Chrissy Hynde interview: Beyond the fringe

Published on Saturday 11 July 2009 14:50

FOR a 'bum' with 'no ambition' Chrissie Hynde is a remarkable rock survivor. But for all the rebel swagger and vegetarian agitprop she's still hiding behind her Beatle chick hair waiting for love, she tells Chitra Ramaswamy

CHRISSIE Hynde is a proper rock star – defensive, arrogant, erratic, and very charming if and when the mood takes her. She talks of being a "bum", "getting loaded" and her weakness for "guys with guitars", even after failed marriages to two stadium-sized ones: The Kinks' Ray Davies and Jim Kerr of Simple Minds.

When we meet I try to shake her hand and she thrusts her knuckles out in that classic rock greeting, though it's also clear that she doesn't want to be touched. I end up with her fist tucked in my palm before she awkwardly wriggles away.

Hynde is 57 and looks as she has always done, regarding me suspiciously with her crinkled, kohl-smudged eyes from under a wall of fringe. Thirty years on from forming The Pretenders she has remained the only constant in an ever-changing line-up, the lone woman surrounded by "guys with guitars" who hasn't changed. We may have had Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison and Iggy Pop, but there was only ever one Chrissie Hynde: androgynous, tough, cool and with that rasping, voluptuous voice that once led Neil Young to say "she's going to be rocking till she drops". She tells me she doesn't mind getting older, but does mind getting uglier and then laughs in her ripe, throaty way that betrays the daily joint she smokes (she is trying to stop).

Hynde was four when she began praying to become a singer, 17 when she turned vegetarian, and 27 when she became the driving force behind her new band, the Pretenders. She is still all of these things.

"I had my belief system and that never changed," she says. "But I was the person least likely to succeed, the bum who was failing school and didn't care and had no ambition. The renegade hippie. Now I look at my hardworking friends and go 'Something went wrong here. How did this happen?'"

She never gets recognised in the street, plays medium-sized venues, only uses public transport, and has two daughters of whom we know little. "I always stay in the middle," she says. "I never do anything to make myself bigger and I always pull back if it feels like that. If you travel with an entourage, act like a big shot, you lose your freedom to be a person on the street. It's like asking to go to jail. Why would you do that? I can get a limo and hang out with celebrities and it's all right. But I like being in the ordinary mix because that's where real life is."

Today she looks every inch the grizzled Eighties rock star: skinny jeans, white cowboy boots and a Peta T-shirt lambasting McDonald's. Hynde believes her prescribed duty on this planet is not being a great singer or bandleader but protecting animals, and she knew this from an early age. Music is simply the vehicle to get the job done. Although we are here to discuss Hynde's first UK album since 2001 – a stripped-back country-flavoured affair with a fresh line-up of Pretenders – we spend a lot more time on cow protection.

"I'm always surprised when I meet meat eaters," she says. "I just think why on earth do you do that? You could put a gun to my head and say, 'If you want to live you have to eat steak', and I'd say, 'Time to go'. I don't want that kind of blood on my soul." She doesn't seem phased by "going" either. "I'm ready to go right now to be honest," she continues breezily. "I'm not saying I want to die, but I've got no further material goals. Anyway, if you haven't finished your business here you'll come back to do it. I like to think mine is finished, thanks very much."

Hynde talks like this a lot, which makes her great fun to interview once she has warmed up. She ricochets from rocket science ("bullshit"), to religion ("I wouldn't be a poster girl for any religious body. I mean, I live like a dog") to touring with men ("Those guys are bums. I can't take them to a cosmetic counter.") And she doesn't understand why people are hung up on gender. "I've never been a feminist so there you go," she says. "I just do what I think I have to do."

Why is she so resistant to it? "I'm not resistant," she bats back. "I'm only interested in meat-eaters and non-meat-eaters. If you're a feminist and a meat-eater you've got nothing to do with me. We're not speaking the same language. I've never been discriminated against anyway."

The title track on the latest album, Break Up The Concrete, is about Ohio, where Hynde has been spending more time with her elderly parents. She recently opened a vegan restaurant there. "There was nowhere to eat," she says. "Everyone said it won't work, you're gonna lose everything, don't do it. But it's packed every night. I see now that I could put one anywhere in the world and it would be a success."

"There's nothing about America that I miss," she continues. "A lot of Americans get Oreo cookies sent over or some bulls***. I tell Americans I live there because they love that s***, but if I feel anchored anywhere it's here, although every day someone asks me what I'm doing here."

Hynde arrived in London in 1973, a small town hippie with an Iggy Pop obsession. What was the first thing she did? "I was with a girlfriend who only lasted a few weeks," she recalls. "I had maybe $200 on me, so the first thing I did was go up to some guys selling stuff on the road and ask them for a job. It was that or shoplifting."

After a stint pretending to be a journalist at the NME, she ended up at the epicentre of punk, Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren's Sex boutique, though this was when it was called Craft Must Wear Clothes But The Truth Loves To Go Naked.

"I'd never met people like Malcolm and Vivienne," says Hynde, who worked in the shop. "They were very straight, intellectual types. They didn't smoke pot or take drugs. Mine was a much more LSD-fuelled, wide-eyed existence." This is no doubt why at one point she almost married Sid Vicious to stay in the country.

In 1978, Hynde met bassist Pete Farndon and guitarist James Honeyman-Scott and formed the Pretenders. Five years later, with huge hits such as Brass In Pocket under their belt, both men had died from drug overdoses. "Those guys were more caught up in it than me," she says. Did she think about jacking it in? "Oh good God, no. I never for one second thought about going back to the States. You can't work really hard at something and then let it go. They worked hard for it too, a little too hard, I guess, at being rock stars. We weren't pioneers, but we did have a sound, and I've been really conscientious about maintaining that."

It seems significant that Hynde has always resisted fame. Perhaps it's because she has seen, first-hand, how damaging it can be. She says the only time she revels in the spotlight is when she is onstage. "You can be the obnoxious asshole that God intended you to be," she laughs. "It's when you feel most yourself, not because you're adored but because you're doing what comes most natural to you."

She lives alone, and when I ask her how she would spend an ideal day, she says "in love". It seems a travesty that Chrissie Hynde can't find a man. "I don't live with anyone. Wish I did. Wouldn't everyone rather live with someone than alone? That's if someone isn't bothering you, giving you a hard time, telling you how to spend your money, how to live your life, who to see or what to think. If someone wants to give me that much space, come one, come all…" She cracks up.

The problem is she's shy, which I find hard to believe. "I cut my fringe when I was 14, decided to be a Beatle chick, and stopped putting my hair in rollers," she says. "Girls who do that mainly use their fringe to hide behind. That's the truth. I shouldn't say that because you don't want to give the game away, but girls who hide behind their hair don't think they're very attractive. They don't want to be looked at."

Is she still hiding behind her fringe? Hynde pauses. "I guess I am," she says eventually. "But there's nothing wrong with hiding. That's what rock is about. It's not for everybody. It isn't about being in the spotlight, it's about being in the shadows." And with that, Hynde disappears into the city to get the Tube home. v

&#149 Break Up The Concrete is out now, Rhino. Chrissie Hynde and the Pretenders play Glasgow ABC, 14 July www.thepretenders.com