Chrissie Hynde arrived in London in May 1973, aged 21, knowing almost no-one in the English capital. Within a year, she had a freelance gig writing for Britain's best-known music magazine, the New Musical Express, and a side hustle working at SEX, the Kings Road boutique run by designer Vivienne Westwood and her then-partner (and future Sex Pistols manager) Malcolm McLaren. Both gigs gave her a front row seat for the birth of punk rock in England, but Hynde was never going to be satisfied with being merely an observer or bit-part player in this new movement. And she credits Lemmy from Motorhead for his piviotal role in her move to centre stage with her own band, The Pretenders.
"Without him, the Pretenders wouldn't have happened," she stated plainly to podcaster Marc Maron in 2014.
"The first time I clapped eyes on him was in a shop on the King’s Road," Hynde wrote in her 2015 memoir Reckless: My Life as a Pretender . "We exchanged no words at all. He eyed me up and down, moved in close, dipped the silver tube he wore on a chain around his neck into a plastic bag of white powder, shoved it up my snout, then turned around and walked out. I was up for three days."
"Lemmy was built like a brick shithouse," she noted. "He was big, hard and looked like he could only belong to one of the world’s more savage motorcycle clubs – except he didn’t. He played bass in a band. Pretty much everything a girl like me was looking for."
At the time, Hynde was dating the sergeant at arms of the London chapter of the Heavy Bikers motorcycle gang, and Lemmy was hanging out with friends in the Heavy Bikers’ Windsor chapter. The pair hit it off immediately, as Hynde recalls in her book.
"Lemmy and I liked bikes, music and drugs," she reminisced. "In this case the bikes were more often than not off the road; the music was omnipresent, and the drugs were too – and then some. Drugs now permeated everything – it was just a fact of life. A life without drugs was unfathomable: tranqs, speed, downers, smoke, smack too. Cocaine was so expensive that we assumed it must be good – the oldest con in the book.
"Lemmy was hip to the trip and didn’t touch anything except amphetamines, smoke and Jack Daniel’s. Clean living. We liked the same things – we were mongrels with an appreciation for the finer things in life. He was a Beatles fan at a time when the Beatles were like a throwback to a distant, almost forgotten past. He was far more musically knowledgeable than anyone who ever saw Hawkwind or Motörhead would have suspected. He kept it well hidden."
As he did with so many of his female friends, Lemmy encouraged Hynde to pursue her own rock n' roll dreams, knowing that she was capable of so much more rather merely watching on from the sidelines. And Hynde trusted that her new friend wasn't just blowing smoke up her ass.
"When punk came along and its followers unconditionally dismissed the bands that had come before, no matter how grand, Lemmy could still hold court and command the admiration of all and sundry," she wrote. "Lemmy was bigger than punk, so if anyone was to be trusted to give advice about the construction of a band he was your man."
Lemmy duly advised Hynde to seek out a drummer of his acquaintance, a Mr Gas Wild, who he described to his friend as "a Jeff Beck lookalike" who could be found hanging out in west London's Ladbroke Grove. One fateful afternoon, while she was making herself useful by tidying up the flat she was crashing at, sleeping at the bottom of Viv Albertine from The Slits' bed, Hynde spotted just such a character on Portobello Road.
Shouting down from the flat window to a man she'd never met, or previously spoken to, Hynde boldly asked, "Wanna get in a band?"
"Yeah, but I haven’t got a drum kit," came the reply.
"I’ll get you one," Hynde promised, and threw down the flat keys to the somewhat bemused drummer.
"And that, essentially, was the beginning of The Pretenders," she wrote.
Another reason to love Lemmy then.
