Chrissie Hynde has just written the rock memoir of the year. Reckless: the story of the scrappy Yank who infiltrated every youth explosion from the Brit Invasion to punk and rode her own band, the Pretenders, all the way to the top. It’s got it all — life-modelling classes with Sid Vicious; cleaning jobs with Johnny Rotten; under the duvet with Iggy Pop; under the influence with everyone else. Acid, speed, coke, dope and biker gangs.
“I couldn’t have written this book while my parents were alive,” she says.
No kidding. They raised her to be a nice little 1950s suburban girl in Akron, Ohio. One early memory from the book sums it up: “I was 10 when Grandma had a heart attack at the dinner table. An ambulance came and took her away, and we never saw her again. The thing that shocked me most was my mother saying, ‘Oh, God. Oh, God.’ I’d never heard her talk like that before. Was that swearing? No, it couldn’t have been. We weren’t allowed to swear.”
The book has meant revisiting lots of moments she’d rather have forgotten. Her disastrous relationship with Ray Davies, lead singer of the Kinks and father to her eldest daughter, Natalie, now 32, for instance. And to think they were almost married. “The guy in the registry office took one look at us and suggested we come back another time,” she writes. “I guess mascara smeared all down my face was the giveaway. Even a total stranger could tell we were making a mistake, but I’ve never heard of anyone getting turned away before. Still, there’s always a first time.”
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Davies had asked her to leave him out of the book, she says. “I thought, ‘No problem,’ and I took him out completely, but the story didn’t make sense. My editors were going, ‘But everyone knows, where did he go?’ ”
Does he know he’s back in?
“No. And y’know, I’m sorry, but if you don’t want to be in my book, then don’t be in my story. But I don’t think I’ve said anything horrible about anyone. Have I?”
Hmm, maybe Nancy, I say. Nancy Spungen was the New York groupie, heroin addict and girlfriend of Sid Vicious, who — prior to Vicious stabbing her to death in a hotel room in 1978 — had crashed with Hynde at her house.
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“But I just describe her,” she shrugs.
Yes, and memorably at that. In the book, she writes: “I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Nancy was a drug mule, but she could fit a length of rubber tubing, spoon, Zippo lighter and box of handy wipes up her flue and still have room for a can of Elnett and a box of Milk Duds.” Ouch.
Spungen’s demise barely registers among the list of casualties. It’s not giving much away to say that almost everyone is dead by the end of Hynde’s book. A heroin overdose eventually does for Sid, while the original line-up of the Pretenders comes to an abrupt end in 1982 when guitarist James Honeyman-Scott’s heart gives up as a result of cocaine intolerance. Their erstwhile bass player — and her ex-squeeze — Pete Farndon, drowns in the bathtub with a needle in his arm a year later.
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She finishes the story there. “It would have seemed almost disrespectful to keep talking after that. I needed to take a breather myself,” she says. “I hope, if anything, this book is not promoting drugs. Because they just kill everyone. They are dropping like flies.”
We meet for tea and biscuits in a central London hotel. Understandably, she doesn’t do much else any more. After the drugs, the booze and fags went next. Her favourite book is Allen Carr’s The Easy Way to Stop Smoking, which she spends a large part of the interview trying to sell me, even though I don’t have a habit to quit. “What about drink?” she asks hopefully. He has one for that too, apparently.
She walks in looking like A Somebody, only not quite the one I was expecting. She still has the rock-star hair, but it’s honey-blonde now, rather than her old, trademark black. It softens her face, making her resemble an absolutely fabulous cross between Joanna Lumley and Jennifer Saunders, which is a little discombobulating. Only the heavily kohled eyes are unmistakably the tough rock bitch of lore.
She is 63 and has lived in London for the past 42 years. She couldn’t believe it when she first came here: the dole, the NHS, squatters’ rights. “I was constantly imagining a couple of comic or sci-fi writers at the end of the Fifties, stoned on weed and speed, trying to outdo each other with outrageous scenarios of the beat world of the future. It was called England,” she eulogises in Reckless.
Does she think it’s changed much, I ask, expecting a socialist rant about privatisation and Tory welfare cuts. Instead I get a grumpy old dear complaining about manners on public transport. “People now will open up a stinking takeaway and eat it sitting next to you, they shout on their phones and you can hear their whole conversation.” This from a woman who once spent a night in a Memphis jail after starting a brawl in a restaurant and kicking the back window out of a police car. No wonder her friend, Morrissey, calls her “the funniest person he’s ever met who doesn’t actually have a sense of humour”.
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She also has a reputation for being steely, but as far as I can tell, it’s a bluff. She is warm and self-effacing, constantly doing herself down. At one point I ask if there is anything she will admit to being good at. “Sure. I’m good at organising a band and bringing out the best in the players. The secret to my success is that I always make sure everyone around me is better than I am.” See what I mean?
It was her old friend, the tennis player and rock fan John McEnroe, who convinced her to write the book. She had tried commissioning a couple of biographies in the past, but they had never worked out. “He said, ‘People don’t want a biography, it has to be an autobiography.’ And he’s probably right.”
She was horrified to learn that most celebrities have a ghost-writer do the work for them. “Unbelievable. I think that’s cheating myself, I think that’s wrong. And these people still go out and say, ‘Oh, when I was writing my book…’, but what they really mean is, ‘When I was sitting on a beach in the Bahamas getting drunk and talking into a tape recorder for three weeks’.”
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Every word of the book is her own. It began as a series of vignettes she wrote for herself after her parents died. “It just happened in the last three years — my dad, then my mum.” Writing became “a kind of meditation on making it make sense. It’s like finishing something so you can move on.”She came of age in the 1960s when everything was changing. The generational gulf between her and her parents still pains her. “It wasn’t so much ‘me’ and ‘them’, as opposed to them representing part of the establishment that I was rejecting.” Obsessed by rock’n’roll, narcotics, the hippie counterculture and the British music press, she fled home as quickly as she could. First to Kent State University, where she studied art and was there when the National Guard killed four of her fellow students during an anti-Vietnam protest.
She arrived in London in 1973 as an illegal immigrant and swiftly landed a job writing for the New Musical Express. Her first review — a hatchet job of a Neil Diamond record — resulted in death threats. She quit soon after, selling her typewriter to an unknown teenager called Julie Burchill on her way out.
After that she worked at Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren’s SEX boutique on the King’s Road, gate-crashing her way into the London punk scene. She tried to start a band with Mick Jones, who subsequently found fame in the Clash, and very nearly became Mrs Sid Vicious (see extract on page 17).
She was 27 when she finally got her own band together — long over the hill as far as she was concerned. The Pretenders released their first single in January 1979. Twelve months later they were No 1 with Brass in Pocket. She’d hated being left behind while all her friends’ bands became successful, but now she hated being famous even more, rounding on the first person who recognised her on the Tube and regularly telling fans to F-off.
“I would say my No 1 regret in my life is what an absolute asshole I’ve been to fans,” she cringes. “I had hypnotherapy once to help with it.”
Even today, she dreads being recognised and has a trick for shutting down unwanted conversations with strangers. “I was sitting on a plane and the guy next to me says ‘what do you do?’ and I said, ‘Nothing — I just spend my alimony money.’ It worked! He didn’t talk to me for the rest of the flight.”
She did eventually make it inside the registry office — twice. She was married to Jim Kerr of Simple Minds for five years, with whom she has a second daughter, Yasmin, 29. Another marriage to the artist Lucho Brieva in 1997 lasted a similar length of time.
“I saw Lemmy’s documentary the other day [the Motörhead singer is another old friend]. “He says, doing this, you can’t really maintain a relationship, and I agree with him. Having said that, I don’t know of many single men. I know of a lot of single women.”
She has a theory for this. “Men need someone to look after them. They’re the weaker sex — you see it wherever they are in the world. Men might be out ploughing the fields, but women are keeping the shit together. I mean, I’m too independent. I’m not proud of it.”
Is that why her relationships haven’t lasted?
“I don’t know. Guys piss me off! Men don’t want someone who’s making more money, or really successful. I’ve never been attracted to anyone who really has stuff. If a guy had a really flash car, to me that would be a turn-off.”
So what is a turn-on?
“What? In a man? Now this is an interesting subject,” she says, leaning in. “OK, I’ll say one, then you say one. He has to be good-looking. OK, you go.”
Funny?
“Funny, of course.”
Your turn…
“That’ll do me!”
I can’t tell if she is lonely or not. When she first walked in she asked where I lived (deepest south London), then told me she was around my neck of the woods recently.
“I took the 36 bus there.”
Oh really, why?
“That’s where the bus was going.”
She does that a lot, apparently: rides public transport to its final destination. Her other favourite hobbies are “goofing off”, which translates as “just wandering around and hanging out, walking through the park, literally doing not much”.
She is very solitary. “I went to the cinema twice last week alone, I went to a restaurant four times last week alone. I do almost everything on my own.”
Because you enjoy your own company?
“I think I’m rubbish company.”
She is a member of a book club with the actress Miranda Richardson and some other north London intellectuals, but it’s with her mates from Peta that she really lets her hair down. She’s been a long-term vegetarian and animal rights campaigner, getting arrested in 2000 after a protest outside a Gap store in New York.
These days she leaves the activism to her eldest daughter, Natalie, who was arrested in 2013 for supergluing herself to another protester at an anti-fracking protest in West Sussex. She has carved out quite a name as the new Swampy, taking part in the Occupy London campaign and protesting against the Bexhill-to-Hastings link road.
Does she have Mum’s support?
“Uh-huh, yes. I support anyone who’s acting on behalf of the environment, of course. I don’t really want to talk about my children. I do my thing, they do theirs. I will say I’ve always thought that the whole eco-warrior thing in England is amazing.”
Hynde has toiled to give her daughters a normal life. “I never wanted my children to feel like they were living in my shadow or that they had famous parents. I had a very colourless background where I was able to discover who I was in my own time and I thought that was probably what they would want, so I always kept them completely out. I was never photographed with them, I never went anywhere in public with them. And then I see my peers and they’re all over the place with their kids and I think. I wonder if my kids feel like I neglected them?”
Have they read the book yet?
“No. Do you think it will bum them out?”
I imagine they’ll think their Mum’s a badass.
“Do you think that’s bad? Would you like that if that was your mother?”
There is one moment that I expect will appal them: Hynde’s unwitting initiation into one of Ohio’s motorcycle gangs. She crossed paths with its members one evening, aged 21, while off her head on Quaaludes. The gang promised to take her to a party, but instead drove her to an empty house where they forced her to perform sexual acts under the threat of violence.
“Now, let me assure you,” she writes, “that, technically speaking, however you want to look at it, this was all my doing and I take full responsibility. You can’t f*** about with people, especially people who wear ‘I Heart Rape’ and ‘On Your Knees’ badges.”
It was distressing to read, I begin to say.
“Yeah, but those motorcycle gangs, that’s what they do.”
But to blame yourself, even now?
“Of course. Because you can’t paint yourself into a corner and then say whose brush is this? You have to take responsibility. I mean, I was naive…”
Exactly! Naive and vulnerable and they took advantage of that...
“They’re motorcycle guys! If you play with fire you get burnt. It’s not any secret, is it?”
A frank discussion about rape and responsibility ensues. I’m shocked to hear Hynde say that she thinks, as a woman, if you walk down the street drunk and provocatively dressed, then you can’t complain if you end up in trouble. She is similarly shocked that I don’t agree.
“If I’m walking around in my underwear and I’m drunk? Who else’s fault can it be?”
Er, the guy who attacks you?
“Oh, come on! That’s just silly. If I’m walking around and I’m very modestly dressed and I’m keeping to myself and someone attacks me, then I’d say that’s his fault. But if I’m being very lairy and putting it about and being provocative, then you are enticing someone who’s already unhinged — don’t do that. Come on! That’s just common sense. You know, if you don’t want to entice a rapist, don’t wear high heels so you can’t run from him. If you’re wearing something that says ‘Come and f*** me’, you’d better be good on your feet… I don’t think I’m saying anything controversial am I?”
It’s not the most feminist viewpoint I’ve ever heard.
“Well, a lot of women who call themselves feminists as far as I’m concerned are not feminists.”
What kind of women?
“Women who sell what their product is by using sex. That’s prostitution. A pop star who’s walking around, parading themselves as a porn star and saying they’re feminists. They’re prostitutes. I’m not making a value judgement on prostitutes, but just say what you are.”
The question that bores her most is the women in rock one. Everyone assumes it must have been difficult to make it in such a male-dominated industry. Typically, I get short shrift when I bring it up.
“The woman issue has never really entered into my world very much. I’ve been asked if I’m a feminist before. As far as I’m concerned, I’m the poster girl for feminism. I’ve never made a decision because a guy suggested it. I’ve always been self-supporting. I’ve never moved somewhere because of a guy. I’m not proud of it, I just do my thing.”
According to the Celebrity Net Worth website, Hynde is worth $12m. Not that she’d know — she claims never to have looked at a bank statement in her life.
“I have a manager and I have accountants, that’s what they do, but I don’t worry about anything. I make a discipline out of it. Maybe that’s what comes from being a pothead, we don’t like to be hassled. Money and stuff like that would hassle me. I saw an ex-manager at the weekend and she said, ‘Do you know you had 26 properties in 22 years and you lost money on all of them?’ I said, ‘Wow, that’s shameful.’ ”
I finish my questions, so she says she has some for me, then laughs as she keeps bringing the conversation back to herself. “So, let’s stop talking about me, let’s start talking about you. How did reading my book affect you?” I decide Morrissey is wrong: she does have a sense of humour.
I think of one last question: given the chance, would she do it all again? “Definitely not. Absolutely not. I would get rid of a lot of the drugs and debauchery and alcohol, all the stuff that led to misery. And with my parents… mine were so far away and I’m sorry about that now. That’s the one thing that’s different about my story. Everyone else says ‘I don’t regret anything’. You know what? I regret all of it.”
See? I told you she was a softie.
Matrimony in the uk
In this extract from Hynde’s new book, she recounts the time she nearly married a Sex Pistol
I was 25 and my British visa situation was a constant source of high anxiety. Johnny Rotten offered to go to a registry office with me and do the unmentionable so I could stay in the country. But as the date approached, the Sex Pistols had stirred it up something rotten on the nationally televised Today show, presented by Bill Grundy. Overnight, they were a household name and all over the tabloids. Steve Jones [the Pistols’ guitarist] had called Grundy a “dirty f*****” when the hapless presenter had asked Siouxsie Sioux what she was doing later that night. I say “hapless”, but Grundy was goading them, and they took the bait. It was a field day for the British press.
John was catapulted into the limelight as the band’s front man. Fame was not the name of the game. The idea was to make some noise and, hopefully, a bit of dosh. Nobody was prepared for it. So when I saw Rotten in the Roebuck on the King’s Road and asked if he was still up for our plan, he buried his head in his hands and groaned: “Oh, Gaaaaawwd.”
He was preoccupied with his new status as public-enemy number one. Sid, who hadn’t been party to the scheme, darted out of his seat and blurted: “What — what’s going on? You want to marry him ’cause now he’s a rock star, you can have his baby and get his money!”
Everyone was shocked by this weird bit of conjecture. Sid sat back down slowly, surprised himself by his bizarre outburst. In an attempt to redeem himself, I guess, he offered to stand in: “I’ll do it! But there has to be something in it for me.”
I said I’d give him two quid and it was on. We had to go to Sid’s mum’s council flat in a high-rise in Hackney, east London, to get his birth certificate, as he was underage. We stayed at mine so I could make sure he’d get to the registry office in the morning. There were three of us on my mattress that night, as he was intent on some girl he’d picked up. All night, I kept getting jabbed by bony knees and elbows. It was like trying to sleep in a sack of ferrets.
The thing about that house was everyone who lived there was too cheap to leave a toilet roll in the bathroom — real student stuff; you’d have to carry your own roll when you went. Chris, the sculptor, had been uncharacteristically generous by tacking an artful poster up in the bog. I couldn’t stop smiling later that week when I saw Sid had torn off the corner to wipe his ass.
Morning came, and we arrived to find the registry office closed for an extended holiday. Bollocks! The next day wouldn’t work, as Sid had to go to court for putting someone’s eye out with a glass. A thousand people since have asked about my marriage to Vicious — it never happened!
© Chrissie Hynde 2015. Extracted from Reckless — My Life as a Pretender, to be published on September 3 (Ebury, £20). To buy it for £18 (inc p&p), call 0845 271 2135 or visit thesundaytimes.co.uk/bookshop