Pretenders II: An Epitaph To Chrissie Hynde And Co’s Original Line-Up

“We couldn’t believe it”

For Pretenders II, Hynde and co reconvened with producer Chris Thomas and finished the record across hastily snatched sessions in both London’s Wessex Studios and Pathé Marconi in Paris. In the short term, the pressure worked in the band’s favour: Pretenders II again captured them at the top of their game, whether they were attacking spiky, aggressive rockers (The Adultress, Bad Boys Get Spanked, Pack It Up) or reining it in on gentler, more reflective material such as Birds Of Paradise and the glorious English Roses.

Elsewhere, while The Kinks’ songbook had already granted Pretenders their breakthrough hit courtesy of Stop Your Sobbing, Ray Davies’ muse again turned up trumps when Hynde and her team heard his beautiful ballad I Go To Sleep.

“We couldn’t believe it when a music publisher sent us an original demo of Ray Davies playing piano and singing this song,” Hynde recalled in the sleevenotes for 2006’s Pirate Radio box set. “Later, after I’d met Ray, he told me he’d written it when he was 19, the day his first daughter was born. He wrote it with Peggy Lee in mind, and she did in fact record it at the time.”

Pretenders handled I Go To Sleep with kid gloves. Their version of Davies’ song was notable for its admirable restraint, with the sparseness of the band’s performance perfectly complementing Hynde’s atypically vulnerable vocal. Released as Pretenders II’s final single, it followed Talk Of The Town and Message Of Love into the UK Top 20, where it peaked at No.7 late in 1981.

“I had to get it together”

To all intents and purposes, the robust Pretenders II continued on from where its illustrious predecessor left off. First released on 15 August 1981, it climbed to No.7 in the UK and reached No.10 in the US, with silver and gold discs soon following. Unfortunately, however, the band’s continued commercial success only amplified problems within their camp – not least in terms of the group’s lifestyle.

By this point, Chrissie Hynde had realised she needed to change (“The image of me as a hard-drinking, hard-living rock’n’roll bitch had become obnoxious… I had to get it together”, she told Rolling Stone), yet while Hynde made a point of curbing her excesses, her bandmates’ hedonistic tendencies were spiralling out of control. Pete Farndon’s heroin habit in particular was driving a wedge between him and the rest of the group. When things finally came to a head, after a traumatic tour of the Far East in spring 1982, manager Dave Hill was tasked with firing the increasingly unreliable bassist.

“I couldn’t do it myself,” Chrissie Hynde ruefully admitted to Rolling Stone. “Pete was the first guy I got into the band, and the band was probably the most important thing in his life. I didn’t have the heart or the courage to tell him he was fired.”

Unsurprisingly, Farndon took his sacking badly, and tragedy compounded the bassist’s departure when he died of a heroin overdose the following April. Before then, however, things got worse for Pretenders before they got better. Just two days after Farndon’s dismissal, guitar hero-in-waiting James Honeyman-Scott died unexpectedly from a drug overdose in London on 16 June 1982. Hynde and Chambers were left reeling by the loss, which was caused by heart failure brought on by intolerance to cocaine. Not only was Honeyman-Scott a dear friend, he was only 25 and had enormous potential.

“They were starting to figure out what they were capable of”

In the end, Pretenders chose to continue, resurfacing with a new line-up and a new outlook in place for 1984’s Learning To Crawl. As a result, Pretenders II isn’t just a great second album, it stands as a worthy epitaph for the band’s astonishing original line-up – a quartet which burned briefly, yet incandescently. Even with this much distance, it’s hard not to dwell on what they could have achieved if events hadn’t dictated otherwise.

“Despite everything the original band accomplished in only two albums, Jimmy and Chrissie were just starting to figure out what they were capable of as a creative team,” Martin Chambers reflected in 2006. The world never got to hear how far they could have gone – and, as Chambers notes, “that’s the tragedy”.

Find out how it all began with Pretenders’ debut album.