Interview with Chrissie Hynde
The following article was taken from the Times Newspaper,
on Tuesday 23rd September 2003.
Chrissie Hynde is an expert on break-up and loss, but
she never holds grudges against the men in her life. And anyone who gets to
spend four or five years with her should "thank his lucky stars"
Chrissie Hynde can’t believe that I can’t guess
which book she’s reading. “Are you kidding me? It’s so obvious!”
I wonder if there’s a vital new text on animal rights or Hinduism I’ve
missed, for she’s keen on both, or if her ex, Ray Davies, of the Kinks,
has produced a memoir. But it’s Martin Amis’s Yellow Dog that engrosses
the great Pretender. She’s such an Amis admirer, she confesses, that she
finds it painful even to be in the same room as him. They’ve met twice
and both encounters reduced this iconic, deep-voiced, man-eater of a woman to
blathering idiocy. “He’s so f***ing funny, you know?”
So Hynde is a complex person, but I know this because
one of her new songs is called Complex Person. On Loose Screw, the current Pretenders
album, she sings it twice, once in English and once, in a version translated
by her recently ex-husband, in Spanish. It goes, in part: “I’m a mixed
up, f***ed up, singer of a song.”
She’s certainly a stir-fry of paradoxes. For many,
she still epitomises youth, yet she is 52. She is half-hippy, half-punk. She
describes herself as “practical”, but “spiritual”. She led
the way for women guitarists such as Alanis Morissette to front groups, but
denies that she is a feminist. When it comes to lovers, she strongly believes
that she has done each of them a favour, yet she “shed many tears”
when her marriage ended last year.
We’re in a publicist’s office in North London,
near where she lives. She looks as she always has: black fringe, long nose,
weak chin and toothsome grin — Keith Richards’s pretty little sister.
As usual, she’s dressed in black, the only deviation being a pair of jokey
Stella McCartney plastic sandals. From her ears swing bunches of dice —
her favourite earrings, although not as famous as the condoms she wore as lobe
furniture on the Kings Road punk in the Seventies.
Loose Screw sounds defiant and filthy so far as its title
goes, but its content, I say, is mournful, its subject romantic loss.
“Oh, I’m an expert in breaking up and loss.
That’s my forte,” she says. She married Lucho Brieva, a Colombian
sculptor 14 years younger than herself, in 1997. The album was written as the
marriage was ending.
“I never stopped loving my husband. I didn’t
love him only when I hated him. So if he wasn’t winding me up and pissing
me off, then I had nothing left but affection for him. I don’t think I’m
great wife material, to be honest. Maybe it was my fault.”
Whose fault does she really think it was?
“Oh, his,” she replies instantly.
What had he done?
“Nothing. I can’t even remember now. If I can see things are starting
to go a bit funny, I’d just rather get out now.”
Other people would say: “Go to Relate. Put in some work for an old age
together.”
“Yeah? No, don’t fool yourself, people, because one of you is going
to die. You’re going to be left alone anyway.”
In some eastern religions, she explains, a person in later life is permitted
to take a vow of renunciation, leave his or her family and prepare for what
comes next.
“Those are real goals, but you have to get all of
the rest of it behind you first. I mean, my situation with my husband was that
he was younger than me and I’d already had kids and our attempts to have
children kind of didn’t — well, we didn’t have kids.”
He wanted them?
“No, he didn’t particularly, but I felt that he would want them eventually,
so I thought I should have a go. You know, I’m the one that initiated the
split, but I just saw him earlier today. I’ll tell you something: any man
who gets a chance with me for three or four years should thank his lucky stars.
Because I’m fun and I don’t hold grudges. But I think it’s better
just to be a sack artist than to be some nagging wench making demands.”
Let’s toast that.
Brieva was her second husband, but he could so easily have been her third or
fourth. When she arrived in London aged 22 from Ohio, when things got too hot
even for her (a friend was killed by Hell’s Angels), she fell in with the
Malcolm McLaren/Vivienne Westwood set and for immigration purposes almost married
the Sex Pistols’ Sid Vicious. Other boyfriends of the period included the
rock journalist Nick Kent and Peter Farndon, the bass player in the Pretenders’
original line-up, whom she was forced to sack for his drug habit. Like her guitarist
James Honeymoon-Scott, he later died of an overdose.
Her great romance, however, was with Ray Davies, whose
Kinks song Stop Your Sobbing provided the Pretenders with their first hit in
1978. He left his wife for her and they had a daughter, Natalie, but it was
a tempestuous business. As he was about to marry them, the registrar refused
because they were rowing so much in his office.
In 1984 she wed Jim Kerr, the lead singer of Simple Minds,
with whom she had run off while touring Australia. The marriage lasted five
years and produced another daughter, Yasmin Kerr, now an actress last seen on
TV as Eddie Izzard’s inappropriate girlfriend in the Channel 4 drama 40.
She says she does not bear ill will to any of these men.
Why then, I ask, is one of her new songs, Lie to Me, packed with unspecified
threats towards any man who dares to lie to her again. Ah, she says, but that
song is aimed at lying politicians. She has no faith in any of them, except,
perhaps, Nelson Mandela.
“I side with the man who shows mercy to animals
in every case. I don’t have time to judge a man for any other reason.”
But Hitler was kind to animals!
“I knew you were going to say that.”
Hynde’s greatest hits are Brass in Pocket, Back on the Chain Gang, Don’t
Get Me Wrong and Kid but, confusingly, when she talks of “hits” she
is equally likely to be referring to the headlines she scores in her battle
for animal rights. This summer, she was delighted at the coverage she won when
she was arrested in Paris for a demonstration that ended up with paint being
hurled at a KFC restaurant.
“That’s one of my greatest hits.”
No 1 being when she suggested firebombing McDonald’s?
“Yeah,” she says, applying a DJ voice. “And heading to the top
of the charts is Gap (where she once she took a knife to its leather designer
labels).”
When Hynde makes news it is not by chance but, it turns
out, through the choreography of Ingrid Newkirk, the president of Peta (People
for the Ethical Treatment of Animals). “The beauty of the Peta organisation,”
says Hynde, “is that they’re media whores. They will stop at nothing
and they know that the way to get to the public is through celebrities.”
The beauty of Newkirk, she adds, is that she has only
one objective: animal welfare. Hynde has another one. She also wants to “destroy
big business”. But the vegetarianism came first.
“When I became a vegetarian at 17 that’s when
everything changed. Then I knew I wasn’t going to be like everyone else.
I knew I was going to live by my principles.”
She was brought up soberly in the steak-eating American
Mid-West in Akron, the “rubber capital of the world”. Her father,
Bud, who worked for the telephone company, and her mother, Dee, are, she says,
Bush supporters, proud of her but “bemused”. She has an older brother,
a sax player, who has opted for an equally conventional life.
But while her politics may be extreme by her family’s
standards and were doubtlessly hardened at Kent State University, where she
witnessed the National Guard shoot dead protesting students, they are not uninformed
or unsophisticated. In discussing American policy in the Middle East, for instance,
she tells me that the Jewish vote in the US adds up to only 4 per cent of the
total. Given its influence, I find this hard to believe, but she is dead right
(the actual Jewish population, in fact, is only 2.01 per cent, but the Jewish
American votes more assiduously). She’s aware, too, of the inconsistency
of having spent 25 years making money for record companies that are big businesses
themselves.
“I’m very grateful to anyone who’s taken
me on and I had no problem with Warner, even when they dropped me because I
wasn’t selling records.”
“People of my age don’t buy records any more,”
she explains. “They have dinner parties.”
I suggest that, as a rock chick, it must be as hard to maintain her career beyond
her forties as it is for an actress.
“They keep telling me that, but I don’t see it. I just saw another
Charlotte Rampling film last night. I think the problem with these dumb-ass
broads who are always moaning about being too old is that there are parts for
women who are 60, but if you’ve had so much cosmetic surgery that you look
like you’re 40, how can you fulfil that role? So take up knitting and wait
a little bit, sisters, and the jobs will come to you.”
So she is nonplussed by the rush for HRT?
“I think I’ve missed the plot a little bit on the menopause. Everyone’s
trying to increase their libido. I’m still working out how I can get rid
of mine.”
Maybe that’s the key to rock’n’roll stars,
I say with a flash of insight: they’re all randier than the rest of us?
“I never thought of it that way, but, yeah, maybe. I don’t know. It
works differently for a man than a woman. Men can have all those groupies. I
can’t. It’s not like that for us. I can’t be as promiscuous as
I’d like to think that I could be.”
Why not?
“Because there’s nothing more depressing than a one-night stand for
a woman. There’s always the exception to the rule and there are some women
who engage in a lot of one-night stands and seem to like that. I wish I could.
It sounds like a lot of fun.”
So when in concerts she invites guys “under 40”
to come back-stage . . .
“No, no one’s ever tried it. Except there was this guy in Amsterdam
who gave me some hash.”
She admits that this “very attractive young” man’s offer has
put her back on the slippery dope slope that she abandoned some years ago when
she found herself hurtling down it rather too fast.
“Yeah, that was a pick-up line, but they don’t
follow through.”
Maybe she scares men. Is she a ball breaker?
“Not sure what that is.”
Does she give men hell?
“See, I think the thing about me is I don’t hold a grudge for very
long. I try to, but I can’t. So if a man were to really cross me and piss
me off, he’ll probably be all right. It’s for that short period of
time when I am pissed off. That’s when the damage can be done. In the long
term I’m OK.”
Is there a bloke right now to whom she’s giving
hell?
“I don’t give hell to guys.”
Very well. Is there a lucky man?
“Yeah, there is. But I haven’t slept with him. So he’s not that
lucky.”
I’ll need to take advice on whether this talk is feminist, post-feminist
or not feminist at all. She has certainly never claimed to be a feminist. Today
she says: “I’ve never needed a man to pay for me or to do anything
for me, but I love it if a man carries my bags. I’m in debt to him. If
a guy wants to tune my guitar, fantastic.”
Then there is the Martin Amis issue. She is incredulous
when I tell her that many women think his portrayal of women in his novels is
misogynist.
“They are very silly girls and should go back and
read them again. Better luck next time, sister! What about John Self (from Money)
? Why isn’t there a man’s group saying ‘Hang on, we are not all
like that’.”
At the launch party of Yellow Dog, she says, she’ll
be the one in corner, the cringeing groupie. Although, of course, even Amis
isn’t perfect: “He described himself as an ‘intellectual agnostic’
in an article he wrote and that broke my heart. There are probably very few
men who have read as many books as he has and he still says he has no idea,
and he doesn’t think he’s ever going to find out, why he’s here.”
Does she never think she might be wrong?
“Wrong about my belief in a supreme controller? No. It seems too obvious.
I’m far too logical. To me that would be like concluding that there was
probably no life on other planets. How could anyone think that? That’s,
like, insane.”
Almost as insane, I’d say, as imagining a devout,
vegetarian Vaishnavist admiring the cynical, godless humour of Martin Amis.
But, then, she’s a complex person, not to mention, as she also once sang,
a special one. At the Amis launch party, by the way, I am glad to report that
she fought past her inhibitions. Author and songstress took to the floor together.
The perfect mismatch.
Loose in LA, the Pretenders’ first DVD, is released
on September 29. The band tours the UK in the first week of October.