On the morning of September 24, 1966, a struggling American blues guitarist touched down in Britain for the first time. This being Jimi Hendrix, it was not your average arrival. Rather than a hotel coffee and a jet lag nap, the guitarist found himself being taken to the Fulham hangout of bluesman Zoot Money, where even through ceilings and floors the ensuing jam wowed the unwitting neighbours (it helped that they included the future Police guitarist Andy Summers). Then it was straight on to the hippest members’ joint in town, the Scotch of St James. Apart from spontaneously joining the house band to an awed audience, he also — so the story goes — soon had two former Rolling Stones’ girlfriends arguing over him. Then he nearly got run over by a taxi while leaving.
The fight may be fabled, but what is certainly true is that it took less than 24 hours for Hendrix to be a hit in London, and that one of those women, Kathy Etchingham, would become his girlfriend for two years. All of which I mention having just traipsed around notable Hendrix haunts in the city. Roll up, roll up (take that as you will) for Jimi Hendrix in London: The Ultimate Tour, a new collaboration between Handel Hendrix House in Mayfair and Music Heritage London.
Handel Hendrix House in Mayfair
CHRISTOPHER ISON
The former is one of the most captivating cultural museums in the capital; the latter is the passion project of one Paul Endacott, and put it this way, if you’re interested in a bit of rockandpoptastic anecdotage around swinging 1960s hangouts, Endacott’s your man. My Jimi jaunt — transportation via his groovily adorned SUV — takes us around once-bohemian, now prohibitively upmarket, locales to visit the sites of the Scotch (down Mason’s Yard in Mayfair), the Cromwellian (in South Kensington), the Troubadour (still a going concern in Earls Court) and 22 Lansdowne Crescent (formerly the Samarkand Hotel) in Notting Hill. The last is where Hendrix died — more of which later.
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All roads start and end at Handel Hendrix House on Brook Street just off New Bond Street, the museum taking in the neighbouring homes of two musical minds some 260 years apart. It has been around for some years — the George Frideric Handel property since 2001, after a 36-year campaign (helped along by this paper’s former music critic Stanley Sadie), with the more recent addition of Hendrix’s adjoining flat included as part of a £3 million restoration. Each side gives a vivid sense of these visionaries’ domestic lives. Hendrix’s version of domesticity meant a place where scenesters would freely come and go — the early hours were one joint-fuelled party — and where you might step over a comatose George Harrison on the stairs.
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Hendrix and Etchingham (who inspired Hendrix’s song The Wind Cries Mary — his way of responding to an argument) found their most enduring home here, albeit one of only eight months from July 1968 to March 1969, and the flat is now an immersive time capsule. As well as guitars, rock paraphernalia and record collections, there are more curious details that could only have been afforded by someone who was there — Etchingham (alive and well, living in Australia) has been instrumental in helping curators to get the details authentically correct, right down to the John Lewis rugs and the colour of the ostrich feathers next to the neatly made bed (Hendrix insisted on this ever since his days as a paratrooper).
It’s where the guitar god liked to watch Coronation Street, drink English breakfast tea and play Monopoly. And, of course, listen to music, not least Handel himself. Hendrix discovered the work of his illustrious neighbour after a journalist, interviewing him in the flat, asked him what he thought of the composer’s music. “I don’t really know Handel yet, but I dig a bit of Bach,” Hendrix replied, before heading to HMV Oxford Street to buy recordings of Messiah and Belshazzar. Hendrix later said that he found Handel’s music inspirational. One wonders what Handel might have thought of Hendrix’s.
A recreation of Hendrix’s room
Hendrix in 1969
ERIC HARLOW/MIRRORPIX VIA GETTY IMAGES
If Daniel Defoe called London a “great and monstrous thing”, across Handel and Hendrix’s eras it was an epicentre of fashion and music that proved welcoming to immigrants. Handel was already a success when he arrived in the capital in 1710; Hendrix quite the opposite. But rather than being a barrier, Hendrix’s race gave him instant credibility in a city in thrall to America’s bluesmen. Across the Pond his boundary-pushing musicianship had been ignored.
Endacott, my walking encyclopaedia in John Lennon shades, explains how Britain’s particular receptiveness to black American artists went back as far as the jazz music the American GIs brought to our shores during the war. By the time Hendrix arrived in 1966, his musicianship, his onstage gimmickry (the guitar played with his teeth or behind his head), wasn’t just admired; his stardom achieved vertical lift-off.
Which brings us back to the Scotch of St James club, scene of that eventful first night in Britain. “A month later, the Jimi Hendrix Experience performed their first UK gig as a private showcase here. At that was McCartney, Lennon, Jagger, Andrew Loog Oldham … because it wasn’t just a nightclub here; it was a place to show up your status.”
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We finish staring at the small black entrance door (it’s still a hip hideaway, but closed this afternoon) contemplating visions of Hendrix blowing the minds of London’s coolest crowd, and move on, past the Royal Albert Hall — where the Experience played two momentous final headline gigs in February 1969 (at the first he was too coked up; at the second he was incendiary) — to the site of the Cromwellian.
Opposite the Natural History Museum, the “Crom” was where Hendrix played another early gig in October 1966. Other frequent jammers there, Endacott tells me, included Eric Burdon, Georgie Fame and Eric Clapton; those mingling about included anyone from Margot Fonteyn to Lee Marvin to Sean Connery. “I’ve got photos of Paul McCartney and John Lennon in fancy dress at a party there,” he says. Now it’s an Algerian restaurant. Times change.
Hendrix performing at the Royal Albert Hall in 1969
DAVID REDFERN/REDFERNS
It was not all A-lister stories at the Crom. Endacott’s multifarious tales — many of which have come to him personally from the mouths of those who were there (he’s friends with many, such as Tommy Steele, with whom he used to play squash in Ibiza) — detour into a recollection shared with him by the Kinks’ former road manager about being introduced to the guitarist at the club.
Hearing the roadie’s Welsh accent, Hendrix declared he wanted to go to Wales. Hendrix’s manager, Chas Chandler, said: “I’m sure that’s something we can organise.” Hendrix said: “No, no, you don’t understand — I want to go now!” He wished to pay his respects to those killed in the Aberfan disaster, some three months before. So there and then, Hendrix squeezed into the backseat of an MG for a chilly six-hour journey up the M4 through the night. Never mind that it meant he’d miss recording a performance on Top of the Pops.
Moving on to the atmospheric cellar bar of the Troubadour club, the kind of place where you might imagine you can still smell joint smoke circa 1967, the stories continue to flow, and my head starts to enter a 1960s reverie — a purple haze of Carnaby Street fashions, bubble perms (on the men, that is) and psychedelic hipness. I realise we’re now at 22 Lansdowne Terrace. Staring at the white stucco exterior of this one-time hotel, we sombrely consider Hendrix’s final moments in Room 507 in the basement on Friday, September 18, 1970. He was 27.
“He’d had a night out full of drugs and alcohol, and conspiracy theories abound,” Endacott says (officially, his death was inhalation of vomit due to barbiturate intoxication). “There was a time lapse between him dying and his girlfriend [by then Monika Dannemann] phoning the police or the ambulance. Was that while she and roadies removed drugs from the scene? Were there people who wanted him dead? Did someone pour red wine down him until he died? His stomach, when it was pumped, was full of red wine, and I’m not sure whether he was a red wine drinker.”
It’s quite a contrast to the scene of Handel’s death, in a four-poster bed at his Brook Street home at the age of 74. Yet both, of course, died having made indelible marks on music. Hendrix is gone and so is the London he inhabited, but his legacy lives on, whether through a sightseeing tour or, more eternally, the wailing sounds wrung out of a Stratocaster, as if communing with a different galaxy all together.
Jimi Hendrix in London: The Ultimate Tour (about 90 min) runs Sep 3 and Sep 6 at 11am, 1pm or 3pm; Handel Hendrix House, London, is open Wed-Sun 10am-5pm. More info at handelhendrix.org