![]() She enjoyed it so much she’s doing it again this February… with these shows as part of Independent Venue Week. The tour was received with rapturous response and the shows were a very special opportunity to see a legend play new songs and personal favourites in exceptionally intimate settings. In October 2022, Chrissie Hynde embarked on a short tour playing working men’s clubs and ale houses. This band has hook after hook and hit after hit of amazing songs. I'll Stand By You, Stop Your Sobbing, Brass in Pocket, Talk of the Town, Back on the Chain Gang, Time the Avenger, Middle of the Road, My City Was Gone and so many more. It has since been accepted as a festive perennial.Icons of the new wave and punk era, The Pretenders, will be playing a very intimate show in our music hall on 5th February. Hynde had penned the song’s heartfelt lyric (“In these frozen and silent nights/Sometimes in a dream you appear”) in tribute to James Honeyman-Scott, but its glorious, chiming guitars and wider seasonal theme elevated the song into the UK Top 20 in time for Christmas 1983. The closing 2000 Miles, meanwhile, was simply transcendent. A disarming parental love song, Show Me (“You with your angel face/Keep the despair at bay”) was surely influenced by Natalie Ray’s birth in January 1983, and its atypical innocence was beguiling. Given the circumstances surrounding Learning To Crawl’s creation, it’s no surprise Hynde’s lyrics frequently referenced death and regeneration: the angular Time The Avenger ruminated on the fragility of existence (“Even your wife and kids could be gone next year”), while the tense, dub-inflected I Hurt You homed in on the destruction addicts can leave in their wake.Įven on these songs, however, the musical backdrops were strident and engaging, and the mood was further leavened by the inclusion of two of the band’s most life-affirming pop songs. Kicked into life by Chambers’ stuttering drum fills, the opening Middle Of The Road was as visceral a rocker as any in the group’s catalogue, while Hynde’s new charges also flaunted their versatility on the scorching, rockabilly-flavoured Thumbelina and the manic Watching The Clothes, in which McIntosh let fly with some lethal, Keith Richards-esque rifferama. Keeping the despair at bayĭespite the upheavals (and the fact Hynde was pregnant with her first daughter, Natalie Rae, when sessions first began in 1982), the album they cut was every inch the equal of Pretenders’ first two records. He brought along a new bassist, Malcolm Foster, for the Learning To Crawl sessions, which the Pretenders’ longtime producer, Chris Thomas, helmed at London’s AIR Studios. It was almost as if he found him for us, so he wouldn’t leave us high and dry after he died.”Īnother tasteful and highly inventive lead guitarist, McIntosh would later work with artists such as Paul McCartney and Talk Talk. “Therefore, Robbie was Jimmy’s natural replacement. “On the last day we met, Jimmy had talked about a guitar player he wanted to bring on board in some capacity, a guy named Robbie McIntosh,” Hynde recalled. Hynde and Chambers duly recruited a stop-gap line-up, with Rockpile guitarist Billy Bremner and Big Country bassist Tony Butler joining them to record Pretenders’ next single, the poignant Back On The Chain Gang, which became a sizeable hit in both the UK and US. I thought we had to keep it going or it would seem like Jimmy’s fault that it had all ended.” “I had to finish what we’d started” We’d worked too hard to get it to where it was. “Because I felt we couldn’t let the music die when he did. “One of the things that kept the band alive, ironically, was Jimmy’s death,” she said in the sleevenotes for Pretenders’ Pirate Radio box set. ![]() Understandably, Chrissie Hynde and Martin Chambers were devastated by the loss of their two close friends, but when it came to Pretenders’ immediate future, Hynde felt the much-missed Honeyman-Scott had already made the decision for her. In June 1982, guitarist James Honeyman-Scott died unexpectedly from drug-related heart failure, while, just months later, founding bassist Pete Farndon, who had been ejected from the band due to his own drug-related issues, died of a heroin overdose. ![]() A masterful blend of punky aggression and pop nous, Pretenders’ self-titled debut album took them to the verge of mass success on both sides of the Atlantic, while its equally fine follow-up, Pretenders II, cemented their reputation on the global stage.Īt least superficially, it seemed Pretenders could do no wrong, but then tragedy struck – twice. The group had already entered the 80s as one of the new decade’s hottest bands. Stuffed wall-to-wall with fantastic songs, Pretenders’ third album, Learning To Crawl, is a career highlight by anyone’s standards, but its quality is all the more remarkable when you consider the personal tragedies that frontwoman Chrissie Hynde and drummer Martin Chambers overcame in order to make it happen.
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