{"id":616998,"date":"2026-09-15T18:12:21","date_gmt":"2026-09-15T18:12:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/616998\/"},"modified":"2026-09-15T18:12:21","modified_gmt":"2026-09-15T18:12:21","slug":"pretenders-doc-is-anything-but-precious","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/616998\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Pretenders’ Doc Is Anything but Precious"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tThere\u2019s a temptation \u2014 even if you\u2019re not a die-hard fan \u2014 to ask: Why did it take this long to make a proper, authorized documentary about Chrissie Hynde<\/a> and her going-on-50-years-strong band? Pretenders<\/a>, the portrait of this first-ballot frontwoman\u2019s venerable punk outfit that just premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival<\/a>, gives you a possible answer pretty quickly. Hynde isn\u2019t keen on talking about herself. Being photographed? She likes that even less than interviews. <\/p>\n

\n\tHynde sat with filmmaker Joss Crowley for conversations over a three-year period, and only agreed to go before the camera for the last one. You feel like he was extremely lucky she signed off on that much. Her confrontational stare often speaks for her: The work? It\u2019s out there, go listen to it. My life? Why do you wanna know about that? The tragedies? I don\u2019t wanna talk about that. Everything else? I don\u2019t really wanna talk about that either, to be honest. \u201cI liked being in a band,\u201d she says at one point. \u201cI just don\u2019t like being observed.\u201d Or, one imagines, pretending she\u2019s in a confessional booth or on a psychoanalyst\u2019s couch.<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd yet! Talk Chrissie Hynde does, and you\u2019re surprised that Crowley not only got her to sit for those extended sessions, but that she opened up this much. Late in the film, Hynde reveals that she was willing to go deep on the band\u2019s first five years, largely because she feels that the Pretenders\u2019 first guitarist, the great James Honeyman-Scott, never gets enough credit as a musician. There\u2019s also the sense that bassist and founding member Pete Farndon hasn\u2019t been given his due either. No one\u2019s trying to correct any records here, or revise history \u2014 \u201cMy story is a story about drugs,\u201d Hynde resignedly sighs at one point \u2014 so much as recount a moment when a young woman from Ohio and three guys from Hereford could turn a fuck-you energy, combined with a swooning sense of melody, into something timeless. It\u2019s a look back that\u2019s anything but precious about the past.<\/p>\n

\t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n

\n\tYou do get Hynde getting into her own history, from her childhood years in Akron, her early love of rock & roll and the walk-on-the-wild-side dangers that accompanied it, her presence at Kent State when students were killed during a protest, and her connection to biker culture. (There\u2019s an anecdote about a motorcycle club \u201cparty\u201d that\u2019s made all the more chilling by how casually Hynde mentions it and then moves on.) It was a biker boyfriend who\u2019d inspire the name for what would eventually become her group, playing her Sam Cooke\u2019s cover of the Platters\u2019 \u201cThe Great Pretender\u201d in secret because he didn\u2019t want his brothers to know he was listening to a Black singer. First, however, Hynde had to get the fuck out of Dodge. Goodbye, Akron. Hello, London.<\/p>\n

\n\tHynde ended up in the U.K. in 1973, long after the Swinging Sixties had receded but right before punk broke. She fell in with music journalist Nick Kent and began writing for NME, penning missives that praised artists like Bette Midler for being \u201ca fine slab of woman with balls to boot.\u201d (Who else does that sound like?) Having the good fortune to be present at a musical revolution\u2019s ground zero, Hynde\u2019s exotic American watched her British pals quickly turn into first-gen punk legends and form the Damned, the Sex Pistols, the Slits, the Clash. She wanted in. A few early attempts at starting her own band resulted in some rough demos and a few stabs at controversy \u2014 the English couldn\u2019t stomach a band called the Moors Murderers, after a notorious spate of serial killings, just yet. <\/p>\n

\n\tThen she met Pete Farndon, a guy with a great punk sneer and even greater leather jacket. His compadre Honeyman-Scott started playing with them, and a few drummers later, a guy with the best rockabilly sideburns in the biz named Martin Chambers became the permanent resident behind the kit. To see those early pictures of Hynde and the OG Pretenders lineup automatically makes you hear those early songs, with the buzz-bomb guitar parts, the chugging bass lines, those straight-to-the-gut snare hits, that husky voice. \u201cPrecious.\u201d \u201cTattooed Love Boys.\u201d \u201cThe Wait.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\tRelated Content<\/p>\n

\n\tPower, in-your-face attitude, and urgency are what make half of the Pretenders\u2019 still-extraordinary 1978 debut slap. The other half comes from the way that Hynde and her partners in crime extract the best of 1950s rock, 1960s British Invasion pop, and even bits of 1970s groove music and add it to the mix. It\u2019s not surprising that their cover of the Kinks\u2019 \u201cStop Your Sobbing\u201d stood out from their demo tape and attracted the attention of Nick Lowe, who\u2019d co-produce (along with Chris Thomas) that first album. What\u2019s shocking is that it\u2019s not an ironic joke or a one-off. Songs like \u201cKid\u201d and their simmering, just-south-of-disco breakthrough \u201cBrass in Pocket\u201d set the stage for the next postpunk wave, a.k.a. New Wave.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe gigs get better, the live show fiercer, the band gets tighter. Success feels weird \u2014 \u201cI\u2019d rather be Number 11 than Number One,\u201d Hynde admits in an old interview \u2014 and the recreational perks that come with rock stardom become more dire. There\u2019s a second album on the horizon, also a banger. Then backstage fistfights, intraband tensions, a firing, and not one but two deaths in six months.<\/p>\n

\t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n

\n\tPretenders gets into all of that, sometimes via Hynde\u2019s own testimonials, sometimes via a lot of kick-ass archival footage, and occasionally from the band\u2019s own tour manager, Stan Tippins, reading from his extensive diaries that sketch out those initial years in great details. Luminaries like Elvis Costello, Johnny Marr (who briefly joined the band) and Paul McCartney weigh in at key moments. The focus remains on the original lineup. There\u2019s a quick run-through of everything after Honeyman-Scott and Farndon both die, including the 1983 U.S. Festival date \u2014 one of Hynde\u2019s most memorable Pretenders Version 2.0 gigs \u2014 and her later involvement with PETA. Every so often, she\u2019ll simply shut a conversation down. \u201cFlinty\u201d doesn\u2019t begin to describe her. \u201cNo-nonsense\u201d is equally as inadequate. Hynde doesn\u2019t suffer fools. She\u2019s already suffered enough and besides, she\u2019s got shit to do.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut when Chrissie wants to be candid, she\u2019ll be candid \u2014 and when Hynde opens up in conjunction with the live clips taken from that initial burst of energy, the doc feels like the closest we\u2019re going to get to a definitive look at her band. Never mind the group\u2019s name, Hynde is the real deal. Her songwriting chops are indisputable. So is the Pretenders\u2019 legacy. The film\u2019s got motion, and sometimes, too much restrained emotion, but you\u2019ve got to consider the source. And if you have a problem with that, well \u2014 Hynde has a message for you. It\u2019s in the last line of \u201cPrecious.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There\u2019s a temptation \u2014 even if you\u2019re not a die-hard fan \u2014 to ask: Why did it take…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":616999,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[18506,146,85,46,409,279103,403,886],"class_list":["post-616998","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-chrissie-hynde","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-music","tag-pretenders","tag-toronto-film-festival","tag-toronto-international-film-festival"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/616998","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=616998"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/616998\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/616999"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=616998"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=616998"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=616998"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}