Will the floor hold?” Ben Esser asks anxiously, his limpid, soulful brown eyes scanning a room inside his East London home while his slim frame teeters atop a bookcase. But the friends he’s invited over for a raucous celebration this afternoon, so colorful they seem to have stepped straight from a street-style blog, aren’t all that concerned: “Sure it will!” After a nervous pause, he screams and leaps.

Rock’s kick-ass rebel Chrissie Hynde returns to her roots (Akron, Ohio, by way of London) to record a new rockabilly album, Breaking Up The Concrete, open a vegetarian restaurant and tear up the road again. Her friend and former flatmate from her pre-fame days, Vivien Goldman, gets on the phone with the great Pretender for prickly heart-to-heart.