Not sure I can actually call this an album that changed my life, but it was sure a big deal when it came along, felt like a kind of discovery or apotheosis a long time coming actually, instantly recognized from the first I played it, as if I had always been waiting for it. Which sounds a little corny I know, but when I listen to it again it still sounds impossibly fresh. I took blasts of it daily for months: I seem to recall hanging out of third-floor apartment windows on hot summer nights with it playing very loud. Listening to it again I don't have to wonder why. It's a dilly, a first-rate rock band pouring it out track after track. They are mostly British, swimming up out of the river of punk-rock New Wave of the time, joining forces with a singer and songwriter from the American Midwest working in London as a music journalist. Right time, right place, right everything. Chrissie Hynde, creature of pure instinct by the evidence, a supremely natural songwriter, and more than that, a supremely natural rock star. She was born to do this, genetically predisposed, if not preconfigured. Slinky, sexy, sassy, wrapped in leather and denim, decked out in lace and boots, topped by a shag haircut, singing lewd songs about domination and laughing at you when you liked it. It was irresistible, from the tossaway "fuck off" in the opening "Precious" to the pure pop sass of "Brass in Pocket" (#14 on the pop chart, April 1980) to the instrumental rave-up of "Space Invaders." Longer moody exercises such as "Private Life" and "Lovers of Today" bore intriguing depths, a sensibility that transcended the sensationalism the rest of it sometimes purely got over on. Already she was playing a game of underpromising and overdelivering, this skinny slutty chick who could make chills go up and down your spine when she sings about adultery and other matters in terms of sin—adultery and sin, because she knows that's how the people she has a bottomless contempt for think of it. It's a bracing shot in the face to convention, which should not surprise us when we recall that she is from Akron, Ohio, attended Kent State University during the National Guard shootings in 1970, escaped America in 1973 to London and eventual punk-rock salvation. Sometimes I think she and her story are so good we would have had to make them up if she hadn't actually come along.
If anything, in retrospect, I think this is an underrated document of punk rock. I remember some ambivalence at the time, Chrissie's a journalist, the band hired hands, etc. Put "The Wait" up against any purist Brit punk greatest hits. The whole record is stellar. Nice write-up.
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