Chrissie Hynde has called the Pretenders’ new album – their 12th – Relentless. The name fits. Since she moved to London from Akron, Ohio exactly 50 years ago, there has always been a defiant, determined, take-on-all-comers momentum to the singer’s storied life and career. Hynde worked first at the New Musical Express in its heyday, and in Vivienne Westwood’s Kings Road shop, Sex, and so was a formative spirit in British punk, involved at the beginning with the Clash and the Sex Pistols (she almost married both John Lydon and Sid Vicious in order to obtain a work permit). The Pretenders’ eponymous first album, released in 1979, was one of the all-time great rock debuts, showcasing not only Hynde’s era-defining voice, look and attitude but also her indelible songwriting gift on tracks that included Brass in Pocket, the first new No 1 of the 1980s. Since then, like one of the band’s driving guitar lines, she has never let up.
Performing a memorable set at Glastonbury in July, with friends on stage including one-time bandmate Johnny Marr of the Smiths and Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters, Hynde’s voice, still so pure and edgy and seductive in its phrasing, transported the crowd across five decades of the Pretenders’ music, from Back on the Chain Gang and Don’t Get Me Wrong to tracks from the new album. Relentless inevitably addresses some of that inspiring longevity. “We don’t have to get fat / We don’t have to get old… We don’t have to fade to black,” Hynde sings, and, at 71, she seems living proof of that faith. She is an advocate for keeping on keeping on, as she told NME, with “no abatement of intensity. It’s the life of the artist. You never retire. You become relentless.”
