Don't get me wrong - Chrissie Hynde interview

She started out on the London punk scene, but now Chrissie Hynde is returning to her American roots with an album influenced by country music and her home town in Ohio. Interview by Alan Light

'AMBITION is not my middle name," says Chrissie Hynde. "But I don't care – I'm up to my eyeballs most of the time goofing off. I'm kind of a hippie, so the idea was not to have goals or anything. Just moving around and observing and living life; that's necessary before you can make a record anyway."

The singer is at the 23rd annual Farm Aid concert in Mansfield, Massachusetts, where she has just played a sundown set with the latest configuration of her band, The Pretenders, dominated by songs from Break Up The Concrete, their first new album in six years. Back stage, the sound of country singer Kenny Chesney's voice is filling the air as Hynde curses at her mobile phone, pulls off her boots and curls up on a couch.

Sipping a non-alcoholic beer and smoking a hand-rolled cigarette, Hynde, 57, remains as rail thin as she was almost three decades ago, when the Pretenders' self-titled debut album perfectly melded punk energy with style and hooks. She now allows some grey streaks to show through her trademark black fringe, but with her make-up smeared from the heat of the late-afternoon stage, she still looks every bit the rock legend.

Discussing Concrete, though, it becomes clear that Hynde's recent thoughts have largely been shaped by a traditional factor: spending more time in her home town, Akron in Ohio. Like the rest of the Rust Belt (the north-eastern states that relied on manufacturing), Akron (also the birthplace of eccentrics such as the filmmaker Jim Jarmusch and the garage rockers the Black Keys) has been hit hard for decades: unemployment hovers well above the US national average, and only one rubber manufacturer remains in the former Rubber Capital of the World.

Hynde might seem an unlikely cheerleader. She moved to London, her primary residence, in the early 1970s and only recently took an apartment in Akron. But she has written about her hometown in songs such as My City Was Gone, and it offers an opportunity to champion causes such as mass transit and urban renewal.

"My parents are really old now, and I want to be around more," she says. "I'm trying to discover my own relationship to Akron – there's a resonance you get when you go back to the place you were born."

Most notably, last year she opened a vegan restaurant in Akron called the VegiTerranean. Hynde is an animal rights activist and has been arrested several times in protests (once for slashing leather products in a Gap store in Manhattan).

At Farm Aid, she wears a T-shirt reading "Tax Meat" and calls for a day when "all McDonald's and slaughterhouses are burned to the ground" – presumably not a sentiment shared by the cattle farmers present at the festival.

"There wasn't one vegetarian restaurant in Akron, so I said, 'I'll do it,' and it's just been a phenomenon," she says. She describes its "international flavour, right down to the teabag in the pot"; at its opening, she personally served veggie burgers to police officers.

"Everybody told me, 'Don't do it, it will not work,' " she says of the restaurant. "But I had to do it anyway, because I had to have somewhere I could eat. And more than the music, it's what I'm about. To me, the music is a vehicle so I can have a voice. I don't think the world really needs another Pretenders record. But frankly, I was getting embarrassed because we hadn't made a record in so long. And we were doing a lot of touring, and I just can't stomach doing those old songs anymore. It's just torture."

As she began to work on new songs, she found her direction changing. "Spending more time in Akron, I was getting more of an American feel in my sensibility," she says. In addition, the Pretenders toured last year with ZZ Top, and Hynde participated in a tribute concert to Jerry Lee Lewis. When she went to Joshua Tree National Park in California and found where the ashes of the alternative-country pioneer Gram Parsons had been scattered, "I sort of had my epiphany there and I thought, Wow, I think I know how this thing is going to go now."

Recorded live in the studio in less than two weeks, Concrete is loose and scrappy, shot through with rockabilly and country. It offers yet another version of the Pretenders, whose line-up Hynde has continually juggled since the deaths of the founding guitarist, James Honeyman-Scott, and the bassist Pete Farndon in the early 1980s. The drummer Martin Chambers, the other most consistent member, is touring with the band, but the session ace Jim Keltner plays drums on the album. "Chrissie is as subtle as napalm," Chambers says in a phone interview. "She's absolutely uncompromising. She knows when there's something wrong that needs to be fixed, and she does it."

The album's title track is a high-speed meditation on urban sprawl and cultural homogenisation, but at Farm Aid, Hynde expresses optimism. She cites wider acceptance of vegetarianism and increased attention to city centres as evidence of changing attitudes. "I have a very good sense of these things," she said. "Like when I was moving around in the 1970s, trying to get a band together. I went to Cleveland, I went to Paris, but around 1976, I could just sense something was going to happen in London. Sure enough, in 1977 the whole punk thing broke loose. And I have that same feeling right now about America. Believe me, I don't feature any false optimism. I'm very realistic about things. But I can sense that there is this change coming, and a lot of it is because people will have no choice."

Though the Pretenders have never matched the peaks of their 1979 debut (which included the hit Brass in Pocket) and 1984's glorious Learning to Crawl (Back on the Chain Gang), the band managed to become a kind of institution. Hynde's bravado and ragged style have influenced subsequent female rockers from Shirley Manson and Liz Phair to Lucinda Williams; today, her spirit is visible in the likes of Karen O from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. "Why hasn't a movie been made about her?" said the pop-rocker Katy Perry. "She is the pioneer for female rockers with her personal style – a female Mick Jagger, but more punk."

Every few years, the spotlight swings back to her: her appearance on Friends, for example. Despite their punk origins (Hynde played in early versions of the Clash and the Damned), the band are now a staple on classic rock radio and were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2005.

Hynde, though, adamantly refuses to think in terms of the band's legacy. "I hate all that," she says, calling the Hall of Fame "another American cheesy moment". She adds: "A Hall of Fame is for sports. It was a big deal to my parents, but I don't see it as any kind of honour."

The common perception is that, at some point, the Pretenders turned into a solo project, backed by whatever musicians Hynde pulls together. She says, however, that the Pretenders will always remain a genuine band. "I've changed the band over the years, but I've never been sued, I've always remained friends with the guys," she says. "They can see that I can't play very good, but I've got a certain vision – and that my loyalty always has to be to the music first. I never would have been interesting if it would have been me alone. If it was Chrissie Hynde and her guitar, we wouldn't even be having this conversation. You wouldn't even know who I was."

• Break Up The Concrete is released today on Shangri -La Music.

BIOGRAPHY

1951 Chrissie Hynde is born in Akron, Ohio.

1973 Moves to London, where she works briefly at an architectural firm, then at the NME, and then at Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood's clothes shop, SEX, where she is fired for getting into a fight with a customer.

1976 After brief stays in France and back in the US, Hynde tries London life again, spending several years on the punk scene and playing in various bands, including one with Mick Jones from The Clash, and one that would later become The Damned.

1978 Hynde finally manages to form her own band, after meeting bass guitarist Pete Farndon at a bar in Portobello Road. Joined by James Honeyman-Scott and Martin Chambers, they name themselves after the song The Great Pretender by The Platters.

1979 The Pretenders release their debut single, Stop Your Sobbing, kickstarting a long career.