(Credits: Far Out / Bent Rej / H. Grobe)
Sat 7 March 2026 16:00, UK
Some of the best songs in history came from dreams. ‘The Killing Moon’ by Echo & The Bunnymen, ‘Let It Be’ by The Beatles, ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’, and, incidentally, one of the most iconic Jimi Hendrix songs of all time.
If you haven’t guessed ‘Purple Haze’ yet, then it’s probably because you’re not already aware of its backstory. Arriving in Hendrix’s mind in a dream about walking under the sea in a cloud of purple haze, the drug anthem was apparently inspired by José Farmer’s Night of Light, a book in which the world is “bathed in a bizarre radiance that rearranges physical reality” once every seven years.
In the realm of the counterculture movement, this description is pretty spot on. After all, those who were in the crux of its mind-altering, psychedelic vapour experienced it as this alternate reality separate from the faux ideals of the real world, and a place dense with all the facts and truths you don’t get in the outside world.
As such, ‘Purple Haze’ became the defining anthem of the entire moment, emerging from a long, arduous journey in which Hendrix entertained lots of ideas and lots of words in an effort to convey this complex, alternative world not too dissimilar from the one he found himself in. As he later said, “It was about going through, through this [mythical] land, because that’s what I like to do, is write a lot of mythical scenes. You know, like the history of the wars on Neptune.”
Although the exact meaning remains unclear, its positioning in counterculture stems not only from Hendrix’s world-class presentation of guitar-playing excellence but also in the song’s lyrics, which reference a series of otherworldly intoxications, like experiencing “purple haze all in my brain”, as well as “’scuse me while I kiss the sky” and “don’t know if I’m coming up or down”.
Much of what you hear was also a culmination of trial and error in the studio, especially when it came to trying out different techniques to create different types of sounds. At one point, for instance, Hendrix and producer Chas Chandler put some headphones over one of their microphones to create an echo effect, and proceeded to record it like that.
The lyrics came to Hendrix one day after Christmas in 1966, with the words coming copiously in a state of free flow. Many of them didn’t make it into the song, a realisation that Hendrix likely had when they developed it further while he was at a press event in East London’s Upper Cut Club: a pivotal moment that saw jaws dropping to the floor when Hendrix started playing the song’s iconic riff in the dressing room.
Sensing the reaction from those around, Chandler knew they were onto a winner. “I said, ‘Write the rest of that!’”, Chandler later recalled, exclaiming how it was “the next single”. The first time Hendrix performed the song was in Sheffield in 1967. In America, Hendrix premiered it at 1967’s Monterey Pop Festival, before it became one of the scene’s most important tracks – a monster that demonstrated sheer excellence and the spirit of the times.
Now, ‘Purple Haze’ remains a stalwart of rock history, as well as something that managed to capture both sides of Hendrix’s story: his importance in the American sociopolitical climate at the time, and his initial claiming as one of England’s finest talents.