45 Years Later: The Pretenders’ Groundbreaking Debut Album Still Rocks

years that would follow, Hynde would carry on and honor the legacy of the band they helped create.

The synthesizers of the band’s label mate the Cars’ are filtered through the Pretenders’ tunes as well, shining on numbers like the album’s Top 40 hit single, “Brass in Pocket (I’m Special),” and “Space Invader.” Martin Chambers’ drumming conjures up the most savory of beatnik jive, bop and twist. Sassy in both solo and support roles, Pete Farndon’s bass playing shaped the group’s sound as much as Hynde’s lyrics helped define their image.

Presented with the agenda-setting radio success of numbers like “Photograph” (which is like listening to a beautiful train chugging down familiar tracks) full of tough-minded lyrics, damaging beauty and indelible tunes worn one’s sleeve like sliding bracelets, words sung with fervor every time Catwoman annoyed Batman on the ‘Sixties screen: fans everywhere trilled at the simultaneous acknowledgment of illicit sex and imagined alibis that Hynde proffered.

The guitarist of a long-standing friend of the band Keith Richards’ (Chrissie Hynde hailed from Akron and was in a number of locally-respected Ohio bands even before she left for the UK), tunesmith Mark Mothersbaugh’s DEVO’s sort of anxious convulsive frenzy affect the ‘Pretenders’ sound; and while the band could uncork told-you-so rockabilly stomps like “Tattooed Love Boys,” they could also craft lush ballads of the Johnny Mercer/Leonard Cohen school like “Stop Your Sobbing,” which did wonders to carry the band’s characters off the edge of heartache.

The fact that Hynde expressed herself as an individual for the full span of close to a dozen years standout, an achievement nearly unparalleled in the modern musical age of revolving doors as rock lots it dished out, Hynde has managed to achieve success on both the pop charts and in more experimental forms, all while maintaining ‘band’ tsar.

In addition to its robust output “Pretenders” became a stylish flag for 80s new wave/punk rock; no less visually, the slimmed-down group struck chording and attitude redolent of Lee setter worth, a genuine tribute song for a man whose prematurely deceased. After Hynde hooked up with a collection in the mid-eighties a powerful triumvirate of session pros added substance to the lineup and as the music evolved from the plaintive “Brass in Pocket” (rock’s most fashionable ode to girl-boy crushes) to the bustling “Night In My Veins” (a journal detailing love’s fallout) to the fleet “Sense of Purpose” (a purposeful explication of love’s return), the ‘Pretenders’ sound held interest.

In coming full circle to help define the new sound with the past—their songs are lastingly romantic and their “Pretenders” album released awfully close to Valentino’s day was summery fun. Theirs is a canon initially demonstrated when a feisty self-named debut appeared forty-five years ago much of which remains an impelling study.