‘Third Stone From The Sun’: the song that connects Jimi Hendrix and Right Said Fred
You could certainly make the argument that Are You Experienced? by the Jimi Hendrix Experience is the greatest debut album of all time. Rarely have so many of a seminal artist’s quintessential hits emerged fresh and ready right out of the oven on day one: ‘Purple Haze’, ‘Foxey Lady’, ‘Hey Joe’, ‘Manic Depression’; they’re all there. And yet, it must be said, the record never managed to top the UK charts, peaking at number two behind The Beatles.
By contrast, another memorable debut album—released 25 years later—raced straight to the top of the chart and blew away all its competition, forever changing the world and the way we think about our respective sexiness in comparison to the objects around us.
Am I suggesting that Right Said Fred’s first album (1992’s Up) is “better” than Hendrix’s classic debut? Alas, if only I were so bold. No, don’t be daft. But there is an unlikely connection between these two disparate works of art. Specifically, it’s the little-known fact that Right Said Fred’s dance club mega-hit ‘I’m Too Sexy’ might never have existed without a subtle but critical bit of influence from James Marshall Hendrix.
More than likely, the first three things you think of when you’re forced to remember ‘I’m Too Sexy’, like when it pops up in an advert at the cinema and there’s no practical method of escape, are the following nouns: shirt, hat, cat. Secondly, you will recall the song’s jaunty, clickety-clack club beat and piano line, which are extremely representative of its era and no other. Finally, if your brain is still working, you will remember the Fairbrass Brothers, hairless but mesh-covered, wiggling about on the Top of the Pops stage.
Nowhere in the Rorschach test of your ‘I’m Too Sexy’ memory banks is a guitar likely to show up, but if you listen to the song, it’s there—a familiar, fuzzy guitar riff forming a sort of structural backbone to the melody, arguably lifting it out of the pure dance category into something with more crossover pop-rock appeal.
That riff, injected into the recording by Right Said Fred guitarist Rob Manzoli, is basically a direct copy-and-paste of the guitar lick from Hendrix’s ‘Third Stone from the Sun’, another track on Are You Experienced. Thanks to the litany of distractions noted above, it took a while for anyone to notice this. But the Jimi Hendrix Estate did do its due diligence, threatening legal action once ‘I’m Too Sexy’ started dominating the airwaves.
“I wasn’t aware that our guitarist, Rob Manzoli, had played the riff from Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Third Stone from the Sun’ on ‘I’m Too Sexy’ until much later,” Fred Fairbrass told the Guardian in 2017. “I thought the guitar parts sounded like the theme from Coronation Street, but the Hendrix estate was very cool about it and just asked for a writing credit and a charitable donation.”
Because the incident didn’t wind up in the courts, the connection between ‘Third Stone’ and ‘I’m Too Sexy’ has remained something of an obscure factoid, often known only by Hendrix mega-fans still researching all the cosmic implications and enduring mysteries of ‘Third Stone From the Sun’ itself. That original song, at nearly seven minutes in length, is a psychedelic space mission in which Jimi—speaking rather than singing—plays the role of a curious alien seeking out the Earth’s finest carnal delights. He isn’t sure, just yet, if he is too sexy for the planet.
At the risk of calling it filler, this fun little LSD trip comes right after the incredible ‘Fire’ on Are You Experienced?, and basically functions as a chance for everybody to catch their breath. No one could have imagined that the seeds had been planted for a future novelty dance hit. On the bright side, there might at least be less risk of encountering ‘I’m Too Sexy’ in trashy adverts going forward, considering the more recent antics of its creators.
