JIMI HENDRIX
His 1969 pad in Mayfair has been recreated down to the last detail. We take an advance look before it opens to visitors.
Hendrix’s restored Mayfair bolt-hole is now open to the public. MOJO has a poke about.
Upstairs from Mr Love, the hippy-themed cafe-restaurant with its agreeable late licence; across the road from shoe shop Russell & Bromley; and in convenient staggering distance from the Speakeasy and Scotch Of St. James: for three months in 1969, 23 Brook Street was the Mayfair pied-à-terre of James Marshall Hendrix. As photos and records show – and then-girlfriend Kathy Etchingham remembers it today – it was a busy time. After a whirlwind ’68, Hendrix planned to take a year off, but with relations in the Experience crumbling and the guitar genius in a state of creative flux, it didn’t play out that way. Meanwhile, fellow artists were up and down the stairs for all-hours jam sessions – Paul McCartney, Roland Kirk, Billy Preston (who broke a whisky decanter) – and the two telephones rang off the hook. “Jimi had one phone for music business, and one for friends,” says Etchingham, “but he kept mixing the numbers up.” In 2016, Brook St is much changed (though Russell & Bromley is still there), but stepping into the apartment’s recreated bedroom/ salon is a mooch back in time. Amid the oriental textiles, visitors find accredited Hendrix memorabilia – the actual mirror that sat on the mantelpiece in ’68/69, the Epiphone FT79 acoustic guitar on which he rearranged Dylan’s All Along The Watchtower – plus detailed replicas of the chair and the gangly, fan-knitted teddy bear that were here 47 years ago. Other items are of-the-period: from the sci-fi paperbacks Hendrix devoured to the enormous Lowther speakers he would regularly blow. It’s eerily tidy for a rock star pit, but even that, says Etchingham, is authentic: “It was Jimi’s army training. He made the bed better than I did.” Etchingham had taken on Brook Street in summer 1968, paying £30 a week. Hendrix had recently been evicted from 34 Montagu Square in Marylebone (leaseholder: one R. Starkey) after complaints from the neighbours, and a stint sharing with Hendrix’s manager Chas Chandler and wife Lotta in Upper Berkeley Street had ended in ructions. Moving himself into Brook St properly from January 1969, the guitarist was tickled that composer George Frideric Handel had lived next door (at Number 25) and purchased copies of the Messiah and Belshazzar oratorios from HMV in Oxford Street, augmenting discs by Dylan, Cream, The Beatles, Wes Montgomery, Chris Barber, even Acker Bilk in the Brook St record collection. “One day Jimi was looking in the bathroom mirror and he swore he saw Handel’s silhouette,” recalls Etchingham. “Mind you, he had been smoking.” While aspects of life at Brook St reek of authentic ’60s pop glamour (Etchingham remembers being escorted home from the bank one day carrying £4,000 in cash), the impression left on the modern visitor is of ordinary domestic bliss: a bottle of Mateus Rosé from Mr Love, Coronation Street on the box, a game of Monopoly on the go. “He described it as his first real home,” says Etchingham. Sadly, it was also destined to be his last.