Chrissie Hynde: The great Pretender

The expression 'rock chick' could have been coined to describe her. She has weathered drug deaths, punk, stormy relationships and stardom. Now 52, Chrissie Hynde tells Fiona Sturges why she no longer sees music as the be-all and end-all

A few weeks ago, Chrissie Hynde, lead singer of The Pretenders and living monument to rock's glorious heritage, was thrown out of a pub. She had run into Paul Weller, and they and a group of friends had spent the evening together singing old soul songs. "They were kind enough to stay open late for us, and I allegedly said something that offended the bar staff," Hynde thunders. "So they asked me to leave." I'm impressed, I say. "Yeah, well, I wasn't impressed with Paul Weller, who didn't stand up and defend me. He wanted to stay for another, so he just said, 'Cheers, mate, see you later,' as I was being pushed out the door."

After just a few minutes in her company, it isn't hard for me to imagine Hynde's mouth getting her into trouble. Her conversation is laden with attitude, her vocabulary spiked with swear words. Every time she speaks, the furniture seems to rattle. And when she warms to a theme, there's no stopping her. Here's what I get when I ask if she follows what young bands are doing: "You know what? I don't give a fuck. I'm not 18 any more, and I don't live for music. It's not like I'm waitressing any more and I get home and put on an Iggy Pop album just to save my life. It's a different world from the one I grew up in and, besides, I've got other things going on in my life. I've got a teenager at home, y'know? I go to gigs from time to time, but I don't look to see who's cool and what isn't. Who cares?"

At 52, she looks pretty much like the Chrissie Hynde of 25 years ago: the shaggy dark hair with a long fringe, the black eye make-up, the don't-mess-with-me stare. While she'll talk in passing about her new LP, Loose Screw, she assures me she won't bore me with the details. She's not into "all this self-promotion crap".

The Pretenders' eighth studio album comes with all the spite and cynicism we've come to associate with Hynde. The opening track, "Lie to Me", pours scorn on the lies of a duplicitous lover; "Fools Must Die" seethes with irritation at the hard of thinking. Hynde's punk roots have always belied the slightly dubious appeal of some of her back catalogue. While The Pretenders' first two albums, which contained such swaggering classics as "Brass in Pocket" and "Talk of the Town", achieved a near-perfect balance of punk and pop, later releases such as 1986's Get Close and 1990's Packed veered dangerously close to the middle of the road. More recent albums, in particular 1999's Viva el Amor, have heralded a partial return to form, although Hynde's status as a pop icon has more to do with her fiery determination and her allegiance to the spirit of rock'n'roll than her musical output.

Over the course of 25 years, The Pretenders have endured the kind of tragedy that would have prompted lesser bands to call it a day. Just five years into their career, the band lost two of their founding members. The bassist Pete Farndon's heroin habit meant that he was becoming increasingly distanced from the rest of the band and, in 1982, he was fired. Just two days later, the guitarist Jimmy Honeyman-Scott was found dead in his London flat after a drug overdose.

"I went from everything to nothing," Hynde states. "Suddenly it was just me and a drummer. Yes, it was a low point." Less than a year later, Farndon died from a cocktail of heroin and cocaine.

But becoming a solo artist was never an option as far as Hynde is concerned. "I don't have the front for it," she maintains. "If it said 'Chrissie Hynde' on front of the Marquee, I would be on the first bus home. This band has not and has never been about me. I'm not interested in singer-songwriters or solo artists. I'm a band person. The reason that this band exists is that I met Jimmy and Pete. Sure, I've always been ringleader, but I couldn't do it on my own."

Since the deaths of Farndon and Honeyman-Scott, there have been several different Pretenders line-ups – guitarists have included Robbie McIntosh, Johnny Marr and Billy Bremner. "As a tribute to Pete and Jimmy, I've kept the name and I've kept the sound," Hynde says. "It's for them that I've carried on."

Over the years, Hynde hasn't been without her own problems. After a stormy year-long affair with The Kinks' Ray Davies in the early Eighties, during which time she had a daughter, Natalie, she met and married Jim Kerr, of Simple Minds, with whom she had another child. Five years later, their relationship fell apart, and Hynde was left bringing up two children by herself. "Sure, having kids slows you down a bit, but in a good way, because if you're too prolific, people are like, 'Fuck off,' anyway. I'm not gonna harp on about how hard it was. I'm the same as any other 52-year-old. Sometimes it's been hard but most times it's been a blast."

Hynde grew up in the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio. Her introduction to music came via her transistor radio. "It was on this low AM frequency," she recalls. "This was before there was corporate takeovers of everything and a girl could stick her tits out and rule the airwaves. I could pick them all up, in Akron and Cleveland as well as Nashville, Detroit and Philadelphia. I heard all this English music – The Beatles, the Stones and The Yardbirds. I had this great musical education just from being a kid in the suburbs with nothing to do."

In 1973, a 22-year-old Hynde had saved enough money for a plane ticket and decided to move on. "I wasn't interested in being in the suburbs, or even going to New York or California. I just wanted out." Armed with a bag of clothes and three records – Funhouse and Raw Power by The Stooges, and The Velvet Underground's White Light/ White Heat – Hynde headed for the UK. One of her earliest memories of London is hearing that Tony Orlando and Dawn's "Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree" was No 1 in the charts.

"I was totally appalled," she cries. "I had all these old issues of the NME that I got in this drugstore in Ohio, and I'd kept this cool article on my idol Iggy Pop and put it on my wall. I thought, 'They'll know where I'm coming from over in London.' When I got over here, no one seemed to know who the hell Lou Reed and Iggy Pop were."

At first, Hynde worked at a series of badly paid jobs – selling handbags on the Bayswater Road, being the "tea boy" in an architect's office in Barnes. One night, she found herself at a party in west London, where she got talking to a journalist who claimed to have met Iggy Pop. He turned out to be Nick Kent, the writer of Hynde's treasured Iggy Pop article. Through him, she met the NME editor, who offered her some work as a writer. "It didn't last long, as I was practically illiterate," she laughs, "though they did get me to interview Brian Eno. I had no idea what to say to the guy. I was totally in awe of him."

After a brief stint of working with Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood in their King's Road SEX shop, Hynde decided to move on again, this time to join a band in Paris. But by 1976, aware of the burgeoning punk scene in the UK, Hynde had returned to London, where she became friends with Mick Jones – who later formed The Clash – and the fledgling members of The Damned. "I was there when all these bands got together," she booms. "I saw them pick up their first guitar. It was really painful and depressing for me. Everyone was in a band but me. I used to bump into people, and they'd say, 'Hey, what are you doing now? Are you still trying to get a band together?' I must have heard that line a hundred times."

Desperate to be a part of the scene, she joined Steve Strange's band The Moors Murderers, which brought instant notoriety in the tabloids. The name meant nothing to the Cleveland-born singer, who was briefly persuaded to change her name to Chrissie Hyndley. In 1978, Hynde met the bassist Farndon, the guitarist Honeyman-Scott and the drummer Martin Chambers, and The Pretenders were born. Within a year they had reached No 1 with "Brass in Pocket", and their best-selling debut album followed shortly afterward.

Nowadays Hynde says she's content "just getting old and being in a great rock band." She leans forward in her chair and, for the first time in an hour's conversation, lowers her voice. "Look, as long as we can make records and sell enough so we can do some shows, that's all I want. You know what? I just want to play guitar and be in a band. Same as I always did."

'Loose Screw' is out on 19 May on Eagle Records. The single 'You Know Who Your Friends Are' is out on 12 May