"Stop Your Sobbing" by The Pretenders

In honour of the birthday of Chrissie Hynde I thought I'd take my readers all the way back to 1979 and the first single ever by The Pretenders, Stop Your Sobbing...

Released as the opening salvo of the band's first album - the seminal punk/New Wave hybrid Pretenders - Stop Your Sobbing was originally written by Ray Davies for his band, The Kinks*, and was produced by yet another music industry legend, Nick Lowe. In another of those crazy twists of Fate which makes writing about pop culture so entertaining, while Hynde hadn't yet met Davies when The Pretenders began climbing the charts with an old Kinks song, by 1983 they knew each other well enough to collaborate on a major project together - a daughter named Natalie Rae Hynde. History does not record whether Stop Your Sobbing was in Hynde's (or indeed Davies') repertoire of lullabies, but in this reporter's opinion with the right arrangement it might just do very well for that purpose.

Here the band is seen performing the song live** in 1980 on Thames Television's Kenny Everett Video Show, which starred (appropriately enough) Kenny Everett.

*Which appeared on their debut album, Kinks, in 1964 - an album released in the US as You Really Got Me.
**Meaning only that they were live in the studio when the cameras rolled; as with most such performances - be they on this show or the more famous Top of the Pops, the band were merely miming to the record.
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Happy Birthday Chrissie Hynde

The late Seventies and early Eighties were not a great time to be a woman in music - unless, that is, you were Chrissie Hynde. Yet her good times were born out of some really bad times... For instance, she was a student at Kent State University during the shootings that occurred there in May 1970; among the fatalities was a friend of hers, Jeffrey Miller.

As an American in London in 1973 she dreamed of being in a band, only the dream kept eluding her. Through a lover, Nick Kent, she landed a short-lived job at the UK's most influential music publication, New Musical Express, and still later worked at Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood's then-little-known clothing store, SEX. After a few false starts at joining a band, by 1978 she had met Pete Farndon, James Honeyman-Scott, and Martin Chambers and was fronting The Pretenders; the following year they had the first of their many hits, Stop Your Sobbing, originally recorded by The Kinks.

Thirty years later and The Pretenders are still together, although she (and her gravelly sweet vocals) are the only constants in the lineup; despite this, she has repeatedly refused to be billed as Chrissie Hynde and the Pretenders, which can only be interpreted as an eschewal by her of the cult of personality which often emerges around singers in bands...
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