She will have managed to impose her expressive and sensual vibrato like her words and her melodies in the macho environment that was rock at the end of the 1970s. And to set herself up as a band leader to such an extent that she almost she alone the group The Pretenders, of which she is the last survivor, among the founding members, with drummer Martin Chambers.
Originally from Akron (Ohio) but revealed in Great Britain with the upheavals of the punk explosion, the American Chrissie Hynde well deserved a portrait which documentary filmmaker Claire Laborey tackled for Arte. By restoring the essence of a career begun in frustration, then struck by tragedy to continue in resilience.
Enamelled with excerpts from the autobiography Reckless. My Life as a Pretender (Ebury Press, 2015, untranslated), the exercise is admiring and does not avoid some questionable assessments. To qualify The Pretenders as a "musical UFO" from the outset is questionable, to say the least, for a group so attached to the classicism of rock, as it was defined in the 1960s.
Desperate Cause
Nevertheless, we follow with interest the stubbornness of a musician whom no one really seems to know what place to grant her when she arrives in London in 1973. Venomous freelancer for the New Musical Express - "That or waitress, that is pretty much the same,” she comments amiably – Chrissie Hynde will also be a sales clerk at the notorious SEX boutique selling punk bondage gear designed by Vivienne Westwood. Her cause seemed so desperate that she even tried her luck in Paris, two years later, with a local group, Frenchies, where she briefly replaced future director Jean-Marie Poiré on vocals.
Under such auspices, the immediate and resounding success, in 1979, of the Pretenders' first album, carried by the irresistible single Brass in Pocket (yet described as "weak disco" by its interpreter), was a miracle. But Chrissie Hynde has finally found three knights who know how to showcase her compositions: besides Chambers, bassist Pete Farndon and guitarist James Honeyman-Scott.
There followed exhausting tours, substance abuse, tension and drama: in June 1982, Honeyman-Scott's heart could not resist an overdose of cocaine, two days after the dismissal of Farndon, who would succumb to his heroin addiction in June 1983.
The Pretenders should have been mowed down in full glory, the band becoming "a tribute to its original musicians", as Chrissie Hynde puts it. Still active today despite her personnel changes and led with a firm hand by this seductive rocker, who claims "boyish tastes" and only conceives of acting within a group.
