Nish Kumar will take Jimi Hendrix’s London story to Chelsea Arts Festival next week, turning an unexpected sideline into the centre of a public appearance. The comedian has described himself as a Hendrix pundit, and this event puts that knowledge in front of a festival audience rather than leaving it as a private obsession.
23 Brook Street and 1966
“I have a weird sideline in my career as a sort of Jimi Hendrix pundit,” Kumar said from his flat, a line that fits the route his interest has taken since age 14. He says it began on a school trip to Sheffield’s Museum of Popular Music, where he put on Electric Ladyland and heard “Crosstown Traffic” for the first time.
That first listen led him into the part of Hendrix’s story that London made possible. Hendrix arrived in winter 1966, and by late 1966 Chas Chandler had discovered him and brought him to London, where the guitarist’s first recordings of material he had written himself started.
London in 150-capacity rooms
Kumar’s case for treating Hendrix as a London story rests on scale as much as myth. He said Hendrix’s entire recording career is “essentially just over three years,” a short span that makes every release and unreleased session carry more weight than a longer career would have done.
“That’s when it goes deep,” Kumar said of the unreleased material, “because he did so much recording in a really short space of time that just was never released.” “London was a cultural crucible in the late 60s. The Beatles – the most famous people in the world – are just sat in these 150-capacity clubs,” he said, which is the backdrop for Hendrix’s arrival into a scene already moving fast.
Jimi Hendrix and George Frideric Handel
Hendrix’s London years also left a physical footprint at 23 Brook Street, where he settled with Kathy Etchingham beside the house George Frideric Handel had lived in 200 years earlier. Kumar called that move “Then this great cosmic coincidence,” and the address now carries a Blue Plaque and a museum connection for Jimi Hendrix and George Frideric Handel.
Hendrix’s timeline closes in September 1970, but Kumar’s appearance next week keeps the London chapter active for anyone who wants the sharper version of the story: not just the legend, but the narrow window in which he became a recording artist under his own name. What Kumar will present about Hendrix’s London life at Chelsea Arts Festival is not specified, and that leaves the event pointed at the same thing his own argument keeps returning to — the years when Hendrix’s career was brief, concentrated and made in London.
