1980 on 45: Pretenders Calling

It’s hard to imagine in this day and age, but the very first month of the Eighties saw the release of some of the most important and influential records of the decade.

In fact, January 1980 boasts the debut LPs by The Romantics and The Buggles, career redefining records by Rush (Permanent Waves) and The J. Geils Band (Love Stinks), Split Enz’s incalculably influential True Colours (which set the template for countless synthpop bands through the decade), and The Wipers’ debut (Is This Real?), which would ultimately inspire many of the later Grunge acts in the Pacific Northwest.

 

But for now, let’s focus on two of the most historically-important releases that month - The Clash’s double LP London Calling, and the first - and greatest - album by The Pretenders. 

Respectively they represented the two directions mainstream rock would go in the 1980s: backwards, in the case of The Clash, and forwards, in the case of The Pretenders.

THAT OLD TIME GROOVE

Rolling Stone famously named London Calling as the best rock album of the Eighties, despite the fact it was originally released in the UK in 1979. These kinds of lists are always ridiculous and entirely subjective, but there was very possibly a hidden agenda at work.

How so? 

Well, CDs were getting a big push at the end of the Eighties, especially as a vehicle for reissuing old material. This was pure profit for the record companies, given that the reissued material had already long been paid-for, and most of it was already in the black.

And given what we know about Rolling Stone being a total industry-shill rag - even back then - it must be noted that at the same time this Best 80s album list was being constructed, a young Arista exec named Donnie Ienner was hired by Sony Music chief Tommy Mattola. 

Ienner’s pet project was Legacy Recordings, which would become the driving force behind Sony’s relentless exploitation of its back catalog. And boy, did they have an awful lot of catalog to exploit.

The Clash had ended badly, both with the backlash following their 1982 sellout (Combat Rock), and another backlash following their 1985 comeback attempt, Cut the Crap. But frontmen Joe Strummer and Mick Jones had begun to rehabilitate themselves, especially after the goodwill generated by their quasi-reunions in 1986 on Big Audio Dynamite’s No 10 Upping Street album and Strummer’s “Love Kills” single, arguably the last Clash track.

So in 1988, Sony’s UK arm had released The Story of the Clash, a double CD best-of that reached the Top 10 and went gold there (it would eventually go platinum in the US). This would herald one of the most aggressive reissue campaigns for any act of The Clash’s stature, resulting in the band landing bigger hits (including a UK #1) after their demise than they ever had during their short existence.

The effect of this campaign would be a generation - some of who weren’t even born the first time around - coming to believe that The Clash were a lot more successful and well-regarded than they actually were. But the truth is that they only ever scored four Top 20 singles in their home country, and only two Top 40 singles in the US. 

And despite being named as the best album of the Eighties, London Calling peaked on the Billboard charts at an unremarkable 27, and didn’t even go gold until 1991, an eternity back then.

But Ienner and Sony rightly saw an untapped cash-cow, especially with the steadily-growing alternative rock movement The Clash helped inspire in the first place. But first they needed a “Great Album” to sell the band’s erratic discography to the masses. 

Enter London Calling.

Now, even if much of the band’s original audience saw it as a sellout - and its traditionalist and nostalgic sounds were far more suitable to 1970 than 1980 - London Calling was well-regarded amongst Boomer critics, and was filled with the kind of slick retro-rock styles that would neither activate nor alienate the listener.

So the myth of London Calling - an album that received no small amount of lukewarm reviews along with the raves, and didn’t exactly set the charts alight - was born, and allowed Legacy to print a boatloads of money off old Clash records.  

HYNDESIGHT IS 1980

Despite selling a lot more records than The Clash did in the Eighties, The Pretenders didn’t get their own boxset until fifteen years after Clash on Broadway. Their best-of beat Story of The Clash to the shelves by a year - and sold quite a lot better - but an active band is a lot messier canvas to paint a mythology upon, so The Pretenders never got the same afterlife The Clash (and before them, The Doors) enjoyed.

The Clash and The Pretenders were of the same social and musical circles in West London that arose in the wake of The Sex Pistols in the mid-70s. Though born and raised in Ohio, Chrissie Hynde not only worked the counter at Malcom McLaren’s SEX boutique, she also did a bit of writing for the NME. She also slogged through the same circuit of rehearsal bands that The Clash, The Damned, Generation X and Siouxsie and the Banshees emerged from. An early prototype for The Pretenders even included Motorhead drummer “Philthy” Phil Taylor.

Nothing was going anywhere for Hynde until she met two extraordinary musicians outside of the hipster insider circuit, bassist Pete Farndon and guitarist James Honeyman-Scott. The lineup was complete with the addition of drummer Martin Chambers, and the new band cut a single with Elvis Costello producer Nick Lowe - a pub rock veteran already past his prime -  who then wrote them off as no-hopers. 

Smelling blood in the water, Sex Pistols producer Chris Thomas swooped in, snapped The Pretenders up, and produced their first album, which went to number one in the UK and hit the US Top 10, quickly going platinum.

Nick Lowe was a man of the past, but so were many scenesters in Britain's post-Punk, post-prosperity doldrums. The Ska, Psychedelia and Mod revivals were the big story in the UK in 1980 but went absolutely nowhere in the US, while The Pretenders futuristic guitar rock was selling by the boatload. 

And even if rock music went in a much different direction in the decade that followed, The Pretenders’ first LP still sounds futuristic, thanks to Honeyman-Scott’s visionary guitar work. Like the Edge,  Honeyman-Scott was clearly listening to a lot of Public Image, Magazine and Siouxsie records, and drenched his licks in the shimmering glaze of the state-of-the-art effects pedals that companies like Roland and MXR were coming up with.

A major part of Honeyman-Scott’s genius was to counterpoint the aggressive punkiness of the rhythm section with hypnotic, nearly-ethereal arpeggios and riffs. The most remarkable example of this approach is on “Tattooed Love Boys.” 

The song is already disorienting thanks to its jumpy 7/16 time signature, but Honeyman-Scott chooses to accentuate its violence not with a driving and distorted riff, but with a maddening, insinuating triplet that almost feels like a fairyland waltz melody laid atop the carnage. 

There’s something just fundamentally wrong about it, which suits the decadent and lust-mad narrative of Hynde’s lyrics. It’s almost as if instead of drowning Hynde’s lascivious come-ons in fuzzed-out noise, Honeyman-Scott’s delicate (if not a bit insane) counterpoint places her elemental womanliness in stark relief, accentuating the contrast to the hyper-masculine energy of the drums, bass and rhythm guitar.

And that's not even mentioning that ludicrously-loud maraca.

Honeyman-Scott pulls similarly-unlikely voicings, harmonies and effects from a bottomless bag of tricks throughout the entire album, blurring the lines between lead and rhythm playing in a different, but not unrelated, way to Andy Summers. But Pretenders boasts a greater variety of emotions than The Police ever managed. Indeed, the album’s two sides take you on a farther psychological journey than The Police’s entire catalog, and certainly more than the promiscuous retro/reactionary pastiche-making of London Calling, for that matter.

Even better, two songs left off Pretenders - “Porcelain” and “Cuban Slide” - are as magic as anything on the album, and surfaced on an EP featuring two more stone-cold classics, ‘Message of Love’ and ‘Talk of the Town’.

Sadly, incessant touring and its attendant drug abuse left the band short of A-material for a follow-up. And while Pretenders II has its defenders, Hynde just couldn’t work up a new batch of songs in time to equal the first LPs classics. Farndon was fired for his habit and Honeyman-Scott OD’d in 1982, followed the next year by Farndon, who’d been working with fired Clash drummer (and fellow junkie), Topper Headon.

Hynde was shattered by the upheavals, but enlisted Rockpile guitarist Billy Bremner and Big Country bassist Tony Butler for the 1982 hit single, “Back on the Chain Gang.” She eventually enlisted Malcolm Foster to replace Farndon and Robbie McIntosh to replace Honeyman-Scott. Both were very good players, but lacked the disorienting otherworldliness that made the original lineup so magic.

Like Cheap Trick, Hynde and Chambers are still out there, road warriors slogging it out with replacement Pretenders. The music she’s made over the years is perfectly fine, but nothing that could never make you forget the sheer adventure of and romance of those early records. It’s just the way of the world.

Like Cheap Trick’s 1977 debut - with which it shares much in common - The Pretenders’ first album is so perfect, so complete, and so indelible that the rest of their catalog automatically suffers in comparison. It makes sense that both bands’ debuts were also the takeoff from a very long runway, with Cheap Trick and Chrissie Hynde struggling in obscurity for years before getting their big breaks. 

By comparison, The Clash were only around for a few months before getting signed, and their poorly-produced debut album doesn't stand the test of time the way Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols does. Indeed, The Clash’s studio discography is just a pale shadow of the raw, elemental, even shamanic power they generated onstage on a good night, which is how their mystique was generated in the first place. 

In other words, you’ll get a far better dose of The Clash’s true essence from their live albums.