Hendrix’s flat recreated along with his possessions (Image: Hendrix’s flat recreated along with his possessions)
At first look, Jimi Hendrix and George Frideric Handel wouldn’t look like splendid neighbours.
One was an electrical guitarist – the best of all time, in keeping with Rolling Stone journal – who fused blistering jazz and blues-inspired riffs with sound distortion and suggestions strategies to create a mode of music by no means earlier than heard.
A flamboyant showman, he would pluck the strings of his guitar along with his tooth while enjoying Hey Joe and, on one event, set his guitar alight on stage. Seattle-born Hendrix’s pursuit of the rock‘n’roll life-style contributed to his early demise in 1970.
It additionally certified him for membership of the so-called ‘27 Club’: the group of artists and musicians, together with Amy Winehouse, Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain, who died aged 27 – many, like Hendrix, from drug overdoses.
Handel alternatively was a baroque classical music composer who made his identify with operas, cantatas and oratorios in Italy and his native Germany, earlier than shifting to England the place he composed for state events and the royal court docket.
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A recreation of Jimi Hendrix's bed room is displayed on the Handel and Hendrix exhibition (Image: Getty)
A personal and well mannered member of London society, whose solely recognized extra was an overfondness for meals, he composed Zadok The Priest for the crowning of King George II in 1727.
It has been used at each coronation since, together with that of King Charles III final month.
Yet, bizarrely, these two excellent musicians have been truly next-door neighbours, divided by one brick wall and two centuries. Both lived on Brook Street in London’s upmarket Mayfair district: Handel occupied the entire of quantity 25 from 1723 when it was constructed till his demise in 1759; whereas Hendrix had a flat on the high of quantity 23 from 1968 to 1969.
Both rented their lodging. Handel, paying £35 a 12 months, was a foreigner, which means he was forbidden from proudly owning property.
Whilst Hendrix’s status for hellraising (he’d been evicted from Ringo Starr’s condominium in Montagu Square after splashing white paint over the partitions throughout an acid journey) meant solely his British girlfriend Kathy Etchingham may signal the tenancy settlement for £30 every week.
The two homes have since been mixed and remodeled right into a museum referred to as Handel Hendrix House which, following an 18-month renovation, has simply reopened to the general public.
It’s probably the one place on this planet the place guests can time-travel between two key intervals historical past, just by stepping throughout a hallway. The museum recreates how the rooms would have appeared when their two well-known tenants lived there.
Using a lot of Hendrix and Handel’s authentic possessions (and replicas), it exhibits how the 2 musicians, regardless of their vastly completely different backgrounds and eras, had extra in widespread than simply some Georgian brickwork.
Curator Claire Davies explains how, in addition to being nice musical improvisers, “Handel and Hendrix were both immigrants to London, and it was here that both of their careers took off”. She continues: “There was this incredible relationship between them and London.
“The music scenes that they were both so welcomed into also kicked off because they were here. Handel comes to England at a time when Italy, the Grand Tour and everything Italian is of great interest to people. He has honed his craft in Italian opera and so has something quite exciting and cosmopolitan to offer the Georgian elite who surround him and his career. Whereas Hendrix brings that cool, US youth culture to the sixties music scene.”
Contact sheets of pictures in 1969 by photographer Barrie Wentzell contained in the Hendrix Flat (Image: Getty)
Hendrix had moved to Brook Street in the summertime of 1968 to write down songs for an album – The Cry of Love which, although unfinished throughout his lifetime, was launched posthumously – and put together for a collection of concert events on the Royal Albert Hall.
He and Kathy furnished the flat with turquoise curtains and a crimson carpet purchased from the materials division of John Lewis in close by Oxford Street.
On recognizing the blue plaque exterior, and realising Handel had been his neighbour 200 years earlier, the guitarist went straight to a store in close by South Molton Street and purchased the composer’s music.
Copies of Hendrix’s vinyl assortment on show embody Handel’s Messiah, the well-known oratorio whose efficiency annually has develop into a standard a part of the British Christmas.
As nicely as giving interviews and posing for photograph shoots in his flat, Hendrix additionally entertained among the greatest names in music.
The Beatles’ HQ in Savile Row was simply across the nook from Brook Street and George Harrison stayed within the spare room upstairs. Entertaining didn’t typically stretch to full-blown dinner events, although.
Whilst Handel’s house comprises the one working Georgian kitchen on show in London – an enormous room with three separate ovens – Hendrix’s kitchen was so tiny it’s not even on present, used as a substitute as a employees workplace.
Fortunately for the guitarist, there was a Wimpy restaurant close by the place the couple would go for hamburgers and one other restaurant referred to as Mr Love, simply beneath the flat.
It was from the latter that Hendrix would order takeaway dinners – all the time the identical order: steak and chips, a bottle of Mateus rosé wine and a packet of Benson & Hedges cigarettes.
A modern eatery within the late sixties, Mr Love’s different regulars included Dusty Springfield and Scott Walker, in addition to the Bee Gees who have been neighbours of Hendrix on the time, dwelling at 67 Brook Street.
Jimi Hendrix performs dwell on stage on the Royal Albert Hall in London on twenty fourth February 1969 (Image: Getty)
Jimi’s sister, Janie Hendrix, was nonetheless a younger lady when her huge brother sadly died in 1970 however remembers him coming house for household dinners and gatherings. Speaking from her house in Seattle, she informed the Daily Express how Jimi would, after entertaining everybody with tales from his travels, like to get the entire household concerned in one among his favorite pursuits: enjoying Monopoly.
“He was ruthless,” laughs Janie, who has lately launched a brand new guide, Jimi, about his profession and life. “He bought up all the good streets and would build as many hotels as he could on them.
“He had this maniacal laugh when you would land on one of his properties. And he loved to be the little boot [playing piece] because he loved shoes and clothes.”
Janie explains: “Our grandma used to sing and dance in vaudeville. Jimi used to see the costumes she wore on stage and they really inspired his fashion sense – the trinkets, the velvets, the feathers and the big hats.
They were all like the things that grandma used to wear on stage and in real life.”
Inside the Handel Hendrix House museum, there’s a dressing-up room the place guests can attempt on silk hats and feather boas like those Hendrix used to put on, in addition to baroque courtier-style wigs from Handel’s period. Janie remembers how a lot enjoyable she and her brother had dressing up collectively.
“He had this big black cape and he used to chase me around like he was Batman, singing the Batman theme tune,” she smiles. “We’d sit in the yard together and he’d put daisy-chain necklaces together for me.
“My memories of Jimi are of him smiling and laughing like a kid because I was a kid myself. I remember the sweetness and the kindness and what a loving person he was.”
Hendrix as soon as mentioned London “is the place I feel most comfortable… the English are my friends”. And Janie has a proof for her brother’s affinity for the UK.
“When Jimi was in high school, he got suspended for holding a girl’s hand, because she was white. In London it wasn’t that way. It seemed to Jimi that, in London, people were more accepting of different cultures and people of various colours and backgrounds.
George Frederick Handel (Image: gETTY)
“They didn’t care what race you came from, you were just part of the human race. So he felt free in London, both in himself and his music.” Handel additionally took shortly to his new house in London and loved the liberty it provided, in keeping with Donald Burrows, a professor on the Open University and an skilled on the composer.
“England had a very liberal atmosphere,” he explains of the Georgian interval.
“Music, culture, newspapers were all flourishing at the time. There was no equivalent on the continent.
“In 1695, the lapse of the censorship act meant that people in Britain could write or publish anything. It was a form of literary liberty with the result that the arts – literature, poetry, music – they all flourished.”
Professor Burrows has nice respect for each residents of this distinctive constructing in Brook Street.
And, as he says of those two cultural greats who each selected London to dwell and who each modified music in their very own methods:
“Creative people have got their own environment and own way of doing things. And the best ones are real individuals,” he provides.
“They are special people who know what to do with music. And that’s certainly true of both Handel and Hendrix.”
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