Reckless

Best musician's biography since "Life" of Keith Richards.Great stars emerge - because music is all that really matters to them!Failed all education, got her ass kicked, lived on a shoestring, almost lost her belief she would ever make it, but never lost her attitude, Finally got her band together and gave us the light with drive "Bad Boys get Spanked" and melody "Don't get me Wrong". Let's be grateful she belongs to those who survived all the drugs of the crazy seventies and is able to tell us her story.Definitely a highly enjoyable read.

Fan depuis 36 ans j ai découvert l 'envers du décors d'un monde d'artiste dans leur travers et leur génie.Bien écrit, et plaisant !

Most people reading this book will do so because they like The Pretenders. It's a shame then that they only enter the story around 75% of the way through. The period covering the first two albums is covered in some detail, and then, that's it, the end. Nothing more about her marriage to Ray Davies, nothing about Jim Kerr, nothing about her activism, or raising kids, or sustaining the band over so many years. Perhaps there is another volume in the offing?In which case, it will be probably be eminently readable, as is Reckless. She acknowledges that the detail she goes into about sex and drugs meant that she couldn't have published this while her parents were alive, but I'd imagine it would make pretty uncomfortable reading for her kids too. There is a lot of sex and drugs. Followed by more sex and drugs. With a bit more sex and drugs to follow. At times it makes uncomfortable reading with some phrases a little more graphic than they need to be, as if she's trying to be deliberately salacious.But all said and done, I read through it in 2 or 3 sittings and generally found that I wanted to keep reading. It's easy to read, chatty, conversational, revealing, engaging. There's lots of name-dropping, some of which is interesting, some less so. And the chapters about the punk scene in London - when she finally gets to it - are probably the best in the book, and provide another angle to stories we've already read in other similar biographies (Strummer, Albertine, Lydon, etc).I read the ebook and the quality of proof-reading/editing was appalling - there's a probably a dozen typos or misprints throughout, which don't detract from the story but nor do you expect it from a professional publishing house.So, I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. And if Volume 2 is to follow, then I shall undoubtedly read that too. But if this is it, then it is a horribly imbalanced and incomplete narrative.

Good fun, honest. Brilliant.

Chrissie has fascinated me since that 1st time in the late '70s I put "The Wait" on the turntable. I wanted to be her, she was so badass. So I was excited to get my hands on this book & find out more about this independent, forceful woman. For about the 1st half of the book I was disappointed. A long account of her life in small town Ohio was about as boring as an actual life in small town Ohio. But I could relate. We're about the same age, & like Chrissie, music & radio was everything to me, so maybe it reminded me of my humdrum youth. After working in LA radio for years, I can attest that she is correct - the Midwest stations played the best & newest music (they still do). We would call Midwestern radio stations to get the info on the latest songs they were spinning. So the 1st 3/4 of the book was just Chrissie goofing around & getting in trouble with creepy biker dudes in Ohio - just not very interesting. Once she got to her move to London, things started picking up, but sadly I could see there were just a handful of pages left. So in the end I wanted more - more about the Pretenders, more about life in London. So the book was lopsided - Ohio should have been 1/4 of the book & her new life as an artist 3/4 of the book. Oh well. maybe she'll write another. Worth a read for sure, if you are a fan.