It was May 1973 and I was 22. A girlfriend and I got in a cab at Heathrow and said take us to a hotel and he took us to the Lion Court Hotel behind Whiteleys. As soon as we arrived, we walked up to the top of the road and asked at the kiosks on the Bayswater Road: “Have you got a job? Have you got a job?” And a guy gave me a job selling handbags in a kiosk on Oxford Street.
Now, I didn’t know anything about London. For all I knew, Chelsea was a city. I’d come straight from Akron, Ohio. I’d never been on a train or the Underground. So when I saw all those kiosks, I’d never seen anything like it. I went to work straight away because I had less than $500 on me. Anyway, there was a girl on the next stall and she invited me to a place in Clapham and that’s where I got my first room in London.
It was Clapham South, Englewood Road. I was living there on and off for quite a few years. I had one room and it was four quid a week. It turned out that Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood lived up the road but I didn’t know them yet. I hadn’t met anyone yet.
I briefly worked in their shop. I remember walking with Malcolm from the shop on the King’s Road back to Clapham together. They weren’t well known then. I wasn’t there for long; they fired me – again, this is a long time ago. There was an incident. But Malcolm and Viv were good pals of mine and I really looked up to them a lot.
I never moved back to the States but I did travel there and try to get a band together.
The next place I had was in Chelsea on Caversham Street. It was a squat, right off of Flood Street. I had a little room and was there a few months. The WC was out through the courtyard and there was no bathtub. It was the way places were back then. This was the early 70s.
Now a confirmed West Londoner, Chrissie has lived all over the city
Credit: Alamy
I also remember Margaret Thatcher was living around the corner on Flood Street at the same time I was there.
Then somehow I ended up in Tufnell Park on Carleton Road. It was a boarding house run by an Irish couple, so I couldn’t bring any guys into the house. And that’s when I wrote a couple of songs, some of the early songs. I had a room in the attic and some of the other guys that I was going to get… well The Pretenders, the early band… just by coincidence, they were living somewhere else in Tufnell Park.
I’ve always loved London and I’ve moved around a lot, like every few months. I was in Covent Garden on Endell Street. In Ledbury Road, just on someone’s sofa for a while. Then I moved to Portman Mansions and this is by the time I was in the band, someone had a room going. And then the first flat I actually had was on Luxborough Street, Marylebone.
What do I like about London? Well, that would be a whole book. The parks, the green space, the trees. Everywhere in London is near a park and nature, that’s the beauty of it.
I’ve been in west London since I had kids. I’ve tried to stay in the same place so that they had a sense of neighbourhood. I’ve lived in two different places on Sutherland Avenue, two on Randolph Avenue, Mortimer Crescent, St John’s Wood borders – is what an estate agent would call it – Kilburn. I lived in Hill Road, Maida Avenue.
I’ve been in my current place for about three years. And I’ll probably stay here now. I can walk across the street to the shop, I’m a two-minute walk from the Tube and I’ve got everything right at my fingertips. I can walk from here to Marble Arch, to the West End. Paddington Rec, that’s also local to me.
I like where I am now. I’m not a very nostalgic person; I always like where I am.
I’m in the studio now until the end of July, working on a Pretenders album. I’ve just finished an album with some guys in Brazil. I’m not touring this year, so I’ve got time to finish other projects. Oh yeah, I love being on tour. But you know, you can only do so much – of anything – because it becomes mediocre if that’s all you do. I needed to take some time out from that.
I’ve always kept the band name as I didn’t expect to change the line-up of the band, but you know a couple of them died [James Honeyman-Scott in 1982 and Pete Farndon in 1983]. And then I wanted to keep doing the songs that we had worked on together. But you know, I always worked within the framework of a band. I’ve never thought of myself as a solo artist. Really, who wouldn’t want to be in a rock band?
I quit smoking about 10 years ago. I don’t drink or take drugs, I avoid all that. I feel I had my fun and eventually you have to… yeah, I don’t do anything!
And certainly I’ve seen changes in London. There have been some great improvements and I’d rather dwell on the good things rather than knife crime. What’s changed for the better? I suppose people don’t smoke. That’s not really a British thing, that’s all around. But no one would have been able to convince anyone 30 years ago that they would ban smoking in pubs, so that’s a big step in the right direction. The parks are well looked after. But there are still too many cars.
What would I bring back to London? Bus conductors, number one. It would be nice to have a bus conductor to tell people to get their feet off the seats. And to keep the noise down and not to stab anyone. It would be nice to have conductors on the Underground, looking after that. It would be nice to have police on the streets.
As a matter of fact, I saw a bobby on the street yesterday and I crossed the road just to say hello and nice to see you, simply because it’s so rare to see police on the streets. When I was bumming around Notting Hill in that 1970s punk scene – it was all punks and rastafarians in the Notting Hill of the 70s – I wouldn’t have thought that I’d be saying something like that.
There’s this whole secret London. I was talking to Billy, who runs the Regent Street Cinema – the city’s oldest – and we went for a tour of the Down Street station, it’s one of the disused stations between Green Park and Hyde Park. Churchill had a bunker there in the war.
The rose garden – I think it’s called St John’s Lodge Gardens – in Regent’s Park is fantastic at twilight when the sun’s coming down, or early in the morning.
There’s the little churchyard at St Mary’s Paddington, where Sarah Siddons [a famous 18th-century actress] is buried. Her statue looks into the Westway, and people pass it every single day, hundreds of times and never see her sitting there looking out. Actually, Rufus Wainwright wrote a song about her because he also stumbled upon her one day, so we talked about that.
I love exploring. If I was walking from here to Marylebone, I would take a route that I’d never taken. I’ll always find a street I haven’t been on. I was looking up the other day and the other woman must have been on her phone and we banged into each other. We both ended up on the pavement.
I feel like I’ve done The Knowledge. I could be driving a black cab.
I love the amazing galleries and museums but they haven’t banned phones. I can’t see anything because everyone is holding their phone up in front of an actual Van Gogh painting. Why haven’t they banned phones? If you hear about a petition of anyone that’s running for mayor who wants to put that on their… call me immediately! In theatres, they’re chomping at the bit like a horse in a cage waiting for the curtain call so they can get their bloody phones out. It makes me crazy.
I guess I can say I’ve just about done everything I’ve ever wanted to. It’s fantastic.
Keep up with Chrissie Hynde at chrissiehynde.com
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