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After the second Pretenders' album in what was one of the most tragic ironies in rock 'n' roll history, Pete Farndon was thrown out of the band because his escalating heroin addiction had made him increasingly more unreliable. On June 16, two after Pete Farndon was thrown out of The Pretenders at the height of their commercial success, James Honeyman-Scott died of an overdose of heroin and cocaine: a speedball. While Chrissie Hynde went into the pangs of child labor with the child of Ray Davies, the leader of The Kinks, Pete Farndon died of a heroin overdose. The title of the Sex Pistols' song "No Future" seemed an incredibly apt for describing what the future held in store for The Pretenders. Had Chrissie Hynde not been a person whose vulnerability was matched if not surpassed by her toughness this may have turned out to be the case. To a certain extent, the first two Pretenders' albums and the EP released between I and II had been the most significant part of the fulfillment of songwriter/singer Chrissie Hynde's musical dream. While growing up in Akron, Ohio, Chrissie Hynde had ambitions of going to England, becoming a successful singer and songwriter and having a romance with Ray Davies on whom she had an adolescent crush. In the early seventies, Chrissie Hynde went to London. Before forming The Pretenders, she was a rock journalist for the New Musical Express and worked in a sex shop owned by Malcolm McClaren, an inestimably important figure in punk rock, selling clothes. Before The...

F L A S H B A C K

	January 2002