"Kid" drove us crazy. The first time I heard the Pretenders it was on “Stop Your Sobbing,” the angle Nick Lowe produced that made lead singer Chrissie Hynde sound like a short let from the Phil Spector Christmas album. It was okay, but it was "Kid" that got me. Nothing like ascending chords for getting inside your brain and the way Hynde slowly climbs an emotional ladder: “You think it's wrong/I can tell you do/How can I explain/You don’t want me to” with Martin Chamber's steel-steady drum beat. I’d break into it all over the place—bathroom, supermarket, you name it...met Jerry one day and drove around shopping, unconsciously bursting out into that break at the same time until we both yelled at ourselves to shut up.

Such is the effect of truly great singles. Not the ones you catch yourself singing when you’ve told everyone it’s the biggest load of trash you’ve ever heard—but Christ that melody line’s so simple it sticks with you—but the more complicated mysterious tracks that lodge into you physically. Unexpected. When they did it again with “Brass In Pocket,” entirely different, insidiously sexual, with Hynde coming on like nobody’s business: “I’m gonna make you see/There’s nobody, no one like me/I’m special”.. .though I didn’t realise how much until the album came out, I had to reassess early reports of the group’s live gigs which were not—to put it mildly—given to encouraging the belief that any of them walked on water.

Pretenders is not the absolutely great album of our time, let me be frank. But it’s close. So close that, oddly, I couldn’t care less how good/bad/ indifferent the group are live. A couple of duds: “Space Invader” and “The Wait,” mainly I think because they allow the band too much room to get fancy and not really pull it off. But ten Hynde pieces, shrapnel scenarios that glitter hard as glass in the sun. Most interesting is that given the space of an album, and having held back from going in and cutting one, Hynde emerges with such confidence and a voice that—while there are trace elements of Lou Reed, owes more to a cross-cutbetween, wait for it, Siouxsie Sioux and Jennifer Wames (!) without any consciousness of either.

Yet another Yankee girl made good in London, Hynde manages better than any other . contemporary woman singer (including Patti or The Slits) to be both truly arrogant and tender at the same time. To be really experimental and familiar, to be liberated-yet bound. It’s these contradictions—coming through her writing and her voice and the way she often uses one against the other—that make her so arresting (and probably arrestable considering some of the lyrics). Right now her guitar playing is, well, okay—mainly used tight up against James Honeyman Scott’s work to jangling razor effect. With her other two components working so full blast who the hell cares? Not me, not me.

Punk, a kind of reggae underbelly, -Talking Heads’ smart whip sound, almost repressed yet surprisingly melodic, the Pretenders’ music is nervously efficient. Hynde’s lyrics promote sexual ambiguity: the male whorehouse of “Tattooed Love Boys;” a disturbing line in self-loathing and self-irony on “Up The Neck”: “I sajd baby, ooh sweetheart.../I remember the way h$ groaned/and he moved with animal skill/It was all pretty run of the mill”; and a tenderly dark multi-layered sexual politics on “Lovers Of Today.” The problem is, if Chrissie Hynde isn’t as smart as she looks, how will she withstand the media blitz to come—as it surely will because despite the move to “acceptance” punk brought women musicians, there’s still not that many on the ground and certainly none with Hynde’s almost too exploitable brilliance. As much as I haven’t been this excited since Springsteen gave me “Sandy,” 1 worry for her.

I used to worry about the Clash (well, n6t worry exactly, but wonder if they’d ever manage to break out of the garage). London Calling makes me smile. Clever clever. The Clash return with a double low-price album thereby keeping their intentions pure and their commitment on their sleeves (the sleeve?) and producing at least one straight hit single with “Lost In The Supermarket,” innocent love song to consumerism hiding dank despair: “I wasn’t bom so much as I fell out/Nobody seemed to notice me/We had a hedge back home in the suburbs/Over which 1 could never see.” Down at the 101 Club, Tom Robinson previews, in rough and ready state, his new band Sector 27 to people he isn’t trying to impress. Another tune, another time, and “Marilyn” makes it over the others even though there’s a danger that more people than me wifl think of the Police when they hear it. “I’m Not, Ready,” nicely turned anguish and pain, makes a close second runner. Metallic three guitar line-up now, there are debts to the new music and lo—a young kid guitarist so uninhibited he does Pete Townshend leaps without looking self-conscious. So far Sector 27’s music isn’t producing politics lyrically. It’s still hard to see Robinson on stage and not also see a political animal but how long that will last overpainting the songs once they’re more familiar and the band get going, who knows? Experimental yet somehow traditional: rock musician makes stand-off rather than on-stage.

The Clash still just hold it all together. Black British struggle still gets a particular place along with their part naive, part too-knowing fook at things that touch the corner of their lives—still: America, consumerism, emotions. Compare and contrast “Koka Kola” with Elton’s “Tower Of Babel,” it’s not after all a new idea to write about coke (snort not drink) in America but it almost sounds it: “It’s the pause that refreshes in the corridors of power/When top men need a top up long before the happy hour.”

It’s what you always miss live—well, I still do— and what it’s easy to forget—Clash still make fine words, twists and turns, catch you out with the neat declamation, a sudden sense of bitter political let-down, ah the romance of politics: “Spanish weeks in my disco casino/The freedom fighters died on the hill/They sang the red flag, they wore the black one/But after they died it was mockingbird hill.”

It’s still harder if you’re a woman. Compare and contrast Janis Ian’s “I Really Tied One On” and Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain” to Chrissie Hynde’s new view with “Up The Neck” and “Private Lives.” The perimeters of the subject matter are that much closer to the subject, four walls getting smaller. But sbmetimes the movie’s twice as brilliant. ,