Chrissie Hynde has said that she “always regretted” her famous cameo on the sitcom Friends because it ruined her anonymity during the school run.
The veteran rocker appeared in a guest role in season two of the hit show as a rival musician, Stephanie Schiffer, to Lisa Kudrow’s character Phoebe Buffay.
During the 1995 episode, “The One with the Baby on the Bus”, the Pretenders frontwoman sings “Angel of the Morning” by Chip Taylor, and also performs Phoebe’s signature song “Smelly Cat” during a scene in the coffee shop Central Perk.
In a fan Q&A for The Guardian, Hynde explained that she hadn’t heard of Friends before Warners asked to feature “Angel of the Morning” on an album to accompany it.
“Then Friends asked me if I could sit in the background in a coffee shop playing it,” she said. “I got to go to LA for a week and see my friend but I didn’t know they’d written a whole part for me. Then Friends was on the cover of every American magazine.
“I thought, ‘Oh f***, this is gonna be big.’”
Hynde said the cast and crew were “really nice” but that she “always regretted it because until then I could take my kids to school and nobody knew who I was”.
“Afterwards, all the kids were saying, ‘Your mom’s on Friends!’” she recalled.
Kudrow revealed in a 2014 Q&A on Reddit that Hynde actually had a hand in writing some of the music to “Smelly Cat”.
“The writers wrote it, I wrote the tune, and had a little help from Chrissie Hynde,” the actor said. “She was amazing.”
Fans of the hit show, starring Kudrow, Jennifer Aniston, David Schwimmer, Matt Le Blanc, Courteney Cox and the late Matthew Perry, were recently devastated at the news that Friends will leave Netflix at the end of the year.
The show is being removed from the streaming service on 30 December 2025 due to the expiration of its licence deal.
Some fans went so far as to threaten to cancel their Netflix subscriptions, while others questioned what they will do to relax now that the show will not be available to watch. “This has been the show to get me to sleep since I was a baby,” wrote one person.
Hynde’s new album, Chrissie Hynde & Pals’ Duets Special, is out now via Parlophone. The Pretenders have also recently released a live album, Kick ‘Em Where It Hurts!
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