It seems that today is Pretenders day, just as Monday was Johnny Rivers day. Inspired by the fact that it's James Honeyman-Scott's birthday, I've come home with the idea of reviewing this most old-fashioned sounding record. And it does sound old-fashioned, from start to finish. The famous L.P.Hartley quote from The Go-Between about 'the past being a different country', where 'they do things differently' applies nowhere quite as well to any other record that I have in my collection as to this particular one.
That claim is by no means meant as a slur on any level, The past as represented here sounds like a wonderful place, and one I wouldn't mind returning to it given the chance, as I listen to it now. But The Pretenders at a thirty five year distance sound like a band quite unlike any other. One that rose without trace and has little perceivable musical influence on anything that came thereafter save perhaps for the guitar playing of Johnny Marr. This, and their second album , quite unimaginatively entitled Pretenders II, the two records released by the original line up, great as they are, can't make any huge claim of any real legacy, (apart from Marr who always attests to James Honeyman-Scott;s influence on his own playing), except otherwise to have made Chrissie Hynde, their lead singer and absolute leader, the star she was clearly always destined to be.
Given Hynde's well documented history as one of the original King's Road Punks and her close associations with Malcom McLaren, Vivienne Westwood, Nick Kent, The Sex Pistols et al. it's also a remarkably conservative album.Not really rooted in either The Stooges or The Velvet Underground who were her initial formative influences. Nor is there any obvious trace of David Bowie, Roxy Music or Kraftwerk to be found anywhere among its songs.
That's no slur either. It's a very fine album but one that sounds to me much more rooted in the sixties than one recorded at the end of the seventies and released at the beginning of the eighties. I have to make a slight disclaimer here and now that I'm not a huge Pretenders aficionado and not terribly well-versed in what brought them together and led to their rise. I've done some rudimentary research to inform the writing of this but prefer to write about the record as I hear it three and a half decades on.
It's a constructed record, just as they were a constructed band and though you can see the joins occasionally it by no means diminishes the impact of the album. As a project they were constructed around Hynde obviously, on their formation in 1978, backed by a trio of jobbing but able musicians from Hereford, that most un-Rock and Roll of towns. The rest of the band, Honeyman-Scott, Pete Farndon and Martin Chambers resemble nothing so much as a gang, of the old school. They look like a bunch of Teds, the intimidating breed that anyone who grew up in the seventies will recognise. A slightly lairy set of individuals, the kind that hung around on any smalltown street corner at the end of the seventies with the vaguest but unmistakable whiff of violence about them. Either that or the kind of rough and ready chancers who manned the dodgem rides at the fairgrounds that visited your town and offered the kind of thrill of danger, sex and violence so well documented in the David Essex film That'll Be The Day and on The Smiths' Rusholme Ruffians.
Hynde too seemed every bit a gang member, albeit one from a totally different gang. Not unlike Suzi Quatro from a few years previously, an unmistakably and proudly American front-woman also grafted onto a set of British musicians, clad in leather to give them a whiff of menace which they rode to pop success largely on the basis of their leader's looks, charisma and undeniable talent. Obviously, by the time of the release of this, their debut, The Pretenders had forged their own friendships and personal and musical bonds, established their own leather-clad identity and paid their dues, playing the UK's circuit set of demanding small and sweaty venues. It's a record that sweats on occasion and gives every indication of hard toil, but really it's the glossy pop moments that make it shine. The rockers are there to show the band's authentic muscle but it's Stop Your Sobbing, Kid, Private Life, Lovers of Today, Mystery Achievement and most obviously Brass in Pocket that signaled a band with enormous commercial potential.
If Hynde is the record's clear focal point and voice that speaks loudest to the listener, as an inspiration to other women and a figure of unattainable awe to dumbstruck teenage males, Honeyman-Scott is The Pretenders secret weapon. He shows incredible versatility on its twelve tracks, every bit the equal although displaying a different, less obviously groundbreaking set of tricks than his obvious competition of the period. I'd number Keith Levine, John McGeogh, Mick Jones and Will Sergeant as his main rivals in this respect among many others. Paul Weller probably also deserves a mention and is probably closest in spirit to what Honeyman-Scott is doing here in that their chief inspiration is most obviously drawn from the sixties, The Beatles, The Kinks and earlier still in Honeyman-Scott's case from The Shadows and a whole range of early players from that decade
As a fan primarily of vinyl as the best medium for listening to this stuff, I'd nevertheless suggest headphones as the best way to appreciate what he and Hynde's guitars do on here. Because this is most of all a guitar record and an unshamedly commercial one, in contrast to the contemporary guitarists mentioned above and the bands they were associated with. The Pretenders is a pop record, most easily classified as the last great statement of the British New Wave as the seventies became the eighties and we moved towards the dreadful pall that came to pass as the Thatcher government took hold and gradually informed and infected what was going on in the pop charts and gave it an altogether more aspirational hue.
The Pretenders is by no means an aspirational album. Instead it's a deeply intimate one and as it moves onto its second side, an incredibly assured one. While I think the first side of the album is inconsistent and I'd say at points slightly incoherent, Side Two is pretty much a flawless set of muscled, glistening pop songs. The Pretenders never bettered it.
Brass in Pocket is the jewel in its crown and when it arrived after the hard climb that most successful singles had to mount and endure to Number 1 in January 1980 it was a huge Pop statement suggesting conclusively that Hynde and her band had arrived. Its promo video is an interesting illustration of the downbeat glamour of the time. The Pretenders were a glamorous band, but it was a cheap and grimy glamour, best illustrated by Hynde's lyrical steal from Oscar Wilde on Pretenders II's Message of Love, 'We are all of us in the gutter. But some of us are looking at the stars.'
No lines speaks better of The Pretenders appeal and the dreadful fate of half of their original line up. Within just over three years both Honeyman-Scott and Farndon were dead from drug induced overdoses. It was a tragic full stop in the genesis of a great band. From this point on they became a vehicle for Hynde's obvious talents but no longer a real band in the true sense of the word. Hynde still stands, as defiant and charismatic as ever. A true survivor with a raft of great and glorious pop moments to her name. Here though I'd say is the best record she ever made and it's as much the work of the rest of the original Pretenders, a bunch of ordinary blokes from Hereford, as hers. One of the last great Pop gangs. Producing one of the great Pop debuts.
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