tattooed love boys the pretenders lyrics

#TATTOOED LOVE BOYS THE PRETENDERS LYRICS FULL#

She tells us about arriving at their intended wedding in Guildford with mascara streaked under her eyes: “The guy in the registry office took one look at us and suggested we come back another time.” They took separate trains back to London when she got to the flat, Davies acted as if nothing had happened. ( Joe Strummer replaced her in the latter, and the band was renamed.) She had a tempestuous relationship with Ray Davies of the Kinks, with whom she has a daughter. Still, she ended up in early versions of the Damned and the Clash. She met Sid Vicious, who almost married her for immigration reasons, but had to be in court that day, and cleaned rooms with Johnny Rotten. Knocking around London and Paris, she lived in cars, in squats, in rooms vacated by suicides, drank and took ungodly amounts of drugs (she is interesting on heroin as a great class equaliser).

Hynde talks about really wanting to be in a band, but by her own account she often seemed half-hearted about pursuing it.

“The more dismissive and poorly written my reviews, the more the NME applauded me.” She finally left, because, as she puts it, “I knew I was a phony, and, unlike some of my comrades, it bothered me.” She then worked as a shopgirl for Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood.Ĭhrissie Hynde in 1983. In 1973, she moved to London and, with few qualifications, ended up writing for the NME. (“‘This is a nice car,’ he said politely.”) She went to Kent State and was there when the National Guard shot four students – in fact, she was friends with a girlfriend of one of the students. She and her friends ended up driving him to dinner in her mother’s Oldsmobile Cutlass. In 1972, she went to Cleveland to see David Bowie’s American debut as Ziggy Stardust. Her first kiss came from “the salty, experienced lips of Jackie Wilson” at one of his concerts – his crew plucked her from the audience. In a way, Hynde’s life, for all its hardship, almost seems bizarrely charmed – or fated for fame. Booze, bikers, Quaaludes, LSD, blackouts, conquests, the clap, dire poverty: it’s all here. The 60s were happening around her and she enthusiastically joined in – at least the drugs and rock’n’roll part. Soon, as she puts it, she was “well outside the margin of conformity”. She frequently drove to Cleveland to see her heroes play live. At an early age she loved nothing more than peeing in gravel and biting into glass, to her parents’ distress.īy the time she was in early adolescence, she was doing poorly in school, had fallen for rock’s “British invasion” and had begun playing “a big-necked nylon-stringed acoustic guitar”, her range of heroes including Mitch Ryder, Jeff Beck and Paul Butterfield. But the straight life wasn’t for Christy, as she was then called. When Hynde’s grandmother died at the dinner table, Chrissie recalls being shocked not by the death but by the fact that her mother said “Oh, God”. Her mother, Dolores, and her father, Melville, a former model and a longtime employee of Ohio Bell Telephone Company, respectively, represented “the norm, the mean, the gold standard”. Hynde grew up in Akron, Ohio, where her parents wanted her to be a kind of pure product of America – a good 1950s suburban girl.

#TATTOOED LOVE BOYS THE PRETENDERS LYRICS FULL#

It is full of engaging stories, dry wit and revelations, but the distance she had on stage also saturates the book – to less charismatic effect. Now she has published a much-anticipated memoir, Reckless: My Life as a Pretender, which joins a list of other memorable rock memoirs by Bob Dylan, Keith Richards and Patti Smith.

Even in the Pretenders’ most polished 80s videos, madeup and sexy, Hynde seemed withheld, her face communicating: this is on my own terms. She rejected conventional female personas, sure, but it was more than that – a buried, ambivalent affect. But there was always something distanced about her onstage: a kind of intensity directed inward. She united punk, new wave and guitar rock in her songs as few others did. Her voice could stutter out bare syllables with animal intensity (“Mystery Achievement”, “Tattooed Love Boys”) and also harmonise beautifully, as if gesturing toward a sweetness that never quite arrived (“Back on the Chain Gang”, “Brass in Pocket”). Hynde – as the lead singer of the Pretenders – was intense, androgynous, sexy, rebellious, fierce. C hrissie Hynde is – and was – an unusual figure, even among the relatively unusual coterie of female rockers.

Tattooed love boys the pretenders lyrics