Chrissie Hynde, wild woman of rock, sits in a private members' club in London's Portman Square in a finely tailored pinstripe suit. Despite the elegance of the surroundings, she is as frank and unapologetic as ever. She still has the shaggy black hair, kohl-dark eyes and cutting humour. On the floor above, Geri Halliwell holds court with a retinue of stylists and photographers. The irony is not lost on us. As Hynde devours a plate of cheese sandwiches, she explains why she wrote Pop Star, the opening track on The Pretenders' new album, Viva El Amor. In the song, Hynde sneers, tongue in cheek: "She'll get to join the meritocracy/All the designers send her their new clothes/She gets to look like Kylie Minogue . . . They don't make 'em like they used to."
Hynde penned the song a few years ago after a boyfriend left her for a younger pop star. "It was an excuse to say get offa my cloud. Your girlfriend wants to be a pop star - you should've stuck with me. She's not gonna do it as good as I did it," Hynde declares.
One could construe this as sour grapes but for the fact that, on a deeper level, Hynde senses female pop stars today have lost the plot. "They all have fake tits!" she remonstrates. "What is that about? When did mutilation become so popular? I tried to get a couple of African scars on my cheeks back in 1977, but I wasn't prepared to pay someone to open me up with a knife, put a bag of jelly in me and charge me 10 grand. I spent a year feeding both of my kids adequately - no, admirably - and my tits have done their job. Now let them rest. I'm not showing them to anybody."
Rocking back on her stool, she warms to the theme. "When I see girls with their tits pushed up around their neck in one of those dresses, to me it's like looking at the builder's bum cleavage. I can't see any beauty in that. I suppose it's just a fashion, but I think it's really, really naff. It's not cool. But hey, I'm old, so don't ask me. Ask a 12-year-old."
The fact is, many women do want to know what Hynde thinks. With her melodic voice, knife-edge presence, uncompromising stance as lead guitarist in a band of men and a 20-year back catalogue that would be the envy of any aspiring female musician, she has long been a role model for women including Annie Lennox, Garbage's Shirley Manson and Courtney Love. Hynde has never seen herself as a feminist heroine - recent advice to "chick rockers" on an Internet site boiled down to a snappy: "Don't say fuck me, say fuck off". But, at a time when pop stars are increasingly turning themselves into bland commodities, Hynde's truculence is inspiring.
"Self-promotion has become so much part of the game now," she says. "It never used to be like that. Your record company promoted you and you just kinda showed up. When I started, I wanted to play guitar in a rock band. You weren't even thinking about the fame. You were thinking, will I ever get a band together? Are these songs good enough? How am I gonna find a place to rehearse?"
Somewhere along the line, she feels, basic values have been overturned. "Now people are thinking about the fame aspect first and then it's, `oh fuck, I've got to get some songs together and learn how to sing. I've got to back up my fame with something'. People don't talk about music. All you have to do now is pull your pants down and say `Hey, over here!' and you get anyone to write an article on you. It's completely back to front."
From the age of 14, when Hynde was a star-struck fan in Akron, Ohio, going to see The Rolling Stones, she was "deadly serious" about forming her own band. In 1973 she ran away to England and became involved in the emerging punk scene, hanging out with The Sex Pistols. John Lydon, then Johnny Rotten, remembers her as "a hard girl". In 1978, after a few years trawling the music scene, she found Pete Farndon (guitar) James Honeyman-Scott (bass) and Martin Chambers (drums), and The Pretenders were born. Within a year they had reached number one with Brass In Pocket. "That moment in pop history when punk was happening for six months let me slip in very nicely because no one was allowed to say: `She's good for a girl'. That's the beauty of rock, it's androgynous. I was a very androgynous kid."
Hynde became part of the `80s rock aristocracy when she lived with Ray Davies of The Kinks, and in 1983 gave birth to daughter Natalie Ray. Their stormy affair ended a year later when she met Jim Kerr, lead singer of Simple Minds. With him she had a second daughter, Yasmin, but after five years their marriage fell apart and Hynde ended up raising the girls as a single mother. Her latest record is permeated with the outlaw gusto that kept her going through the bleak years and a few uninspired albums (The Pretenders hit a mediocre patch from the mid-`80s after Farndon and Honeyman-Scott died, within a year of each other, of drug overdoses).
The album was originally going to be called Biker. "My record company hated the title, but it felt good to me," Hynde says. "The Biker lives by his own principles. He's the freedom fighter, the renegade. It's very romantic, but it's an ideal."
She was eventually persuaded to change the title to Viva El Amor, a reflection on the rejuvenating power of love and the fact that she is now happily married to a South American sculptor called Lucho, "who looks like Che Guevara".
The album's revolutionary fervour is captured on the sleeve, with a picture of Hynde raising her fist in the air, "propagandist" style. The photo was taken by her late friend, Linda McCartney, just before she died. "She did not get drawn into the bullshit. That's where she and I met on common ground. We were both resolute in that way," recalls Hynde, who took it upon herself to organise the animal rights benefit at London's Royal Albert Hall last week, in memory of McCartney.
Hynde has always been a rebel, something her mid-western parents found hard to stomach. When I ask if they listen to Pretenders' records, a chink appears in the armour.
"Probably," she says quietly. Then: "Maybe they don't. I'm sure they disagree with a lot of things I say. My "Firebomb McDonald's" statement in 1989 didn't fill them with joy."
She brightens. "D'you ever see King of the Hill?" she asks, referring to Mike Judge's cartoon set in small-town, gung-ho America. "Well then, you get a pretty good idea where I'm from. My dad played harmonica on the back porch, things like Smile Though Your Heart is Breaking, and all the men in the neighbourhood would play horseshoes. It was real Republican, real gung-ho. You don't talk about politics with them."
At 47, Hynde remains defiant. She rejects the notion that age disqualifies her from being relevant or hip. "I had a very sad experience a coupla months ago," she says, grinning. "I was reading the NME when I looked up and in the mirror saw this old hag wearing reading glasses. I thought, this is the saddest thing I've ever seen. But then I just put up my two fingers and said, well, if you don't like it, fuck off, and went back to my paper."
Rocking back on her stool one last time, she adds: "You can do what you want. That's what I've found out. No one's gonna stop you because you're a woman or because you don't have big tits. The only person to stop you is yourself."
Viva El Amor is released by WEA on May 17.