Pretenders guitarist Chrissie Hynde, who carved out her reputation with her eye-catching — and now time-beaten — Ice Blue Telecaster, may have been born in Ohio, but it was in the U.K. that she made her name.
“I don’t know what my parents thought of me moving to London when I was 22,” she told The Guardian in 2014. “I never thought about it, and I didn’t go home to Akron, Ohio, for 35 Christmases.”
Indeed, the guitarist confessed to having had “a strong sense of destiny in my youth.” That burgeoning sense of self-determination saw her move from an ill-fated job at an architectural firm to music journalism, and then to a position at Sex — the clothing store owned by Vivienne Westwood and her husband, Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren.
That job afforded her some important contacts and, one way or another, thrust her into London’s punk scene — including an early encounter with Lemmy. At first, he seemed like a caricature, proof that the stories were true.
“The first time I clapped eyes on him was in a shop on the King’s Road. We exchanged no words at all,” she wrote in her memoir, Reckless: My Life as a Pretender, with the quotes unearthed by Classic Rock.
“He eyed me up and down,” she says, “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.”
Stories like this make it little wonder Motörhead played so fast and loud. Phil Campbell, the band’s guitarist from 1984 until Lemmy’s passing in 2015, once reflected on his own first meeting and audition for the group — when Lemmy was seeking a replacement for Brian Robertson — by joking that “he remembered the amphetamine, not me.”
So that side of Lemmy was very real. But in time, Hynde saw more than the mythology suggested.
“We liked the same things — we were mongrels with an appreciation for the finer things in life,” she says.
That included music that wasn’t quite as fast, loud, and ferocious as Motörhead.
“He was a Beatles fan at a time when the Beatles were like a throwback to a distant, almost forgotten past,” she adds. “He was far more musically knowledgeable than anyone who ever saw Hawkwind or Motörhead would have suspected. He kept it well hidden.”
Later in life, Lemmy became more forthcoming about his appreciation for the Fab Four — and in particular their bass player, Paul McCartney.
Speaking during a 2012 interview, he explained how his sex drive inadvertently introduced him to the band. He lived near a holiday resort, he said — presumably when he was residing in the Welsh seaside town of Anglesey — and struck up what he diplomatically described as a friendship with four Liverpudlian girls.
“It was all Billy Fury: ‘Oh, isn’t he gorgeous,’ you know?” he said. “Then one year they came down and Billy Fury was gone — it was ‘Beatles, Beatles, Beatles.’ I didn’t know who they were, so I went up to Liverpool. I really fancied one of these birds anyway, so it was two birds with one stone.”
There, he watched them play at the now-infamous Cavern Club and saw them many more times before the “excellent” band blew up “into the stratosphere.”
“The Stones got the reputation of being hard men, and the Beatles got the reputation of being smart, but it was the other way around,” he once quipped. “The Stones were just dressing up. The Beatles were from Liverpool. It’s a tough place.”
Reflecting on her life in the Pretenders in 2023, Hynde told Guitar Player that lead guitarist James Honeyman-Scott was naturally solo-shy — but she pushed him to take the spotlight, coaxing guitar solos out of the gifted player while she pummeled her Telecaster into submission.
