The Pretenders
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Year:
2005
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Inducted by:
Neil Young
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Category:
Performers
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Chrissie Hynde -
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Pete Farndon -
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James Honeyman-Scott -
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Martin Chambers
Introduction
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.
Neil Young Inducts the Pretenders
Neil Young Inducts the Pretenders at the 2005 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony-
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Neil Young Inducts the Pretenders00:02:50 -
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The Pretenders Acceptance Speech00:04:21 -
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"Message of Love"00:03:47 -
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"My City Was Gone"00:06:03 -
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"Precious"00:04:08
Hall of Fame Essay
2005
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.
They went through all of the heartache that rock and roll is built on.
