At 53, Chrissie Hynde is still regularly picked up and arrested by members of whatever constabulary she may be picketing in. She might be fighting for animal rights before popping off to see her new favourite band, Kings of Leon — the Pretenders lead vocalist has always had a propensity to repair the damage left by others, socially, musically or otherwise.
From going naked for Peta and chaining herself to tuna trawlers for Greenpeace to testing the Billboard top 100 with her rasping voice and sultry attitude, Hynde has contributed on all levels of her life.
Armed with a brand-new Pretenders album, Loose Screw, and boasting a Rolling Stones support bill, Hynde’s attitude, after three decades of fame, fortune and Mick Jagger-stature friends, is partly the recipe to her success and longevity. In an industry continually reporting the demise of yet another player, band or record label, she is assertively nonchalant about her place: “I am always working on many different things at any given time, so I think the diversity of my life helps to keep me firing on all cylinders.
“It’s not like the good old days,” she muses, “where an album came out and that was it. These days there are all these other little projects that come in that are needed to make a record work. Albums aren’t what they used to be. Gone is side one and two … all to be replaced by far less emotive and more planned and plotted executions. Years ago fame drove people to succeed and with that came the cash. Today, however, money is the single biggest killer of creativity.”
Talking about the state of music in 2003, Hynde says: “It’s all about swings and roundabouts. Just when you think guitars are gone, lo and behold, a whole bunch of little guitar bands reappear.
“So, in some ways what goes on in someone’s bedroom [musically], what goes on in people’s heads and what goes on in your own pop experience kind of stays true to form — it’s the [music] industry that goes through incarnations of fashion, not the fans.” Or, as David Bowie’s Star Man puts it, “we are all just prisoners here, of our own design”.
She has fornicated and fondled her fair share of rock’n’roll’s renowned set over the years — the likes of the Simple Minds’s Jim Kerr has great stories to tell of his time spent in the world of this musician who today records, releases albums and tours purely because she chooses to do so.
“Music today is very derivative, where marketing and big budgets make stars of nobodies as quickly as they dismiss them when they release one remotely suspect single. At one point the whole business of recording and selling music got a little silly,” Hynde says. “From the salmon lunches to the hideously huge advances given to artists, stuff like that only abetted in having the business lose touch with reality.
“At any point in the history of rock or pop music there has always been something to moan about or blame a label for. The good news today is that the record industry got so greedy it has now finally destroyed itself out of its own excesses. So to be in a band today, timing-wise, is not a bad thing at all. There are loads of independent labels and avenues and platforms available for artists and bands to have their music heard other than through a major player like Warner Brothers or EMI.
“You must understand that I don’t think that rock music is that important,” she says. “There was a time that it was more so, but now that I’m older I see that those are superficial things anyway. I am not one of these artists where, if you took away writing, I would go to pot.
“Yes, my music is my therapy, but if you took it away I would happily prevail. I would like to think that I would not fall apart and do other things outside of music, like get on a Greenpeace ship and happily sail off into the sunset and sink a couple of whaling ships. That has to be as much fun as being on stage with a rock group, surely?”
Arguably the facts that Hynde is a rock icon and The Pretenders are a seminal rock band have afforded her the opportunity to help influence change outside of entertaining punters in smoky nightclubs and arenas around the world.
“By virtue of my being in this band I am asked to do more environmental and animal rescue stuff,” she agrees. “I will do anything if it means fucking up the establishment; it’s all the same to me. I don’t, however, feel that because I am in the public eye I need to be more responsible or attach myself to any cause or plight. Everyone has to feel their own responsibility. My causes are my own as are yours to you — agenda or otherwise.”
As a veteran in a ballpark dominated by adolescents who churn out formulaic pop, Hynde holds the high ground with a certain quiet confidence and swagger.
“I am midway through a century old and tomorrow night I am going to be on stage playing my guitar in a rock band — who would have thought it possible?”