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Scott Murphy

FROM THE VAULT: 1981

The Pretenders

Pretenders II

(Sire/Rhino)

Just how did vocalist and guitarist Chrissie Hynde  follow up her band's classic Grammy-winning debut  as the 1980s began? The American-born British transplant went and did it again on the band's  imaginatively titled second release.

The debut may have boasted plenty of punkish new wave highlights and the group's first top 10 hit in the saucy, reggae-tinged Brass in Pocket, but the four piece sounded altogether harder, tighter and sexier on their 1981 release. 'You don't listen to me do you ass****,' Hynde growls amid cracking whips and chilling screams on Bad Boys Get Spanked.

By the  way she  spits out the lyrics, one gets the feeling that the former NME music writer, who counted Sex Pistols member Steve Jones among her sexual conquests, was certainly game for administering a few spankings herself.

On opening song The Adultress, Hynde (below) admits that she is 'the adultress I didn't want to be'. All around her James Honeyman Scott's guitars slash and burn with a ferocity that sounds just as fresh 25 years later. It was a time when the group, and certainly Hynde, could do virtually no wrong.

Message of Love may be a pulsating ode to men and women getting together in the name of love but Talk of the Town is the flipside, a chiming, near ballad about wanting a man so bad she could, well, there's no telling what she'd do. That is before she flees and yells 'you're the pits of the world' on   Pack it Up.

Yet Hynde had a softer side too, with vocals that are as gripping and distinctive as ever courtesy of this just-released remaster. Complete with an extra disc of scorching performances from a 1981 show, it's a rock act at its blistering peak. Tragically, both Honeyman Scott  and bassist Pete Farndon  would be dead from drug overdoses shortly after this album, leaving a defiant, devastated Hynde to soldier on, occasionally matching but never surpassing this one-two punch.



The Pretenders