Don't get her wrong;Chrissie Hynde

AS CHRISSIE HYNDE STROLLS into the sedate west London hotel bar she has chosen for our rendezvous, ribs are nudged, heads turn. It is unlikely that the gaggle of blue­rinsed matrons in the corner or the American family sipping afternoon teas by the window recognise her. Yet, if asked to guess her profession, it's a safe bet that they would come up trumps. When it comes to rock­chick chic, Chrissie Hynde remains a walking, talking definition of the term. At 44, this is no mean feat. She may well be the world's only middle­aged mother who wouldn't look out of place in the Rolling Stones, circa 1972. When she removes her jacket, her rangy, loose­limbed frame is taut and obviously well tended, and clothed in various degrees of tightness ­ cropped­sleeve T­shirt, sprayed­on jeans, Cuban­heeled boots. She drapes herself in a corner chair, back to the wall, places a cigarette in the side of her mouth and the look is complete: Keith Richards's little sister, all tousled fringe, mascara and cheekbones. All the while, she has been talking loudly and excitedly to her press officer about a recent meeting with John McEnroe, who, God help us, harbours a serious ambition to play guitar in a rock band. "He's a cool guy. I've been trying to show him a few chops, get him to loosen up his wrists a little after all that tennis. He told me some great stories, but you ain't gonna hear them." She throws back her head and cackles. She has a bad laugh. Then again, Hynde is rumoured to be the original bad girl. If the legend is to be believed, she was a hard­drinking, fast­living, drug­taking angry young rebel back when the likes of Courtney Love were still in kindergarten. "What really bugs me about pop culture right now is that so much of it is voyeuristic, narcissistic nonsense," she explodes at the mention of Love's name. "To me, anyone who talks about their intimate relationships after the fact is utterly repellent. Can you think of anything more undignified than exploiting other people's memories to further your own thing? It's just an extreme form of vanity and narcissism." Hynde is lippy and outspoken one minute, reflective and measured the next. "You don't want to cross me," she says, only half joking. "I don't forget easily." Which is worrying because I do cross her. We end up fighting, Chrissie and me, over her strongly held, and emotionally expressed, beliefs. She's pro­capital punishment "to restore the natural order of justice"; she agrees with Muslim fundamentalists who think blasphemy should be punished by death ­ "it's all about basic respect"; she thinks Oasis is a great pop group. I can forgive her this last lapse of taste, but how can a celebrated militant vegetarian animal­rights campaigner condone the death penalty for humans? She takes a deep breath: "I know it's unfashionable for people of my generation and after to uphold any religious principles, but I agree with the Muslim fundamentalists that certain crimes should not be allowed. I think religious principles are the only ones worth fighting and dying for. Blasphemy should be punished because it's utterly disrespectful, and when respect and order go out the window, you end up with a society like the one we have now ­ 80­year­olds getting beaten up and murdered for their money, children being sexually abused. I think the scum who do that sort of thing should be lined up against the wall and shot." I try to counter, but arguing with Chrissie Hynde is like shouting into a wind tunnel. She pummels me with statistics, all delivered with a degree of emotionally charged certitude that steamrollers any attempt at dissent. Not for the first time do I find myself musing on the link between the rarefied oxygen of rock celebrity and the irrational thought patterns of its protagonists.

HYNDE'S CONTROVERSIAL and contradictory views are, by now, as much a part of her public persona as the liberally applied eye shadow and biker wardrobe. But there is a whole lot more to her than that. For a start, there's the songs she writes and sings with the Pretenders. Songs that tend to be sensual and defiant or tear­stained and regretful ­ or both. She's one of rock's great romantics and a hard­bitten realist, willing to articulate the bitter and twisted emotions most of us leave bottled up inside. Her back catalogue is littered with the minutiae of broken romances and soiled relationships. "People always say you shouldn't regret anything, but I have big regrets. My life is full of them," she tells me with characteristic candour. When pressed, she refuses to elaborate.

Although her street­tough demeanour might suggest otherwise, of all the singers who emerged in the immediate wake of British punk, she was the most tender­hearted and traditionalist. Seventeen years after she formed the Pretenders, the full force of her emotional sway and attendant gift for melodic craft is evident on the new album, the strangely titled Isle of View (say it out loud). This is the Pretenders unplugged, live and acoustic, with only a string quartet for company. Here, old songs, particularly the slow, heart­breaking ones such as Kid and Lovers of Today, have new life breathed into them by some rich but understated ensemble playing. The album was recorded over two nights last summer before an invited audience in an east London studio. On stage, cradling an acoustic guitar, Hynde had initially looked uneasy and vulnerable; at once assured and nervous, confident but not altogether comfortable.

She grew up in Akron, Ohio, a bleak industrial town that has gained a certain notoriety as the birthplace of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer and for having one of the highest suicide rates in America. She was, she says, "a regular American adolescent, miserable and suicidal". She was also an Anglophile pop fan, having undergone a teenage epiphany at the sight of Jeff Beck performing with the Yardbirds. "I was a frustrated small­town girl and suddenly pop music meant the world to me. Still does, but not in such an intense way."

After a spell at Kent State University ­ she was protesting on campus the day the National Guard shot dead four students ­ she left for London in 1973. Nursing a serious obsession for that most quintessential of English pop groups, the Kinks, she waitressed, washed dishes and sold handbags on a market stall before, briefly, writing for NME. By 1975, she was working for Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood in their King's Road shop, Sex, and rehearsing with McLaren's Masters of the Backside, who later metamorphosed, without her, into The Damned. Her Brit­pop debut was less than auspicious: she briefly teamed up with Steve Strange and, in a tasteless pre­punk attempt to shock, they recorded together as the Moors Murderers.

When punk rock arrived, then, she was ready. She hung out with Sid and Johnny, squatted, skived and shoplifted with the rest of McLaren's motley crew, and was generally ­ and to a great degree remains ­ one of the lads. "I was into some wild stuff back then. Had my ears pierced and wore condoms for earrings. I even tried to give myself some African­type face scars with a razor." I wince and she throws back her head and laughs. "It was the times, y'know? Anything that gave two fingers to society."

It wasn't until 1978, after a chance meeting with a bass player called Peter Farndon, that her true colours began to shine through. The Pretenders' first single, unsurprisingly, was an old Kinks song, Stop Your Sobbing. The gorgeous Ray Davies melody was undercut by a beefy, no­nonsense Nick Lowe production that lent it a distinctively post­punk edge. It was a minor hit. A few months later, with guitarist James Honeyman­Scott and drummer Martin Chambers on board, the Pretenders proved their pop mettle. The self­penned Kid was the first of many slow­burning Hynde ballads. It was swiftly followed by the swaggering, chiming Brass in Pocket, a kind of Chrissie Hynde signature tune courtesy of its insistent, spoilt­brat chorus line ­ "Got to have some of your attention. Give it to me!" The song became their first and, to date, only number one single.

WHEN THEIR EPONYMOUSLY titled debut album followed it to the top of the charts and crashed into the Top 20 in America, the Pretenders had arrived. "I have always had what you might term a hippy­punk sensibility," Hynde notes now, "which was sort of at odds with the original punks. I'm pretty traditionalist in so far as I like to have an edge and a strong melody. And luckily that kind of approach was acceptable again by 1979."

By 1982, the Pretenders had recorded a string of hits ­ Talk of the Town, Message of Love and another Davies song, I Go to Sleep ­ plus a second best­selling album, Pretenders II. By then, however, they were already falling apart. Hynde was forced to sack Farndon, who had been her lover, because of his over­fondness for hard drugs. But it was 26­year­old Honeyman­Scott who became the first casualty, dying of a heroin overdose a few days after Farndon's messy departure. Less than a year later, Farndon, too, was dead of a heroin and cocaine overdose.

Did their deaths cause her to review her own lifestyle? "It seemed glamorous for a while to burn yourself out, but there ain't nothing romantic about dying young." Had she come close? "Well, put it this way, I was told to pull myself together by the two members of my group who subsequently bit the dust, so I ain't exactly a good example. But, y'know, I'm trying to be." Back then, she tells me, there was a code of silence ­ a rock and roll omerta ­ governing the extramural activities of the rock fraternity. "These days," she shakes her head in dismay, "things have gotten so damn graceless. I want to punch some of these young guys on the mouth when they go in NME and start talking about their crack habits. I don't need my kids reading about their pop idols' so­called personal problems. What's personal about a problem that's been aired all over the papers anyway?"

Between the deaths of Honeyman­Scott and Farndon, Hynde had a child, Natalie Ray, by Ray Davies. The Hynde­Davies relationship was a stormy one which began when he divorced his wife to live with her, and ended when she rang him from Australia, where the Pretenders were touring, to announce that she was leaving him for Jim Kerr, the lead singer of Simple Minds. She married Kerr in 1984, and produced a second daughter, Yasmin. During this tumultuous time, what was left of the Pretenders managed to release some of the best guitar­driven rock of the Eighties, most notably on 1982's Back on the Chain Gang and 1984's 2,000 Miles. Then, after five years, she parted from Kerr and seemed to lose her way for a time. In the process, she also temporarily forgot what she was good at. There followed a series of Pretenders albums where the good tended to be outweighed by the mediocre. Her ear for cover versions never failed her ­ as 1984's cover of the Persuasions' Thin Line Between Love and Hate and 1986's exquisite Hymn to Her testify ­ but she seemed only sporadically inspired.

Although no stranger to the pop charts in the late­Eighties (she had two hits duetting with UB4O's Ali Campbell: I Got You, Babe and Breakfast in Bed) the 1990 album Packed was, by Pretenders standards, a nadir of sorts. Around that time, truculent and uninterested, she told a music journalist that she hated the sound of her own voice. The Pretenders hadn't toured since 1988. "I had more important things to do," Hynde says. "I was a single mother of two." By then, she had found another outlet for her energies and her anger. At a time when rock stars and good causes were the uneasiest of bedfellows, she broke ranks with the soft liberal protocol of the Band Aid generation and, at a much­publicised press conference, remarked that McDonald's should be firebombed. She claimed it was an off­the­cuff joke but was subsequently hounded by the press and a kind of apology ensued. In the process, though, she became rock's most celebrated eco­warrior and defender of animal rights.

"I've been vegetarian for 25 years," she says, "and it's what's given me my strength, power and focus." Suddenly, she's animated, flexing those long arms and drumming on the table. "I'm not against killing animals for survival, but if it's done for profit or for pleasure it becomes murder. That's my take on it." I remember a song on Last of the Independents called Revolution in which Hynde sings: "Bring on the revolution I want to die for something". Is she really willing to die for her beliefs? "I'm a rock singer, not a spiritual leader. Rock is what I'm good at. But, personally, I will do all I can to stop an industry that slaughters 200 million animals in Britain a year. I mean that. If I have to die under a lorry, so be it. I think it's worth it. To me, everything that lives is important. We can't create life, so why destroy it? Simple, really."

HOW THIS TIES IN with her views on capital punishment is a mystery, but for many it's the contradictions that define Chrissie Hynde: she's the vegetarian in leather trousers, the animal rights campaigner who goes to boxing matches. "Oh yeah, I know that's how the media sees me ­ the veggie who likes to get splattered in blood at the ringside ­ and, yes, I am a mass of contradictions. I know that boxing is a sport where ultimately someone hits another person as hard as possible on the head. Now, for me, who lies awake at night suffering because some animal is locked up in a crate somewhere, it's a pretty bizarre thing to like, but there's a nobility about it." She pauses and shakes her head. "Still, it's bizarre. I gotta give you that. But that's just me, y'know..." I suggest that the deaths of ten million sheep are less important than the death of one human being. "Not to a sheep, they aren't," she counters with a tight­lipped seriousness that suggests I am perilously close to a smack in the mouth.

Despite our disagreements, I come away liking her. It may be something to do with the fact that, even after 20­odd years living among the reticent English, she is as loud and proud as ever and still possesses a street­wise edge that neither material wealth nor middle age has blunted. Or, that, in her own words, she's "never had a shrink or a face­lift or a boob job". Or maybe it's that she's still an enthusiastic rock fan who, last year, was so blown away by her favourite young band, Urge Overkill, that she turned up at various American dates and sold T­shirts for them. Whatever, Hynde is one of that increasingly rare breed, a rich rock and roller who has survived the embrace of the mainstream with street cred intact. She still walks a fine line between growing old gracefully and remaining a recalcitrant rebel, forever in thrall to the rebellious urges that first fired her imagination.

I ask her if, in her heart of hearts, she knows that rock is essentially an adolescent genre. "I'm aware of that opinion," she nods, "and I even kinda agree with it. Then again, the nature of rock and roll is to do what you want, when you want, how you want." She grins, proudly. "Sure, I get depressed when I hear about rockers making wise investments. It's mortgage rock and it's uncool. Me, I'm old school. I still feel that rock and roll is essentially anti­Establishment. It's not any more, of course. It's Establishment now. But, y'know, I come from a different place."

No Turn Left Unstoned, a documentary on the Pretenders, is on Channel 4 on Tuesday at 11pm; The Pretenders: Live From the Isle of View is on Thursday at 11.15pm

return to menu of Pretenders articles