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Chrissie Hynde, who was arrested
in Paris last week at an animal rights protest, says she's "too old
to be a rock chick". That hasn't stopped her touring again with the
Pretenders, alone in a bus with 13 men. Emily Bearn reports.
At 52, Chrissie Hynde has said
that she would be happy "just getting old", but it is an
occupation to which she does not appear wholly committed. She is one of
rock's most venerable chicks - her band, the Pretenders, has been going
for a quarter of a century - but she is by no means its tamest. Last week, for example, she was
arrested at an animal rights protest in Paris during which paint was
hurled at a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant. A few months earlier, she
was thrown out of a London pub after allegedly saying something that
offended the bar staff. Just before midnight one night
last week, Hynde was in Paris waiting to board her tour bus to set off on
a two-month European tour, incorporating Sweden, Norway, Denmark and
Germany. The first stop is Brest, where she will arrive about seven in the
morning. After 25 years on the road, she says she is finally beginning to
feel the wear and tear. "Frankly," she says,
lighting a cigarette, "I regret every pill I've ever taken, every
glass of wine I've ever drunk, every joint, every fag. It's crazy when
you're young. You just burn through the pain barrier - hit my age and
think, 'Shit, I'm f---ing exhausted.' Sometimes I think it's pretty
amazing that I'm still knocking around. But I've got to keep going."
Hynde's expression changes to one of resigned irony: "I'm a band
leader. I can take people to glory, and that's a remarkable feeling."
While waiting for the bus, she
walks down a crowded Montmartre boulevard searching for a cafe table. It's
a slow procession because Hynde has a gammy knee - "cartilage
problems. You don't want to know" - and walks without bending her
left leg. The problem can't be helped by her stiletto boots. Everyone seems to be gazing at
her in dazed wonder, and a few people nervously accost her:
"Chrissie? Chrissie Hynde?" asks one woman, her face frozen in
disbelief. "That's right," says Hynde, submitting reluctantly to
a handshake. "Why would I lie about it?" Hynde says she does not
like being recognised - "It's awkward: it changes the dynamics of
everything" - an aversion which becomes more apparent when she
finally sits down in a cafe. More people gawp; the waiter compliments her
on her Mike Tyson T-shirt. Hynde decides it's time to go. Hynde might be less recognisable
if she did not look almost exactly the same as she did 25 years ago when
she burst onto the British pop scene with her now legendary hit Brass
in Pocket. She is arrestingly handsome with her huge, black-rimmed
eyes still shrouded beneath her trademark shaggy fringe. She does not travel with a
stylist and says her only preparation for going on stage is a hot bath.
"I'm not into being groomed, because I'm not afraid of looking my
age. Some people have this big trauma when they have a birthday. I'm just
grateful to get a card." Dressed in tight jeans and a
bright pink jacket, she has the figure of a 21-year-old, even if she no
longer has the stamina. She says her first intimation of exhaustion came
10 years ago during a particularly rigorous tour. "I had dreadful
hangovers every day. I turned to the manager and I said, 'OK, let's not
have another drink.' He lasted three years and I lasted eight." She now limits herself to the
"odd splurge", of which last night was apparently one. "I
feel like shit," she says, "but that's an exception. After a
show everyone's backstage drinking bottles of tequila. I can't sustain
that any more. I just go to bed." Yet Hynde betrays no hint of
fatigue. Her sentences come like gunfire, in an appealingly raw American
accent in which words such as "shit" sound like natural
currency. She is formidably direct and talks with a lack of affectation
that at times makes her sound almost preternaturally sensible. Singing is
"her job", fame is "just one of those things that goes with
it" and "the whole rock 'n' roll thing is pretty overrated. You
take the drugs and the drink out of it, and what are you left with? I just
want to make good music - I'm too old to be a rock chick." Yet on the subject of animal
rights she speaks with the gusto of a student revolutionary. She has
joined demonstrations all over the globe, once spending a night in a New
York jail after ripping up leather jackets in a Gap store. (She has worn
leather in the past, but now tries not to.) During last week's scuffle with
the Parisian police she was frisked, detained for "half an hour or
so" and released with a fine. The demonstration (aimed at
"encouraging" KFC to use more humane poultry-execution methods,
such as gassing) was organised by PETA, a vociferous lobby for which Hynde
is one of the principal cheerleaders. She says she is motivated by
"compassion", a compassion which, however raucously expressed,
seems genuine. She will talk for hours about the iniquities of
battery-farmed chickens ("They need to roost, damn it. Chickens need
to roost") or cattle transportation methods in India ("They rub
chilli in their eyes to make them go faster. Chilli. Can you
imagine?"). She is a trenchant vegetarian and has said that she does
not like "being in association with meat eaters". "I try to
avoid them, but it's hard," she says. A therapist would find plenty to
discuss with her. After a "normal childhood" in Ohio, where her
father worked for a telephone company, she moved to London at 22 planning
to start a band. Though she insists her youth was not "exceptionally
wild" ("I was just having the normal life of someone living in
squats"), she has lived through some vintage rock 'n' roll tragedy. The Pretenders were formed in
1978 and within five years had lost two of its founding members: in 1982
the guitarist, Jimmy Honeyman-Scott, was found dead in his London flat
after a drug overdose; less than a year later the bassist, Pete Farndon,
died from a cocktail of heroin and cocaine. "It was terrible,"
she says. "Terrible. But I kept going because I believed in the
band." She talks about drugs with the disinterest of someone who has
experimented with them "within reason". She says she does not believe in
commercial success, which is just as well since the Pretenders no longer
have huge record sales: "We're too edgy to be mainstream. We're never
going to be the flavour of the week because we were the flavour of the
week in the '80s. But I'm not trying to attract a huge audience. I'm just
trying to do enough to get by." She is touring to promote their
latest album, Loose Screw. Her lyrics have been described as
cynical (one track is entitled Fools Must Die; another, Lie to
Me, castigates a duplicitous lover), a description she staunchly
rejects. "If there's anything tender about me then I hope it's in my
songs. You can be cynical when you're young, but it's not something for
the elderly." Most of the time she is in the
company of men: "Everyone I work with is a man. I'll be getting on
the coach tonight with 13 guys, but I like that. Men don't bring their
emotional life on stage, but I tend to carry mine around with me." There is a fair deal of baggage.
She has two teenage daughters, the first by Ray Davies of the Kinks, with
whom she had an affair in the early 1980s, and the second by Jim Kerr of
Simple Minds, to whom she was married for five years. There have been
subsequent relationships - she was briefly married to the Colombian
sculptor Lucho Brieva - but none endured. "Living my life would be
tough on any man. I'd love to be in a happy marriage, but I get to do what
I want to do, which is to play in my band. I've never been that good at
being subservient to someone. It's something I never specialised in."
Hynde has said she is not good at
"domestication" but she appears to have had a good go at it,
however, taking eight years off work after the birth of her first child.
"I definitely have parenting skills," she says. "I took to
it naturally." Though her children grew up thinking she was "not
an unusual mother" they are, at times, proud of her. "They
totally support my animal rights work," she says. "They think,
'Hey, Mum's a friend of Morrissey and she got arrested!"' Her
parents, who still live in Ohio, are less supportive. "They
vehemently don't approve of it all. They're Midwestern Bush supporters -
can you imagine they would?" Later, inside the black Velcro
interior off her tour bus, five of the Pretenders' road crew are
congregated around a Formica table littered with empty beer bottles. The
vehicle is apparently air-conditioned but there is little evidence of it
on the sweltering upper deck where Hynde and her all-male entourage sleep
in rows of child-sized bunks. Some of her colleagues have already retired
and spill vast, hairy limbs over the edge of their mattresses. "Can you draw the
curtains?" she asks, coolly turning to her tour manager. "I
don't want to go to sleep staring into all these naked bodies ... Isn't
this f---ing great? Don't you wish you were coming with us?" Copyright
© 2002 Global Action on Aging |
