5. The Jimi Hendrix ExperienceElectric Ladyland

The reason I chose this album is primarily because of ‘Voodoo Chile’ to be completely honest. Discovering that as an English boy growing up in the countryside… There’s a big fuck off picture of Hendrix in my mum’s office, but weirdly enough he wasn’t played often in our house. I’m not sure how I discovered him, but I remember being stopped in my tracks – how is this possible? How can somebody play like this? I don’t think anyone could play like Hendrix ever again. The stage presence, setting his guitar on fire, those stories from Woodstock, playing the guitar behind his head, all of that stuff. 

I never got guitar lessons at school, but I played a lot of guitar, so I was around the guitar teacher a lot. It might have been him that turned us on to Hendrix, along with people like Stevie Ray Vaughan. As kids, we all wished we were there at Woodstock in the 60s. I remember having those conversations in school like the one in [2003 Bernardo Bertolucci film] The Dreamers: are you a Clapton fan, or are you a Hendrix fan? “Clapton picks up the electric guitar and plays it like it’s an acoustic, but Hendrix picks up the electric guitar and plays it completely differently.” I think I fucked the line up, there. [“Clapton plugs in an electric guitar and he plays it like an acoustic guitar. Hendrix plugs in an electric guitar, he plays with his teeth.”]