“I had never done that before. I thought Jimmy was going to go, ‘Nice one’ – he looks at me and goes, ‘Don’t you ever do that again’”: That time Chrissie Hynde enraged one of her Pretenders bandmates because she stopped playing mid-gig

Chrissie Hynde has recalled the time she spontaneously decided to shake up her stage act and stop playing her electric guitar mid-gig in order to fully embrace her role as a vocalist – and it ended up enraging one of her Pretenders bandmates.

In interviews, the Fender signature artist regularly downplays her role as a guitarist, and in the latest issue of Guitarist, Hynde reflects that she sees it as her responsibility “to shine a light on the guitar player”.

However, as Hynde notes, she needed to play her six-string in order to sing: “When I first started playing, I was too shy to go with the guys in the art room and play so I just had this foresight, like most people who end up writing songs, just to be on my own and write,” Hynde recalls. “I could only really sing if I was playing. For years, I needed that.”

During one gig with the Pretenders, though, Hynde tried to change that, and spontaneously decided to stop playing mid-gig in order to get hands-on with the mic.

“There was one time with Jimmy Scott where we did a show somewhere, I don’t know where it was and, for some reason, I kind of stopped playing and got more handheld [with the vocal mic],” she says.

“I had never done that before. I really enjoyed that show and I thought, ‘This is fucking great.’ I remember really being pleased and I never felt like that after shows. I always felt that I wasn’t really very good. I just felt more in the pocket and everything.”

Hynde thought the off-the-cuff shake-up had been a huge success, but Scott – the band's original lead guitar player – felt differently, and he didn't hold back on his feedback after the show.

“So when we came off, I thought Jimmy was going to go, ‘Nice one,’ and he looks at me and he goes, ‘Don’t you ever fucking do that again.’ I don’t think I’d ever seen him really angry at me before. It was the only time I remember him really pissed off at me.”

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Current Pretenders guitarist James Walbourne, who joined in 2008, leaps to Hynde's defence, saying, “Well, that goes to show how important your parts are!”

“Chrissie’s playing really shapes the sounds of a record, especially the early ones,” he adds. “It was Chrissie and James Honeyman Scott, that was the sound. It wasn’t just one, it was two. It was definitely a shared thing.”

Elsewhere in her Guitarist interview, Hynde remembers the time she bought her own signature guitar off the shelf while she was in Paris without a six-string.

To read Hynde’s interview in full, along with new interviews with Andy Summers and Billy Corgan, pick up issue 523 of Guitarist at Magazines Direct.