Chrissie Hynde to release memoir

Penguin Random House has announced that it will publish a memoir by musician Chrissie Hynde on 8 September.

The currently untitled book will see the woman who basically is the Pretenders (being the only constant member of the band’s 37 year history) cover her childhood in Akron, Ohio (the town whose music scene would later also spawn Devo and The Cramps); her emigration to London at the very beginning of punk and her time at the heart of the movement as, variously, a journalist for the NME, a worker in Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s clothes shop SEX, a member of the band that would later become The Damned and a tour mate of The Clash; the chequered history of the Pretenders; and her cameo in Friends, maybe.

The book’s publisher promises that it is ‘incredibly frank’, ‘strikingly intimate’ and ‘bittersweet’, which you’d certainly expect, or at least hope for, from a woman of Hynde’s stature in the classic rock pantheon, particularly one whose early successes were tempered by losing two of a four-member band to drug-related causes within a year of each other, then firing the remaining member two years later.

Hynde herself hopes the book will ‘make people dance, have fun, possibly cry and maybe reach for a guitar’. If nothing else, there’s always the potential that she’ll offer an opinion on Scarlett Johansson’s pink-wigged singing of “Brass in Pocket” to Bill Murray.

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