Later, after she’d moved to London and begun writing for the New Musical Express, she once opined: “Raymond Douglas Davies is the only songwriter I can think of who can write such personal material (and he is always very personal), and never get embarrassing. Their debut LP was one of the first albums she’d ever bought. Ever since she’d been a child in Akron, Ohio, Chrissie had been enamored of Davies, now 39, and the Kinks. Within 12 months, the bass player, still addicted to heroin, was dead, too.īut if ever there were a man who could make Chrissie Hynde fall head over heels in love, it was Ray Davies. Two days later, the guitarist whose lyrical playing formed the bedrock of the group’s sound, died of a cocaine overdose. First, the bass player who was once her lover, who had become a hopeless junkie, was kicked out of the band. No, Chrissie Hynde doesn’t seem to have been changed, or even slowed, by the two years of tragedy that followed the Pretenders’ swift ascent to fame. The same snarl that can stop you dead in your tracks. The same unfashionably tousled black hair, the heavy black eyeliner. Here she is, with the same black-leather wrapping. Now 32, the Pretenders’ lead singer looks like the same tough punk whose hellish behavior once attracted as much attention as the songs she wrote from her gut. The lights in Glasgow’s Apollo Theatre dim as the voice of Frank Sinatra starts to fill the dank, dingy hall: “That’s life/That’s what all the people say/You’re riding high in April/Shot down in May/ … Each time I find myself/Flat on my face/I pick myself up/And get back in the race.” With Sinatra wafting from the PA system, the defiantly unsentimental Chrissie Hynde takes the stage.
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