“They’re great – such balls of innocence,” she says later of the twins. Within minutes, we’re talking about where I live (near Hereford, where the other three Pretenders came from) and my young son: she’s got twin grandsons, who live nearby with her daughter, Yasmin, from Hynde’s brief 1980s marriage to Simple Minds’ Jim Kerr (Hynde also has an older daughter, Natalie, from her relationship with Ray Davies she brought both girls up alone). She’s wearing a black hoodie, black T-shirt and black jeans and her hair is the coolest way out of the rock star-with-greying-hair conundrum I’ve seen – ash-blond over eyes still thick with black eyeliner. She buzzes me into her flat with a friendly hello (I pass her black boots, unlaced, on the bottom step).

Hynde can sound blase on paper, but in person she’s much warmer. “I mean, who the fuck am I? There’s so many people who’ve been doing this all their lives and they can’t get a gallery…and then muggins walks in, dabbles for a couple of years and the next thing, here’s a big fuck-off box set of her paintings!” She laughs at herself, although she’s not a phoney, she says. Hynde has reservations about entering this gang. You may have seen Ronnie Wood’s canvases of his celebrity friends or Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell’s coffee-table smothering volumes. Rock stars becoming painters remains one the most cliched career transitions in showbiz, however. And if I was in a happy relationship, you wouldn’t be looking at these paintings

Chrissie hynde of the pretenders