Jimi Hendrix Experience Jimi pulls off blinder, despite stage invasions, heavy-handed cops and intra-band friction.

It was a very good one… It’s being recorded! By whom? For whom?” declared Noel Redding’s diary entry for April 1969’s gig at LA’s Forum. The ever-griping bassist, who would leave Hendrix that June, got his answer when most of the show turned up on 1990’s Lifelines box set.

Now upgraded by Experience Hendrix, the recording from that night perfectly captures the conflict between Jimi’s ever-questing genius and outside pressures in a tumultuous year that also saw his liberty-threatening heroin bust, shortlived Woodstock band and, embracing black roots, the formation of Band Of Gypsys to honour a predatory lawsuit. Happiest forging his fourth album at New York’s Record Plant, Jimi felt shackled playing big arenas but, with professionalism ingrained from his chitlin’ circuit days, instinctively put on a show, stretching chestnuts into improvisational flights.

In this set the sometimes tangible friction between Hendrix and Redding is bridged by Mitch Mitchell, playing the first of two drum solos in the opening jam around the instrumental Tax Free.

Hendrix initially dispenses flashes of supernatural guitar brilliance more like reflex reactions than extended reveries, although a mercurial Red House,

followed by jazzy chording and sustained meteor storm that extends Spanish Castle Magic, is thrillingly cathartic. Freak-out fusillades in Purple Haze and I Don’t Live Today ignite the 17,000 audience, many rushing the stage already overrun by cops.

Hendrix sounds unsettled, asking the audience to sit down (“to get rid of the other folks”), before coaxing cheeky ‘fuck you’s from his guitar. After he settles the audience down, the set roars to a sizzling close aboard a savage 17-minute medley of Voodoo Child (Slight Return),

Mitchell’s second drum solo and Cream’s Sunshine Of Your Love, Hendrix marking his crowd-control triumph with the night’s most devastating guitar salvo.

If not a classic tour de force, this pressurecooker set remains an era-capturing document of the social turmoil and pressures Hendrix faced as the world’s greatest rock guitarist, always burning to make his next move.