16. Pretenders, Pretenders (1979)

Chrissie Hynde had every reason to believe that a career in rock ‘n’ roll simply wasn’t going to work out for her. The native of Akron, Ohio had kicked around on the fringes of the music biz for much of the nineteen-seventies, never quite finding the entry point that would get her to center stage. She wrote for NME and tried to pull together a band in both France and the U.K. At one point, she tried to get an act going with Mick Jones, who would go on to be a central figure in the Clash. They remained friendly enough that Jones invited Hynde along when the Clash mounted their first major tour of the U.K. For Hynde, the experience was bittersweet.

“It was great, but my heart was breaking,” Hynde said a couple years later. “I wanted to be in a band so bad. And there I was, like the real loser, you know?”

Hynde’s dejection wouldn’t last too much longer. She had a demo tape making the rounds in London, and it landed in the Dave Hill, who was the responsible for corralling punk acts for Anchor Records. Hill liked what he heard but also felt Hynde needed a strong band to back her up. Although Hill didn’t sign her to Anchor Records, he did agree to manage Hynde as she hunted for collaborators. Whether due to the validating encouragement or sheer luck, Hynde did finally starting finding the right people. Bassist Pete Farndon heard good things about Hynde and sought her out. After the two of them clicked, Farndon called in a skilled guitarist he knew named James Honeyman-Scott. As was often the case, getting the drummer settled took a couple tries; when Martin Chambers settled in behind the kit, the band was set. For their name, they borrowed from an old Platters chart-topper that was a favorite of one of Hynde’s ex’s: The band would be called Pretenders.

Pretenders had early successes with singles in the U.K., including their debut, a lovely cover of the Kinks’ “Stop Your Sobbing” produced by Hynde’s drinking buddy Nick Lowe. The seismic blast came with the release of the band’s self-titled debut at the very end of 1979. Pretenders debuted at the top of the U.K. album chart and resided there for a full month. Lowe might have been the band’s first producer, but he wasn’t the most significant. After Lowe moved on, feeling incorrectly that Pretenders had nothing much else to offer, Chris Thomas stepped in. A producer for a wide range of acts, including Badfinger and the Sex Pistols, Thomas immediately recognized the strength of Hynde’s songwriting.

The album has obvious polish that is logically attributed to Thomas’s impeccable credentials. What really makes it work, though, is the prevailing sense that its the work of a band that’s intense and hungry. It’s neither garage rock or punk, but Pretenders carries the unbridled energy and devil-may-care urgency of those brasher genres of music. Thomas often found that his first loose pass at a track captured the group best.

“On the first Pretenders album, ‘Tattooed Love Boys’ and ‘Precious’ were both rough mixes I did at the end of the night,” Thomas explained. “And then like two months later I thought, ‘Well, I’m not going to mix those again; they sound perfect!'”

“Precious” opens the album with a jolt, it’s driving guitars against Hynde’s icy cool vocals creating a friction that’s also strangely congruous. Versions of that seeming contradiction are the well-wielded weapons across the album. “Up the Neck” delivers sweet, meticulous rock music that’s strafed by Hynde snarling rough lyrics with a panache reminiscent of Iggy Pop: “I got down on the floor with my head pressed between my knees/ Under the bed with my teeth sunk into my own flesh.” “The Wait” is gnarled and thrilling, and “Mystery Achievement” feels downright epic. Even the light reggae lilt of “Private Life” somehow carries a tinge of danger.

After listening to their first few songs, Thomas expressed enthusiasm for the range Hynde showed as a songwriter. The album absolutely highlights that aspect of the band’s output, too, whether the flinty instrumental “Space Invader” or the tender “Kid.” The best example is the album’s biggest hit, a chart-topper in the U.K. and a Top 20 single in the U.S. “Brass in Pocket” starts with an absolutely heavenly opening guitar riff, an offhand invention of Honeyman-Scott that Hynde sparked to. She crafted a lithe, pulsing melody in response, then gave the song a title based on a unique turn of phrase she’d heard from a member of the band the Strangeloves and crafted a set of ridiculously sexy lyrics (“Gonna use my sidestep/ Gonna use my fingers/ Gonna use my, my, my, imagination”). Hynde initially disliked the song, insisting it shouldn’t be on the record. She might have been the only one with an ill opinion of it.

“I used to cringe when I heard my voice on those early Pretenders recordings, and then that fucker went to number one,” Hynde said years later. “I remember walking around Oxford Circus hearing it blasting out of people’s radios. I was mortified.”

Pretenders’ music blasted out of a lot of radios in the year after their self-titled debut’s release. In addition to the lofty perch it immediately reached on the U.K. chart, Pretenders was a Top 10 album on Billboard. Especially considering the long haul full of setbacks that Hynde had traveled to that point, the sudden success was something of a shock.

“I thought we’d be playing small clubs and not having anyone know who we are,” Chambers said a few months after the album hit shops. “But we’re selling out auditoriums, and people come up to us on the street in some cities and say hello. I wouldn’t have believed it possible a few months ago.”

To learn more about this gigantic endeavor, head over to the introduction. Other entries can be found at the CMJ Top 1000 tag. Most of the images in these posts come straight from the invaluable Discogs.