darling. Maybe ‘Brass In Pocket‘ will finally chase Supertramp off the American airwaves. Mass acceptance plus instant excitement and critical plaudits is the consistent American response to the Pretenders.
Most British bands start on the long haul to breaking America by playing few select club dates. The Pretenders are playing a 40-city tour in halls; they sold out the 3,500 capacity Santa Monica Civic in LA in two hours and second added show in even quicker time.
The Pretenders | Talk Of The USA
Their one club gig, at the Palomino in Hollywood, a club usually specialising in county music was the hottest ticket in town since, dare I say it? Dire Straits. Which was probably highly satisfying to the United Indian Development Association for whom the gig was a benefit.
In San Francisco, the Pretenders are booked to support the Boomtown Rats, themselves completing a successful second American tour on their way to Japan (Geldof is reading up ‘Shogun’ to get prepared — he does his homework).
Simon Crowe, the Rats’ drummer tells me, “We were a little worried that everybody had come to see the Pretenders and that they’d all leave at half – time. Actually it wasn’t like that at all and we went down really well.”
Stax gems
Which they did. Yet by British standards at least, it’s incredible that the Rats should even spare a thought to rivals.
Not that the two bands are rivals exactly, what with Paula and Chrissie being the best of buddies as you shall see in Paula’s forthcoming magnum opus on underwear and with Jimmy Scott guesting on the two last numbers of the Rats’ tour at the Palladium in LA, creditable versions of Stax gems ‘My Girl’ and ‘Show Me’.
But the Rats are struggling in the States where the Pretenders are coasting Man smart, woman smarter. The Pretenders’ tour is covering a lot of ground, starting out in New York State, down to Florida, across to California through Texas and then back through Denver and the midwest, for a finale in New York on May 3. After which the band finally gets a holiday.
The Pretenders | Talk Of The USA
Tours are hard work. Take a typical day like that of their gig in Santa Barbara where I catch up with the band. Santa Barbara is 100 miles up the coast from LA, an affluent white middle-class community by the sea where the local lingo is a bizarre mixture of surfer slang and “new age” hip psychology.
Not exactly your angry urban environment, the Beach Boys and Kenny Loggins live here and so do a lot of retired rich folks — Joe Cocker, for example.
If you wear a leather jacket in Santa Barbara, the locals assume that you must be in a rock band and ask if you are a “new waver”. The Pretenders are already very popular in Santa Barbara though the Grateful Dead are still Number One.
The Pretenders arrive in town and they do a soundcheck, a rapid surprise visit to the local radio station for a quick interview and then an instore appearance at the opening of a record store.
As Dave Hill explains, “It’s the radio stations that have made the album and we like to pop in just to say ‘thank you’ and give the record a push in those places where it’s selling slower. We go to the ones that are backing the album.”
Chrissie tells the interviewer that she doesn’t want to be an elitist cult or a kids only success: “I don’t want to play just for some kid driving around on quaaludes. I want to play for everybody from housewives to the local butcher. We don’t just want to be played on FM radio, it’s great to get a single on AM, we want everybody to hear us.”
L.A. Times
Chrissie made the same point in an interview with the LA Times: “I don’t want to be boring in any mainstream way, but I’m glad a lot of people like the music. I want to be accessible to everybody as opposed to being ‘real cool’ and having only the ‘hip’ people like me.
I love it when the maid of somebody at the hotel says. ‘Can I have your autograph for my daughter, and by the way, I like your music too.’ I like lggy Pop and Tony Bennet, OK? To me the only kinds of music are good and bad, I try to make good music.”
The Pretenders | Talk Of The USA
Chrissie is obviously aware of the kind of snobbish thinking that has dogged Joe Jackson’s success in the States for so long, whose logic equates commercial success with artistic failure and success in America in particular, with either a sell out or as testament that the act lacked integrity in the first place.
The Pretenders have none of the revolutionary aspirations that area trademark of the early British punk bands, they want to sell out — their shows that is. The Pretenders are conservative rock and roll in the best Tom Petty tradition, they know their rock and roll mythology and they know how to sell themselves.
In Santa Barbara, the Pretenders work hard to consolidate their popularity. They whisk down to Licorice Pizza and appear at its opening. A couple of hundred rock starved kids stand in line outside the door, clutching place numbers, craning necks and waiting over an hour for the band to arrive.
Being the Queen
First thing you learn is that you’ve always gotta wait. When the Pretenders finally arrive, they are led to a table like visiting royalty. It’s tough being the queen, you get arthritis from shaking all those hands.
The kids are allowed in one by one to file past their new heroes and get their albums signed, five seconds each. The Pretenders drink beer and knuckle down to the task.
In the course of the afternoon a lot of Pretenders’ albums get sold. “My concern is my music, not being a nice guy . . . Being a chick has never been an obstacle for me in any way.”
That’s what Chrissie told the LA Times and its obvious that being a chick with all that the word implies it’s what’s making Chrissie a star right now. Chrissie is defining perfectly a certain kind of modern woman who is both contemporary and a good deal more traditional than she first appears.
The Pretenders | Talk Of The USA
Modern, in that Chrissie plays tough. The biggest cheer of the gig at Santa Barbara, a cheer that the fans have been storing up is for Chrissie’s big moment in ‘Precious‘ when she gets to prove that she’s no sucker,
“But not me, baby, fuck off!”
The perfect moment when you get to tell the world where to get off, a rock and roll treasure, whose real force is that it comes from a woman who’s making it clear in all the songs that she’s not going to be used by anyone.
Special, she’s downright suspicious. Look at the way she deals with the emotional parasite in ‘Private Life‘. “You asked me for advice I said use the door.”
This is one woman who’s not prepared to be a doormat to be walked all over by someone draining sympathy out of her like it was blood. And then she’ll recreate a love scene only to turn round and tell you. “It was all . . . very run of the mill,” the pause being the perfect timing to add swing to the punch.
She’ll wear the tight leather pants with a knee band and play alongside the boys, come up with Lou Reed type lines like “You’re gonna make some plastic surgeon a rich man” and yet she’ll call her own bluff claiming or admitting, and I’m not sure which.
Vulnerability
“I’ll never be a man in a man’s world.” She wears leather and she stares the camera down but she’s real feminine. I mean she’s got those black lace gloves and there she is on the back cover adjusting one of her boys’ boots.
On stage what’s real attractive about Chrissie is the vulnerability behind the leather. There’s a moment at the end of the show when the boys in the band start messing with Chrissie, prolonging ‘Stop You Sobbing‘ beyond its usual arrangement to the lady’s consternation.
The boys in the Pretenders, drummer Chambers and bass player Peter Farndon particularly look like rockabilly yobs from somewhere in the sticks with West Country sideburns and greasers hair.
Peter Farndon pulls the mike away from Chrissie after finishing a chorus, just enough to irritate. She flashes him the sign from ‘Precious‘, no way she’s going to let the boys come out on top.
But she also looks vulnerable, it is a man’s world and it’s tough playing with the boys. You have to prove yourself all the time. Chrissie Hynde is definitely the leader of the Pretenders, a real tough gang leader with a bunch of big boys to back her up.
Santa Barbara
But the boys are stronger and the force is only in her personality and she could always get done in if the boys weren’t there. It is a man’s world. Most of the fun of the Pretenders’ show comes from this dynamic between Chrissie and the boys in the band.
The boys are very smug as if to show that what Chrissie is struggling to say they only take half seriously anyway. Jimmy Scott spends a lot of the show sharing a private joke with someone in the wings.
When his moment of applause comes he raises and drops the level of applause with his arms while laughing at the audience for following him so blindly The Santa Barbara audience are so starved they’re hardly a struggle.
Pete Farndon grins to himself throughout and takes great pleasure in acting out a number of mildly macho bass player poses, falling on his back on the floor at appropriate moments as if his bass has suddenly got heavy.
There’s a sense of privacy about their performance as it they are getting on with the real joke while they let Chrissie handle the audience. She may be cleverer than they, but you still get the impression that they give her her power.
The set is the album rearranged plus the new single and a country based number ‘Tequila‘ which Chrissie announces by wishing that it’ll do away with the awful term new wave.
New Wave
It is an awful term, particularly here where the record companies have taken three years to pick up on a new kind of music only to strip it of its original energy and sell it slick, streamlined and bland.
The Pretenders aren’t bland, there’s real struggle in Chrissie’s tales of sexual intrigue. But the number that really wows then is when Chrissie takes of her guitar, plays with her long arms and gets assertively seductive, provoking the LA Times to compare her to Donna Summer.
It’s Chrissie’s ghostly hiccupping style at its best, full of mysterious echoes and the confidence all comes through when she’s secuding,
“There’s no one else here, no one like me, I’m special.”
Special enough to get a man’s attention. Chrissie is a great diarist, her songs are full of intimacy and confession and she knows how to act them out. This is no mystery achievement, the great pretender has arrived, behind, besides or in front of the boys?
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