Jimi Hendrix once stood in as Engelbert Humperdinck’s guitarist incognito
He beat The Beatles to number one, his name sounds like a kind of melty swiss cheese, and he played with Jimi Hendrix. That’s right, It’s Englebert Humperdinck. Born in Madras, India, the British pop singer started singing in his late teens after performing as a saxophonist in various bands throughout the 1950s. He struggled for several years before winning the top prize at Belgium’s 1966 Knokke song festival. A year later, he shared ‘Release Me’, which kept the Beatles from landing yet another number one with ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and ‘Penny Lane’.
Before long, Humperdink was one of the biggest names in show business. ‘Release Me’ spent 56 consecutive weeks in the top 50, selling close to 85,000 copies a day at the height of its popularity, which is presumably why practically every charity shop in the UK has a copy in its vinyl section. In 1968, the singer reached number two in the UK with ‘A Man Without Love’ and, not long after, landed his own television program for ATV and ABC. Humperdinck’s dizzying success saw him cross paths with many musicians of the day, including the great Jimi Hendrix, with whom he went on tour in the spring of 1967. Humperdinck, alongside tour-mates Cat Stevens and The Walker Brothers, would have been present during Hendrix’s iconic show at the Astoria, London, where he set fire to his guitar.
A few years after Hendrix’s death, Humperdinck gave an interview in which he recalled the moment Jimi Hendrix filled in as his guitarist during that 1967 tour. “At one point on one of those dates, my guitarist didn’t show up and Jimi said ‘Don’t worry, man. I’ll play for you.’ I said, ‘You can’t be out in the open playing , you know, you’re a star in your own right.’ He said, ‘I tell you what I’ll do, I’ll play behind the curtain.’ And it was like listening to three guitars behind the curtain when he played.”
Humperdinck got to know Hendrix very well over the course of 1967: “Jimi was quite an unusual character even then, you know,” he continued. “He not only used to burn his guitars and used to smash them up and all that business, but basically, he was a real nice human being. Because I happened to make a comment one day and I said, ‘Jimi, that’s a nice jacket, man.’ He says, ‘I’ll give it to you, man.’ He wanted to take it off his back and give it to me. I wish I had taken it now, at least I would’ve had something very special from a very special man.”
