In that fractured musical landscape of 1979-80, it took the Pretenders to provide the missing link between the iconography and idealism of big sixties guitar rock and the deconstructed nihilism of the punkish mid- and late seventies. The united mainstream FM rockers, self-conscious new wavers, and the pierced, tattooed toughs that still uneasily roamed the earth like vestigial body parts as the Me Generation tottered to an unsteady start.

What is probably most significant is that it took a single woman, born and raised in one of the grittier bowels of the American Midwest, who answered an urgent call to travel to the U .K . for her own rock & roll baptism.