return to menu of Pretenders articles"Rewind the tape, January '80 the month that the Pretenders released their first album in the U.S. This is a record that could not have happened before. It had the saber-toothed emotions of punk rock, but it required punk to have completedits first years of head banging. It required a lyricist who knew the whole alphabet. Here was a sound, blunt but legible, stripped down but musical, that could sprint up your spine on tiptoe, then clobber your rainpan. When you saw the album at a record store, the group looked just the way you wanted it-a woman and three men dressed in red and black, the colors of sex and death, of juvenile delinquents and renovated basement playrooms.
The Pretenders were a sign of hope. Maybe a legion of New Wave bands would replant the standard of rock in the scorched earth that raw punk left in its wake. Maybe ragged vocals and melodies that were yanked form the ground that would rule the world. And maybe it didn't quite happen that way, but you would go on hearing that spirit for years to come in the albums of people as different as the Police, John Cougar Mellencamp and Nirvana. The arena-rock pachyderms of the 70s-Kansas, Journey, Foreigner, Styx-might still trundle their dreary tonnage from place-to-place. So What? The future belonged to something more nimble".
return to menu of Pretenders articles
