{"id":508271,"date":"2026-04-02T03:48:16","date_gmt":"2026-04-02T03:48:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/508271\/"},"modified":"2026-04-02T03:48:16","modified_gmt":"2026-04-02T03:48:16","slug":"chrissie-hynde-on-her-unforgettable-first-meeting-with-lemmy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/508271\/","title":{"rendered":"Chrissie Hynde on her unforgettable first meeting with Lemmy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Pretenders guitarist Chrissie Hynde, who carved out her reputation with her eye-catching \u2014 and now time-beaten \u2014 Ice Blue Telecaster<\/a>, may have been born in Ohio, but it was in the U.K. that she made her name.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t know what my parents thought of me moving to London when I was 22,\u201d she told The Guardian<\/a> in 2014. \u201cI never thought about it, and I didn\u2019t go home to Akron, Ohio, for 35 Christmases.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Indeed, the guitarist confessed to having had \u201ca strong sense of destiny in my youth.\u201d 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 \u2014 the clothing store owned by Vivienne Westwood and her husband, Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren.<\/p>\n

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\"Chrissie\n<\/p>\n

Hynde onstage with her Ice Blue Tele at OverOslo, in Norway, June 21, 2019. (Image credit: Per Ole Hagen\/Redferns)<\/p>\n

That job afforded her some important contacts and, one way or another, thrust her into London\u2019s punk scene \u2014 including an early encounter with Lemmy. At first, he seemed like a caricature, proof that the stories were true.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe first time I clapped eyes on him was in a shop on the King\u2019s Road. We exchanged no words at all,\u201d she wrote in her memoir, Reckless: My Life as a Pretender, with the quotes unearthed by Classic Rock<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe eyed me up and down,\u201d she says, \u201cmoved 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Stories like this make it little wonder Mot\u00f6rhead played so fast and loud. Phil Campbell, the band\u2019s guitarist from 1984 until Lemmy\u2019s passing in 2015, once reflected on his own first meeting and audition for the group \u2014 when Lemmy was seeking a replacement for Brian Robertson \u2014 by joking that \u201che remembered the amphetamine<\/a>, not me.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\"Chrissie\n<\/p>\n

Hynde in 1982 (Image credit: Getty Images)<\/p>\n

So that side of Lemmy was very real. But in time, Hynde saw more than the mythology suggested.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe liked the same things \u2014 we were mongrels with an appreciation for the finer things in life,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

That included music that wasn\u2019t quite as fast, loud, and ferocious as Mot\u00f6rhead.<\/p>\n

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\u201cHe was a Beatles fan at a time when the Beatles were like a throwback to a distant, almost forgotten past,\u201d she adds. \u201cHe was far more musically knowledgeable than anyone who ever saw Hawkwind or Mot\u00f6rhead would have suspected. He kept it well hidden.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\"Lemmy\n<\/p>\n

Lemmy in June 2015. (Image credit: Getty Images)<\/p>\n

Later in life, Lemmy became more forthcoming about his appreciation for the Fab Four \u2014 and in particular their bass<\/a> player, Paul McCartney.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 presumably when he was residing in the Welsh seaside town of Anglesey \u2014 and struck up what he diplomatically described as a friendship with four Liverpudlian girls.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was all Billy Fury: \u2018Oh, isn\u2019t he gorgeous,\u2019 you know?\u201d he said. \u201cThen one year they came down and Billy Fury was gone \u2014 it was \u2018Beatles, Beatles, Beatles.\u2019 I didn\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Beatles are better than the Stones (w Lemmy from Motorhead) – YouTube
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There, he watched them play at the now-infamous Cavern Club and saw them many more times before the \u201cexcellent\u201d band blew up \u201cinto the stratosphere.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Stones got the reputation of being hard men, and the Beatles got the reputation of being smart, but it was the other way around,\u201d he once quipped. \u201cThe Stones were just dressing up. The Beatles were from Liverpool. It\u2019s a tough place.\u201d<\/p>\n

Reflecting on her life in the Pretenders in 2023, Hynde told Guitar Player that lead guitarist James Honeyman-Scott was naturally solo-shy<\/a> \u2014 but she pushed him to take the spotlight, coaxing guitar solos<\/a> out of the gifted player while she pummeled her Telecaster<\/a> into submission.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Pretenders guitarist Chrissie Hynde, who carved out her reputation with her eye-catching \u2014 and now time-beaten \u2014 Ice…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":508272,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[96,128,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-508271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-music","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/508271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=508271"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/508271\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/508272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=508271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=508271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=508271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}