“Brass in Pocket” by The Pretenders

"Brass in Pocket" is the swaggering heart of the Pretenders' self-titled debut album, the third single off it, and it started life as a guitar lick James Honeyman-Scott came up with. Chrissie Hynde built a song on top of it, and the two of them share the writing credit. Chris Thomas produced it, with Bill Price engineering, and he left plenty of air around that loping, sly groove so Hynde's voice could do the strutting.

And strut it does. Hynde has said the song is about the nerve you need to get up on a stage and sell yourself, all cocky self-belief with a flicker of doubt underneath, and she took the title from a phrase she overheard after a gig. It's a come-on and a pep talk at the same time, sung by a woman who sounds like she's already decided she's going to win.

It became the band's biggest British hit, going to number one in the UK, where it was the first new chart-topper of the 1980s, and also in Sweden and Ireland, while reaching number 14 on the Billboard Hot 100. When MTV switched on in August 1981, its video was the seventh one the channel played.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.