Pretenders’ Debut Album At 45: A Track-By-Track Guide To Every Song

The Phone Call

Also a feature of the band’s earliest rehearsals, The Phone Call was once described by Pete Farndon as “the heaviest fuckin’ punk rocker you could do in 5/4 time”. He wasn’t kidding. Hynde delivers her mystery-laced lyric with urgency, describing herself (or the song’s protagonist) as “a faceless messenger” who warns the addressee “Somebody you used to know is back in town/You better go!” while the band hurdle the tricky tempo changes with aplomb. In keeping with its visceral mood, the song ends abruptly with the sound of an engaged tone (recorded in an actual telephone booth) the caller leaves the receiver off the hook and flees the scene.

Up The Neck

Up The Neck started life as a reggae song, but it changed shape decisively after Honeyman-Scott brought in its distinctive introductory riff and suggested the band speed it up. Hynde has since admitted the song’s title derived simply from the way she referred to it “as I slid my left hand up the neck of the guitar”, but her lyric is anything but prosaic. Indeed, it’s a brilliantly observed reflection of the dangers of casual sex and one-night stands, with Hynde employing language that’s both hedonistic and cautionary (“When my tongue lay inside his lip/Felt like the time in the womb/But I woke up with a headache that split my skull/Alone in the room”). Both seductive and withering, Hynde’s vocal delivery is magnificent, and it’s rendered all the more powerful by the band’s dynamic performance, which switches from muscular to mellow and back again.

Tattooed Love Boys

Hynde’s animalistic portrayal of sex on Up The Neck is visceral enough, but it’s obliterated by the content of Tattooed Love Boys. Indeed, in her memoir, Reckless: My Life As A Pretender, Hynde revealed that its lyrics refers to the assault and rape she suffered at the hand of motorcycle gang members in Ohio when she refused to share drugs with them. Incredibly, she even turned the abuse they shouted to her advantage, using it to inspire some of the song’s most telling lines (“Stop snivelling/You’re gonna make some plastic surgeon a rich man”).

Tattooed Love Boys is also sonically exceptional, with the band simply smoking as they give the song’s punky, Bo Diddley-esque backdrop their all – despite encountering more of Hynde’s wicked time signatures. Explaining the song’s genesis in a 1981 Guitar Player interview, Honeyman-Scott said that Hynde’s “timing in that number is so weird, like 7/13 or something!” Acknowledging that Hynde’s way of playing rhythm guitar can make it hard to follow the beat, he said, “I just put a little guitar line over it, like the lick in Tattooed Love Boys. I just happened to know that those notes, in that order, fit it rather well, so I kept doing it so it wouldn’t go out of time.”

Space Invader

A chugging, Farndon/Honeyman-Scott co-write led by the former’s bullish bassline and embellished by the latter’s nagging guitar figures, the instrumental Space Invader is dynamic and focused, doing more than enough to deserve its place among the more fully rounded songs on Pretenders’ debut album. It only ties itself to the late 70s during its final moments, which feature a few seconds of sound effects from the arcade game Space Invaders, from which the track takes its title.

The Wait

Co-written by Hynde and Farndon, The Wait is a stuttering, high-energy rocker that was initially cut for the B-side of the band’s first single, Stop Your Sobbing, before being re-recorded for inclusion on Pretenders. The album version is superior – and certainly more robust – but the song was capable of grabbing attention from the off, as Stop Your Sobbing producer Nick Lowe recalled in the liner notes for Pirate Radio. “We couldn’t believe we’d done something as good as [Stop Your Sobbing],” he said. “But when they did The Wait for the B-side, I thought, Hang on, we should be concentrating on this kind of stuff. This is really the band.”

Stop Your Sobbing

Unlike Precious and The Wait, which were re-recorded for Pretenders’ debut album and produced by Chris Thomas, the group retained the original, Nick Lowe-helmed recording of Stop Your Sobbing, from July 1978, which featured Pretenders’ initial drummer, Gerry Mackelduff. It’s hard to imagine them improving on their initial take on this Ray Davies-penned Kinks song, which they fashioned into a shimmering jangle-pop classic in their own image, in time to introduce themselves to the UK Top 40 for the first time early in 1979.

Kid

Stop Your Sobbing may have been a cover, but its follow-up single, Kid, banished any doubts that Hynde could write hits of her own. Indeed, Kid was the sort of yearning, drop-dead-gorgeous pop song most guitar bands would kill for, even if its subject matter was unusual. Hynde elaborated further on this in a 2020 interview with UnmaskUs, when she said, “It’s about a prostitute whose son finds out what she does for a living, and this is her having a conversation with him. Not all songs are autobiographical.”

Even allowing for that, Kid had a tuneful, radio-friendly appeal beyond the capabilities of most of Pretenders’ post-punk contemporaries. Much of that sprang from James Honeyman-Scott’s ear for melody – and his finely plotted, country-flavoured guitar solo remains one of rock music’s touchstones. Indeed, Johnny Marr would later credit Honeyman-Scott for inspiring “the jingle-jangle” in The Smiths. “He was the last important influence on my playing before I went out on my own,” Marr told Guitar Player in 1990. “The first time I played Kid with Pretenders I wouldn’t believe it. I’ve used that solo to warm up with every day for years.”

Private Life

Chrissie Hynde has never hidden her passion for reggae, and Pretenders have dipped their toes into the genre on a number of occasions, with songs such as Waste Not Want Not (from Pretenders II) and several tracks from 2003’s Loose Screw riding Jamaican-tinged rhythms. However, their first venture into the genre arguably remains their most telling, as it produced Private Life: a tense, hypnotic reggae/post-punk mash-up which later found a bigger audience after Grace Jones covered it on her groundbreaking Warm Leatherette album. In the liner notes to Island Records’ Private Life: The Compass Point Sessions compilation, Hynde suggests Jones’ version is the definitive one, but the Pretenders original has bags of presence and panache – and also features a superb extended solo from Honeyman-Scott.

Brass In Pocket

Both Stop Your Sobbing and Kid went Top 40, but when Brass In Pocket, the third and final single from Pretenders’ debut album, topped the UK charts in January 1980 (becoming the decade’s first No.1 single), it served notice that Chrissie Hynde and company were here to stay. In retrospect, its success now seems even more remarkable, for while it’s soulful and lilting, Brass In Pocket breaks most of the rules a great single usually adheres to: it has no discernible chorus, features relatively obscure lyrics, and its colloquial title (“brass” is a common term for money in the North of England) appears only in the song’s first line.

Nonetheless, its star quality was apparent from the off, with Pretenders producer Chris Thomas saying, “I knew Brass In Pocket was the single the first time I heard the demo. The original was a bit slow, but I heard it coming up to the tempo of an Al Green track, with that sort of swing.” In fact, Chrissie Hynde was the only person who didn’t much care for it, though she has since made peace with her signature hit. “Now I like that song because it’s one of those songs that served me well,” she told American Songwriter in 2009. “I didn’t like my voice on it. I was kind of a new singer, and listening to my voice made me cringe.”

Lovers Of Today

Another fine example of the versatility on display throughout each of the songs on Pretenders’ debut album, Lovers Of Today provided the record with its epic, slow-building ballad. Featuring one of Hynde’s most impassioned vocals and excellent performances from the whole band, it’s a tour de force, though it remains relatively unsung compared with many of the best Pretenders songs. Its final line (“I’ve never felt like a man in a man’s world”) has, however, provoked thought, and Hynde made her own standpoint on this issue clear in a 2023 interview with The Guardian. “Have I ever felt like a man? No,” she said. “When I was 17, I read [jazz legend] Charles Mingus’ autobiography and he described this island, this colourless island, where musicians and artists lived. And that’s how I’ve always thought of it. Writing music is not about gender, race or any belief system, none of that sort of thing.”

Mystery Achievement

A consistently compelling record, Pretenders’ debut album opens in style with the wired, shape-throwing Precious and concludes in a similar fashion with the exhilarating Mystery Achievement. Despite acting as a vehicle for Hynde’s derisory commentary on what she refers to as rock’s “reward system” of industry awards and the trappings of celebrity in general (“I got no trophies on display/I signed them all away/I mean, what the heck?”), this anthemic rocker is still full of muscle and flash, with the band’s tough, febrile ensemble performance making for the perfect denouement for a landmark debut that’s rich with rock music of quality and distinction.

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