There’s a temptation — even if you’re not a die-hard fan — to ask: Why did it take this long to make a proper, authorized documentary about Chrissie Hynde and her going-on-50-years-strong band? Pretenders, the portrait of this first-ballot frontwoman’s
venerable punk outfit that just premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, gives you a possible answer pretty quickly. Hynde isn’t keen on talking about herself. Being photographed? She likes that even less than interviews.
Hynde sat with filmmaker Jess Crowley for conversations over a three year period, and only agreed to go before the camera for the last one. You feel like he was extremely lucky she signed off on that much. Her confrontational stare often speaks for her: The work? It’s out there, go listen to it. My life? Why do you wanna know about that? The tragedies? I don’t wanna talk about that. Everything else? I don’t really wanna talk about that either, to be honest. “I liked being in a band,” she says at one point. “I just don’t like being observed.” Or, one imagines, pretending she’s in a confessional booth or on a psychoanalyst’s couch.
And yet! Talk Chrissie Hynde does, and you’re surprised that Crowley not only got her to sit for those extended sessions, but that she opened up this much. Late in the film, Hynde reveals that she’s was willing to go deep on the band’s first five years, largely because she feels that the Pretenders’ first guitarist, the great James Honeyman-Scott, never gets enough credit as a musician. There’s also the sense that bassist and founding member Pete Farndon hasn’t been given his due either. No one’s trying to correct any records here, or revise history — “My story is a story about drugs,” Hynde resignedly sighs at one point — so much as recount a moment when a young woman from Ohio and three guys from Hereford could turn a fuck-you energy, combined with a swooning sense of melody, into something timeless. It’s a look back that’s anything but precious about the past.
You do get Hynde getting into her own history, from her childhood years in Akron, her early love of rock & roll and the walk-on-the-wild-side dangers that accompanied it, her presence at Kent State when students were killed during a protest, and her connection to biker culture. (There’s an anecdote about a motorcycle club “party” that’s made all the more chilling by how casually Hynde mentions it and then moves on.) It was a biker boyfriend who’d inspire the name for what would eventually become her group, playing her Sam Cooke’s cover of the Platters’ “The Great Pretender” in secret because he didn’t want his brothers to know he was listening to a Black singer. First, however, Hynde had to get the fuck out of Dodge. Goodbye, Akron. Hello, London.
Hynde ended up in the U.K. in 1973, long after the Swinging Sixties had receded but right before punk broke. She fell in with music journalist Nick Kent and began writing for NME, penning missives that praised artists like Bette Midler for being “a fine slab of woman with balls to boot.” (Who else does that sound like?) Having the good fortune to be present at a musical revolution’s ground zero, Hynde’s exotic American watched her British pals quickly turn into first-gen punk legends and form the Damned, the Sex Pistols, the Slits, the Clash. She wanted in. A few early attempts at starting her own band resulted in some rough demos and a few stabs at controversy — the English couldn’t stomach a band called the Moors Murderers, after a notorious spate of serial killings, just yet.
Then she met Pete Farndon, a guy with a great punk sneer and even greater leather jacket. His compadre Honeyman-Scott started playing with them, and a few drummers later, a guy with the best rockabilly sideburns in the biz named Martin Chambers became the permanent resident behind the kit. To see those early pictures of Hynde and the O.G. Pretenders lineup automatically makes you hear those early songs, with the buzz-bomb guitar parts, the chugging bass lines, those straight-to-the-gut snare hits, that husky voice. “Precious.” “Tattooed Love Boys.” “The Wait.”
Power, in-your-face attitude, and urgency is what makes half of the Pretenders’ still-extraordinary 1978 debut slap. The other half comes from the way that Hynde and her partners in crime extract the best of 1950s rock, 1960s British Invasion pop, and even bits of 1970s groove music and add it to the mix. It’s not surprising that their cover of the Kinks’ “Stop Your Sobbing” stood out from their demo tape and attracted the attention of Nick Lowe, who’d co-produce (along with Chris Thomas) that first album. What’s shocking is that it’s not an ironic joke or a one-off. Songs like “Kid” and their simmering, just-south-of-disco breakthrough “Brass in Pocket” set the stage for the next postpunk wave, a.k.a. New Wave.
The gigs get better, the live show fiercer, the band gets tighter. Success feels weird — “I’d rather be No. 11 than No. 1,” Hynde admits in an old interview — and the recreational perks that come with rock stardom become more dire. There’s a second album on the horizon, also a banger. Then backstage fistfights, inter-band tensions, a firing, and not one but two deaths in six months.
Pretenders gets into all of that, sometimes via Hynde’s own testimonials, sometimes via a lot of kick-ass archival footage, and occasionally from the band’s own tour manager, Stan Tippins, reading from his extensive diaries that sketch out those initial years in great details. Luminaries like Elvis Costello, Johnny Marr (who briefly joined the band) and Paul McCartney weigh in at key moments. The focus remains on the original lineup. There’s a quick runthrough of everything after Honeyman-Scott and Farndon both die, including the 1983 US Festival date — one of Hynde’s most memorable Pretenders Version 2.0 gigs — and her later involvement with PETA. Every so often, she’ll simply shut a conversation down. “Flinty” doesn’t begin to describe her. “No-nonsense” is equally as inadequate. Hynde doesn’t suffer fools. She’s already suffered enough and besides, she’s got shit to do.
But when Chrissie wants to be candid, she’ll be candid — and when Hynde opens up in conjunction with the live clips taken from that initial burst of energy, the doc feels like the closest we’re going to get to a definitive look at her band. Never mind the group’s name, Hynde is the real deal. Her songwriting chops are indisputable. So is the Pretenders’ legacy. The film’s got motion, and sometimes, too much restrained emotion, but you’ve got to consider the source. And if you have a problem, well — Hynde has a message for you. It’s in the last line of “Precious.”
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