Catherine and Nick Roylance, who run Genesis Publications, approached her after she made an Arena documentary to promote the Pretenders’ last album, 2016’s brilliant Alone. Hynde says it’s to thank the team that put the book together. Or pretending that I think I’m an artist either!” You’d be forgiven for wondering why she’s promoting this book at all. The music and art that turns me on always seems to be reaching up for divinity, making sense of life.” But then she pulls back. “It’s so psychedelic and I have a psychedelic frame of mind. “A lot of that conceptual, avant garde stuff has a purity to it, though, that I wouldn’t have got as a teenager. “Did I just get waylaid for 30, 40 years by rock’n’roll? If I’d got into art in the 60s, is that where I would have gone?” She shrugs again. I could have gone to university with them and I’d never heard of any of them!”
Then there were 20 other artists on the same page that were the big deal of the last century who are probably my age. “He’s supposed to be this huge influence on art, so then I read up about him. “I just like drawing and making stuff.” She talks about an article she read that morning about an artist whose name she can’t remember (we later work out by text that it was Bruce Nauman). “I’m not really into art,” she shrugs (when she does, her earrings shudder: small, silver keys hanging from her lobes). We begin talking about art, not that Hynde finds it easy. “Eat up.”Ĭhrissie Hynde’s painting Dancing Noels. “And these.” She hands over a plate of Portuguese custard tarts and winks. “I got some fig rolls in,” she adds, before lowering her voice conspiratorially. On the walls are drawings done for Grandma, one a street scene with Hovis lorries felt-tipped in red. “I don’t remember them ever playing it, but it’s probably what made me want to be a singer, seeing that picture when I was a child,” she says. This is one of only three records Hynde’s parents had.
#The pretenders chrissie hynde tv#
The debut album by 50s singer Julie London sits on top of the TV its first track is her signature torch song, Cry Me a River. She’s a good host: the kettle is on, flowery mugs already laid out. “They’re great – such balls of innocence,” she says later of the twins. Within minutes, we’re talking about where I live (near Hereford, where the other three Pretenders came from) and my young son: she’s got twin grandsons, who live nearby with her daughter, Yasmin, from Hynde’s brief 1980s marriage to Simple Minds’ Jim Kerr (Hynde also has an older daughter, Natalie, from her relationship with Ray Davies she brought both girls up alone). She’s wearing a black hoodie, black T-shirt and black jeans and her hair is the coolest way out of the rock star-with-greying-hair conundrum I’ve seen – ash-blond over eyes still thick with black eyeliner. She buzzes me into her flat with a friendly hello (I pass her black boots, unlaced, on the bottom step). Hynde can sound blase on paper, but in person she’s much warmer. “I mean, who the fuck am I? There’s so many people who’ve been doing this all their lives and they can’t get a gallery…and then muggins walks in, dabbles for a couple of years and the next thing, here’s a big fuck-off box set of her paintings!” She laughs at herself, although she’s not a phoney, she says. Hynde has reservations about entering this gang. You may have seen Ronnie Wood’s canvases of his celebrity friends or Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell’s coffee-table smothering volumes. Rock stars becoming painters remains one the most cliched career transitions in showbiz, however.
And if I was in a happy relationship, you wouldn’t be looking at these paintings
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