Why did Jimi Hendrix move to England?
Jimi Hendrix was a Seattle boy through and through, but success didn’t come easily to him in his homeland. In the early 1960s, he drifted across the American gig circuit, from Washington to Tennessee, with little to show for his efforts. In hindsight, it seems absurd—how could the world’s greatest guitarist have been on the brink of permanent obscurity?
It was a fate so grim that even the main man himself couldn’t face up to it, so much so that he decided he had to take action. But his move wasn’t just one of sound or vision – it was one that saw him leap across the pond. London famously became Hendrix’s spiritual home and the height of his most seismic success, but his decision to uproot his American life and land there wasn’t one taken lightly.
Yet it needed to happen because Hendrix was barely scraping a living from the relentless American circuit. However, after being spotted by a savvy record representative, he was put into contact with Chas Chandler, the former bassist for The Animals. At this point, Chandler was leaving his days on the stage behind and trying to carve out a career in rock music production.
Seeing Hendrix as the genius he was and sensing his first big hitmaker on his hands, Chandler relocated the burgeoning guitarist to his native London on September 24th, 1966, and set about turning him into a star. To do that, he first changed his name and then went in search of a crack team of backup musicians who would complement Hendrix’s raw talent in its finest form – and found Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell to fit the order.
This lineup was the making of the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and from there they began scouring the scene for gigs. On October 1st, 1966, Chandler brought Hendrix and Co to perform at the London Polytechnic, where the band Cream were performing that night and another guitar maestro, Eric Clapton, was left reeling by the new kid on the block.
Speaking of his memories from that night, Clapton said: “He played just about every style you could think of, and not in a flashy way. I mean he did a few of his tricks, like playing with his teeth and behind his back, but it wasn’t in an upstaging sense at all, and that was it … He walked off, and my life was never the same again.”
That was a sense not just in Clapton but also in Hendrix himself, as it was a seminal moment in which, finally, his fates began to look much brighter. Within months of his crash onto the British scene, Hendrix and the Experience had scored a triple whammy of top ten hits in the form of ‘Hey Joe’, ‘The Wind Cries Mary’, and ‘Purple Haze’.
At this point, the only way was up, and, well, you don’t need to be told what happened next. Hendrix, in all his short flash of a life and career, marked the industry forever with his extraordinary talent. But just think – it might never have come to it if Chandler hadn’t made him move to London, and if one thing’s certain, the state of the musical world would have been left so much worse.
