Plus Icon
Chris Willman
Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic
ChrisWillman See All
Courtesy TIFF At this late date, what the Pretenders accomplished is no mystery achievement. But it’s also a story that has never been extensively chronicled on film until “The Pretenders,” a Joss Crowley-directed doc that premieres Sunday at the Toronto International Film Festival. The band released what might rightly be considered the best rock ‘n’ roll debut album of all time in Janauary 1980, and Crowley’s film covers the lead-up to that — Chrissie Hynde looking and acting like a biker chick in late ’70s Akron before moving to and finding her real gang in the U.K. — and the tumultuous few years that followed, with further masterpieces arriving alongside band dismisals and deaths. Although the focus is on the original lineup and the first five years, it brings us into the present day of Hynde, still one of the greatest to ever pick up a guitar.
As delightfully plain-spoken as Hynde is when you get her to sit down and talk, she can be to get into that chair, as a naturally camera-shy personality, so Crowley’s film is particularly useful in further immortalizing a subject who never wanted to be anything more than an ordinary musician, whether “rock goddess” was quickly and eternally thrust upon her or not.
Variety spoke with Crowley and the delightfully tart-as-ever Hynde in advance of the Toronto premiere.
Most of the time with modern music documentaries, it’s the artist or their company instigating the doc, and usually co-producing it. But it sounds like that’s not necessarily what happened this time because, Joss, you’ve talked about the difficulty in talking Chrissie into it.
Joss Crowley: I’ve been trying to work with Chrissie and tell the Pretenders’ story for over 10 years, and kept knocking at the door; didn’t get an answer. It was just a question of right time, right place, and Chrissie came round to the idea of meeting me. We sat down and talked about some of the docs I’ve made, and about other things, trying to find some mutual interests. I wasn’t really sure when I left that meeting how it had gone, but within about a week, we sat down and recorded our first interview, at the end of 2023.
Chrissie, you needed less than a week to think about it and get underway after that first meeting?
Chrissie Hynde: Well, we had to have a go and see how it would go, and I think I must have laid down some sort of ground rules, so I was willing to go into it — that it would be (visually focused on) archive footage, and really talk about the band and not focus too much on me, and it wouldn’t be about “women in rock” or any of that kind of thing. It would just be a story of the band. I was kind of keen to have it done because, as we all know, there’s documentaries on everything and everyone now. And in fact, someone else had already made a documentary on the Pretenders, which had nothing to do with me or my entire organization. I was starting to get calls from some of my old friends saying, “Oh, I’m gonna do your documentary on Tuesday.” And I’d be like, “We’re not doing a documentary!” This other team had gone in to people I know and made it sound like it was an official documentary. So I thought, “Well, if that’s happened once, that’s gonna happen again.” Either you want to do it and you want your story out, or you don’t, which I didn’t particularly, but if it’s going to be out, I’d rather know that it’s true.
Chrissie Hynde in ‘The Pretenders’ Courtesy TIFF At the very end of the film, you’re heard talking a little bit about why you did it and you mention that you especially wanted to do it for James Honeyman-Scott [who suddenly died at the height of the band’s success in 1981], in some way.
Hynde: For me, a rock band is all about electric guitar, and I think he was one of the great guitar heroes. Over the years when I see lists of the greatest 100 rock guitar players, I never see Jimmy’s name. That’s all he was interested in, music and playing the guitar, and I thought he didn’t get his due and that would be important for him. He’s not here, so I thought I could do it for him.
It feels like the way the documentary turned out was kind a nice compromise in the end, since you didn’t want to be on-camera at all, but you were talked into being seen for the very last interview, so there’s a little bit but not a lot. You acquiesced a little bit.
Hynde: Yeah. I haven’t seen it, and I probably won’t. Someone said, “Oh, don’t say that! That sounds negative.” But I think a lot of people don’t like watching themself or listening to themself talk, and I don’t have to watch it, and there you go. It’s not negative. I mean, I’ve already lived through it, so I don’t think I wanna go through it all again.
I think so many people feel this way, and most people that I’ve ever had a conversation about it with do: they don’t like the sound of their speaking voice. I mean, I’ve had to get used to my singing voice because, you know, that’s kind of my shtick. But my speaking voice, when I hear it back, I’m always pretty horrified. And everyone I talk to feels the same way… People expect if you do it for a living, that you must like it, but that’s not necessarily true.
Related Stories
