Skip to content

The Pretenders

THE PRETENDERS

YEAR

2005

INDUCTED BY

Neil Young

CATEGORY

Performers

Punk professors and pop crossover phenoms.

The Pretenders’ music is simultaneously melodic and bristling with rebellion. Fronted by singer/songwriter Chrissie Hynde, they exposed the confessional underbelly of punk and new wave.

Chrissie Hynde

Chrissie Hynde

Pete Farndon

Pete Farndon

James Honeyman-Scott

James Honeyman-Scott

Martin Chambers

Martin Chambers

HALL OF FAME
ESSAY

By Jaan Ubelszki

In that fractured musical landscape of 1979-80, it took the Pretenders to provide the missing link between the iconography and idealism of big sixties guitar rock and the deconstructed nihilism of the punkish mid- and late seventies. The united mainstream FM rockers, self-conscious new wavers, and the pierced, tattooed toughs that still uneasily roamed the earth like vestigial body parts as the Me Generation tottered to an unsteady start.

What is probably most significant is that it took a single woman, born and raised in one of the grittier bowels of the American Midwest, who answered an urgent call to travel to the U .K . for her own rock & roll baptism.

Read More
Class of 2005
They went through all of the heartache that rock and roll is built on.
Neil Young
More from the class of 2005
%post_title%

U2