The Pretenders hang tough and score a new triumph
There were two calls, very much the same, and after the first there was no need to go into detail.
Chrissie Hynde, lead singer, prime force and all-round soul shaker of the Pretenders, picked up the phone one morning in her London apartment and heard the voice of the band's manager. "What is it?" she said, and he said, "We've heard that Jim died. I'll call you back when I find out anything."
Not a year later, the manager called again. "Farndon" was all he said. "Oh," Hynde said, more prepared this tune. "Talk to you later."
Within the sharp, scary trajectory that followed the band's formation in 1978, the Pretenders absorbed some strong doses of success and a few serious jolts of fate. At times it might have seemed like a tradeoff: two hit singles, Stop Your Sobbing and Brass in Pocket, and one Top Five album, Pretenders; two deaths: James Honeyman-Scott, the lead guitarist, whose body finally gave in to the cumulative destruction wrought by massive infusions of cocaine, and Pete Farndon, whose prolonged bouts with pharmacological excess seemed to accelerate in direct proportion to the band's increasing celebrity. "Because fame and success jumped on us so fast, we all had our own ways of dealing with it," Hynde says now. Other English bands of the period got mixed up between amateurism and honesty. The Pretenders, who had their chops down from the start and were proud of it, never made that particular mistake. They were much too busy, thanks, making most of the others.
From the start, this band had a sound recklessness. was both brash and melodic. The Pretenders burned through the pomp and pose that had crusted over the British punk movement by 1980. Other bands, similarly adept and not so heavily brushed by fate, disintegrated. The Pretenders, to everyone's astonishment, including their own, turned out to be survivors. There are two new members now: Lead Guitarist Robbie Mclntosh and Bass Player Malcolm Foster. The two veterans, Hynde and Drummer Martin Chambers, have made a separate peace with the past by putting a stake in the future. Hynde has a 15-month-old baby; Chambers' wife is expecting her own in July. Not incidentally, the band also has a smashing new album called Learning to Crawl (No. 13 on the charts) that has no current rival for tough rock and straight talk. There is the present sellout U.S. concert tour from Honolulu to Radio City Music Hall, ending May 6 in Buffalo. And there are, apparently, quite a few lessons that have been learned.