Jimi Hendrix played Nottingham three times in 1967. His place in musical history is well documented and beyond my need to explain and give wisdom but in a nutshell he came to a vibrant Britain in the mid sixties bringing the blues and fusing it with the new psychedelic rock and took the guitar as an instrument to a new height which is still used as a barometer for guitarists today.
First visit
The Beachcomber Club: Saturday January 14th, 1967
This gig was early on in Jimi Hendrix’s career. He only arrived in the UK in September 1966 and still had only one single release to his name: “Hey Joe / Stone Free”.
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from http://www.jimihendrix-lifelines.net/1967jan-june/styled-14/styled-32/index.html
14 JANUARY • SATURDAY
Nottingham, ‘Beachcomber Club’, Lace Market, Nottinghamshire, England.
Concert (60 minutes)
Support: Jimmy Cliff And Shakedown Sound. The Shakedowns eventually ‘morphed’ into Mott The Hoople.
Accommodation: [the famous] Black Boy Hotel [now demolished], Long Row, Nottingham.
Also billed at the Beachcomber that month Le Gay from Leicester, Haydocks Rockhouse from Manchester and Nottingham’s soul group Robert Hirst and the Big Taste.
Songs: from a set list scrawled on Hyde Park Towers notepaper:
Can You See Me
Mercy, Mercy (Don Covay)
Like A Rolling Stone (Bob Dylan)
Rock Me Baby (BB King)
3rd Stone From The Sun
Foxy Lady
Stone Free
Hey Joe (Billy Roberts)
Wild Thing (John ‘Chip Taylor’ Voight)
With thanks to Renwick McNeill.
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Some memories from Jimmy Cliff
Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Cliff were artistes from entirely different worlds living in London during the Swinging Sixties. One was a psychedelic bluesman, the other a ska and rocksteady act. Today is the 50th anniversary of Hendrix’ death. The man considered the greatest guitarist in pop music died in London at age 27 from a drug overdose. Born in Seattle, Washington, Hendrix cut his teeth playing with acts like King Curtis and The Isley Brothers. But it was in the racially and musically tolerant United Kingdom that he got his break. He moved there in late 1966 around the same time Cliff, a former child star, went to the UK and signed with Island Records.
On January 14 1967, Hendrix’ band The Experience shared the stage with Cliff at the Beachcomber Club in Nottingham. Cliff was backed by The Shakedown Sound.
He remembered the show in a 2012 interview with Reggaeville.com.
“There’s a picture of Jimi Hendrix in the reception area of this hotel. Tell me about meeting Jimi Hendrix in Britain for the first time…”
“I used to play the clubs. I think I was playing in Nottingham. A week before my gig they asked me, ‘Y’know there’s this new guitarist… do you mind if he opens for you?’ It wasn’t like a real opener because I used to do two sets so they said, ‘Do you mind if he does one set in between your two?’ I didn’t mind, I didn’t know him, but when he came to the club I had just finished my first set so when I came off he came to me and said, ‘What’s the name of your your band, man?’ I said, ‘Jimmy Cliff and the Shakedown Sounds’. He said ‘Maaaaan… you can sing! I can’t sing. I can just play my guitar’ (laughs). Apparently, he didn’t have all that much confidence in his singing! But then he went on and he tore the place up! After that we became pretty close. Every time we were coming back from a gig up north or down south, we’d stop at (a) café and talk about how our gigs went and how things were going. He was one of the kindest people you could ever find,” said Cliff.
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http://popcultureclassics.com/jimmy_cliff.html
PCC: What do you recall about sharing a bill with Jimi Hendrix? Was that a memorable experience?
CLIFF: That was a very memorable experience, because Hendrix is one of the originals, and for the fact that he opened for me. And we had some nice conversations. I remember the first conversation we had, the night that he first opened for me. He was a great soul. Very inspirational spirit that came on the scene here. He did his work very quickly and just left, left the scene.
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Chris Steer from local Nottingham band “Injun” remembers going to the gig at the Beachcomber:
“actually I don’t remember that much. I knew who he was and wanted to see him. The Beachcomber club was in St Mary’s Gate basically the same building as where the later Ad-Lib club was located. It was only half full, people didn’t really know him yet, and I could stand right at the front within touching distance. Hendrix was great.”
From Kathy Etchingham’s facebook page (Jimi’s then girlfriend) is a short memory of staying at the Black Boy Hotel. I’ve left the following memory of Middlesborough as it describes that sometimes rock and roll wasn’t always fun.
In January 1967 Jimi and I drove up north in Gerry Stickells’ old van for a gig in Nottingham where we stayed at the Black Boy Hotel, which Jimi thought was a very strange name for a hotel. Chas and Lotta came up on the train.
The next day we drove further north through sleet and snow to a very rough club somewhere near Middlesborough. After the gig when the van was packed up Jimi started to do some arm wrestling with the bouncers and he won. They then did a drinking game which involved doing press-ups and picking up bottles. I think Jimi learnt how to do this sort of thing in the Army. Jimi won again and one of the bouncers stepped forward and said “We’re going to have to teach this nigger to play fair” or something like that. Before we could blink Chas had whipped round and with one punch knocked the bouncer out cold. Jimi and I ran to the van with Gerry Stickells while Chas kept the rest of the bouncers off. The van wouldn’t start so Jimi and I had to get out and push the van to get it going. I was wearing little strappy sandals in the slushy snow but we got the van started and skidded and slid away. Chas must have then made his way to the railway station with Lotta. Jimi, Gerry Stickells and I drove up to Newcastle that night to Chas’ parents’ house but we were so shocked by what we had just seen we hardly said anything on the journey.
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Second visit
The Sherwood Rooms, Nottingham, Tuesday 29th August 1967, (Nottingham Blues Festival)
From http://www.jimihendrix-lifelines.net/1967july-dec/styled-6/styled-76/index.html
Nottingham, “Sherwood Rooms”, ‘Nottingham Blues Festival’, Nottinghamshire
Concert (between 19.30 and 01.00).
1,300 people attended.
Support: Jimmy James & The Vagabonds; Jimmy Cliff; Wynder K. Frogg; Long John Baldry.
Songs played: Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band; Killing Floor: Hey Joe; Fire; I Don’t Live Today; Like A Rolling Stone (15-minute version); Purple Haze.
The “Dancing” Ad has Stewart W. Brown & Marsha Hunt listed. Stu Brown was a member of Bluesology as was Marsha Hunt briefly. Bluesology was Long John Baldry’s backing band. Bluesology also featured Reginald Dwight who would become better known as Elton John.
Journalist Richard Williams wrote a review of Jimi Hendrix’s gig in the “Nottingham Guardian Journal”.
GUARDIAN JOURNAL – ‘Here’s An Experience that hits you for six!’ by Richard Williams:
“If you’ll pardon the pun, watching and hearing Jimi Hendrix at the Sherwood Rooms last Tuesday [29 August, Nottingham] was a supremely emotional experience. Yet the question is: How many of the 1,300 people there shared it? Naturally, there were scores of Hendrix fanatics in vociferous attendance. Like most hard-core enthusiasts, they are incapable of objective judgment and for them Jimi can do no wrong. But there were also those, and I saw many of them, who were apparently non-plussed by the startling, electrifying show put on by the American and his accomplices, drummer Mitch Mitchell and bass player Noel Redding. This puzzled me somewhat until the idea struck home that perhaps there are people who really dug the records of “Hey Joe” and “Wind Cries Mary” but are not yet ready to see Hendrix live. To be sure, you have to put up with a lot to be able to appreciate him. There were long pauses for guitar tuning between numbers, a rambling spoken introduction to “Purple Haze,” and several wide open spaces where nothing at all seemed to be happening.
Shattering
But what came out of the 50-minute show was a demonstration of 1967 pop music almost shattering in it’s occasional intensity, delivered with the offhand ease of Garfield Sobers [A famous West Indian cricketer] straight-driving to the boundary. And that’s where, I think, Jimi wants to take us: to the boundaries of ourselves, the very limits of our souls. In his mindless thunder he tries to help us find out something about the world around—the violence and the beauty, the love and the pain. But at the Sherwood Rooms this objective could not be reached. The place was too big, the crowd too puzzled, and the acoustics cruelly sabotaged the rolling tom-toms of Mitchell. After opening with a roaring short version of “Sgt. Pepper’, the group charged into Howlin’ Wolf’s “Killing Floor”, which amply demonstrated Jimi’s roots in the Urban Blues he heard in his youth.
Jig of joy
He spun, twisted, and bent his rangy body in sympathy with every nuance of his screaming guitar, while Redding did a little jig of joy and Mitchell threw himself all over his immense drum kit in a frenzy of jagged rhythm. “Fire,” his rocking teenybopper song, preceded a rather perfunctory version of “Hey Joe,” which helped to prove my pet theory that when people play their old hits faster than the recorded version they’re just not interested in them any more. His solo, played with his teeth, also demonstrated that the original was played in the conventional manner, as he never approached the fluent swing of the record. “I Don’t Live Today,” although short, showed that he was getting down to the nitty-gritty, and then came the real stunner when he complied with requests to play his famous version of Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone.” As Mitch and Noel riffed quietly in the background, Jimi’s guitar sputtered and smouldered until the phrases caught fire as he crashed out the song’s chords. He sang the words quietly, and with respect to their composer, and on the last chorus he built up such a climax that the music seemed almost to continue under its own internal momentum. It lasted well over 15 minutes, and was quite simply a masterpiece, But the final freedom was realised in “Purple Haze, “at the end of which he created a beautiful sound-picture by thumping his guitar against the huge wall of speakers behind him, before carelessly casting the instrument to the ground, giving the crowd a wave and a shrug, and shambling off, followed by his henchmen. In a way, the three of them are all musical assassins. They twist, tear, and murder noise and, in doing so, present a virtual insult to the senses which can’t help but provoke a reaction. Mitch may well become the most important of them all, because he seems to be on the way to developing a new style of rock drumming, based less on the insistent splash of a cymbal than on a ceaseless torrent of sound from all the devices at his disposal. He is on his way to almost totally arithmetic playing, with no steady beat or pulse, but whether THAT innovation is ever accepted only time will tell—after all, you won’t be able to dance to it!”
Also on a forum here.
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Memories from Firbeck on Nottstalgia February 10, 2011
“My brother saw Hendrix at the Sherwood Rooms in 1968, he got a ticket, I didn’t, I was shattered, although he reported back that he spent the evening in a cloud of other peoples dope smoke, I wondered why he fell in the door when he came home, a naughty Chartered Accountant.”
Firbeck also suggests that Hendrix might have played Nottingham in support of the Walker Brothers but he must be mistaken on that fact. The Walker Brothers were on the bill with Jimi Hendrix but not in Nottingham.
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Maurice Moore from his website remembers:
the Nottingham Blues Festival, featuring:
Jimmy James and the Vagabonds, a popular soul band,
Jimmy Cliff,
Wynder K Frog,
Long John Baldry and Bluesology,
the Jimi Hendrix Experience. I’m quite sure Jimi set his guitar on fire at the end of the set;
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Third visit
The Theatre Royal, Nottingham, 3rd December 1967
This was a package tour featuring seven bands. There was two shows on the night. By December Jimi Hendrix was the sensation of the year so both performances were sold out and memories are clearer.
Nottingham, “Theatre Royal”, Theatre Square, Nottinghamshire, England
Concert (two shows – 17.30 and 20.00).
Support: The Move, Pink Floyd, Amen Corner, Outer Limits, Eire Apparent, The Nice
MC: Pete Drummond.
Accommodation: ‘Royal Station Hotel’, Neville Street, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, (this meant a coach drive of 310 kilometres after the show).
The programme for the show
You can look through all the pages on the Theatre Royal website
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Memories from Sue Topham
From: https://www.nottinghampost.com/whats-on/music-nightlife/there-pink-floyd-syd-barrett-
I was there: When Pink Floyd and Syd Barrett blew minds at the Theatre Royal Nottingham 50 years ago.
Sue loved the Pink Floyd track Arnold Layne because that is where she lived in Gedling – and once met Jimi Hendrix.
By Pam Pearce 11:33, 3 DEC 2017 EVENING POST
It is 50 years since Pink Floyd first played in Nottingham. The band, still years away from being the stadium-filling global phenomenon they would become were just making their mark. And the gig on December 3 1967, was remarkable in that it would be one of the last featuring the brilliant but troubled Syd Barrett.
Sue Topham, who then lived in Gedling, was there. In 1967 Sue was 16 and a schoolgirl at Carlton Le Willows Technical Grammar School. She had watched Pink Floyd on Top of the Pops that summer and had first been drawn to their single Arnold Layne because “that was the road I lived on in Gedling!”. Pink Floyd and Arnold Layne quickly became favourites along with See Emily Play. She saw Floyd twice, at the Theatre Royal Nottingham in 1967 and at Trent Poly in 1971.
But in 1967, Floyd were just starting out. They had a couple of singles out and had become famous for their psychedelic lightshows. Think lava lamps and strobe lighting. But the 1967 show – with Jimi Hendrix on the bill too – did not quite go to plan. Pink Floyd had been formed in 1965 by Cambridge students Syd Barrett who played guitar and was lead vocalist, Nick Mason on drums, Roger Waters on bass and vocals and Richard Wright on keyboards and vocals. The band had played the Boat Club in April that year and this was their second appearance in Nottingham. As with many bands in those days, Pink Floyd played two shows a night, at 5.30pm and 8pm. They were joined by Jimi Hendrix, The Move and Amen Corner.
Sue and her six friends caught the bus into Nottingham from Gedling on this Sunday evening. The gig ticket cost 17/6 (17 shillings and 6 old pence) and they had seats in the stalls at the front. Just like a lot of teenagers in the 60s, Sue had got to know her music from listening to medium wave radio in the evenings at home in Gedling. “The reception for Radio Luxembourg was pretty awful so I always preferred the pirate radio stations.” Sue said. “I used to love Wonderful Radio London – Big L. The reception was good and they played great music, but they were forced to close down that August. It was a memorable and sad day. The last song played on the station was A Day in the Life by the Beatles.” The year 1967 was a fascinating time on the music scene. Jimi Hendrix’s Are you Experienced had been released in May, The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper had come out in June, The Small Faces released the single Itchycoo Park in July. Radio 1 was launched by the BBC in October. In America, the year had seen the “summer of love”.
Sue, today in her 60s, lives in north Nottinghamshire with husband David. She still has the ticket stub and the colourful programme from that Theatre Royal gig. And lots of memories. She said: “I was expecting a psychedlic light show during Pink Floyd’s set – the band were famous for it – and a huge white sheet was draped at the back of the stage ready for the show. “Then someone announced that, because it was a Sunday, for some reason they could not do the light show. It was a great shame. In fact the stage was very dark for the Pink Floyd performance. “I remember they did an incredible version of Interstellar Overdrive and and Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun. It was amazing, but all over very quickly. They played no more than 15 minutes – there were 6 other bands to fit into the gig.” “I had a great time that evening, but very recently I came across a mystery surrounding the concert. I discovered that Syd Barrett did not make it to some of the theatres on this tour, and a guitarist from The Nice replaced him on stage. So, amazingly, I’m not sure if I actually saw Syd that night.” “Syd Barrett was undoubtedly the genius behind the band in the early days. The main influence. It is sad what happened to him.” By the end of December 1967 Syd had left the group, replaced by Dave Gilmour. Floyd were not the only band on the bill. A cornucopia of artists made it a memorable night.
The Move played for 30 minutes, Pink Floyd were on after the interval and Jimi Hendrix did 40 minutes as top of the bill. Sue remembers the show as much for Jimi Hendrix as for Floyd. She said: “He wore velvet pants, a striking coloured jacket and a hat. “He started off with a brilliant version of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, as a tribute to the Beatles, followed by his famous tracks Hey Joe, Purple Haze, The Wind Cried Mary and The Burning of the Midnight Lamp. “It was a tremendous gig and quite a spectacle. It was the first time I’d felt the giddy effects of strobe lighting. “I remember him playing his Stratocaster guitar with his teeth, above his head and behind his back. He set fire to his guitar using a splash of lighter fluid, and knelt beside it conjuring up the flames. “Quite a striking image and one expected by the audience, who’d come to see the full Jimi experience.”
Fast forward to May 21, 1971 and Sue saw Pink Floyd again at Trent Polytechnic, now Nottingham Trent University. This was an altogether different experience. Sue has vivid memories of queuing up to get in. She said:“ I think we paid on the door. The gig was part of the “Atom Heart Mother Tour” and I particularly remember Careful with that Axe Eugene. “There was an amazing light show that night with swirling oil patterns and lizards projected onto the walls and ceiling, all in bright technicolour. “The music was incredibly loud with deep thumping rhythms that resonated throughout your whole body. It was packed out and very hot and I started feeling very peculiar, but survived to the end.” For Sue, 1967 was an important year for musical outings. She even met Jimi Hendrix before his show on April 16, 1967 at the De Montfort Hall, Leicester. She said: “It was a beautiful day. He came out of the stage door, walked right up to me and asked me if I knew where he could get some ice cream. “I was taken aback to say the least and said ‘down there’ and pointed to where the shops were. I had no idea whether there was ice cream there or not, I wasn’t from Leicester. But it was amazing to meet Jimi. “The image of this towering, incredibly polite. friendly, smiling guy dressed in a black velvet jacket with a beautiful Moonstone brooch will forever be my memory of Jimi Hendrix. “I saw Jimi several times in 1967, in Leicester, Lincoln, Hanley and Nottingham. He remains the best live act I’ve ever seen.”
Sue is an amateur musician in her own right and, with her husband David, produces music for friends, just for the fun of it. “We have been honoured to play in an ancient church in the depths of winter, which was a challenge as there was no electricity, and we had to rely on candles to see what we were doing! “We are also very fortunate to live in the East Midlands with its fantastic tradition of promoting live music at smaller venues such as Lowdham Village Hall, Farnsfield Acoustic, Bonington Theatre Arnold, National Forest Folk Club at Swadlincote and The Musician in Leicester.”
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http://novdec1967.blogspot.com/2010/02/3-december-1967-theatre-royal.html
3 December 1967 Theatre Royal Nottingham
2 shows
Nottingham Evening News And Post (4 December) by Richard Williams: “The audience, older than most, gave a reception which was scarcely more than polite to most of the groups, and it was not until the arrival of Hendrix that they really went wild. Starting off with a deafening ‘Sgt. Pepper’, he built a climax right through his act until, in his hit song ‘Purple Haze’, the theatres sedate foundations threatened to crumble under the weight of his assault. Although he was not quite at the top of his game, an out-of-form Hendrix can still carve any other blues group into ribbons.”
Phil J. Ellis wrote in with his memories of the night, and he supplied a scan of his ticket and the newspaper advert for this night. Thanks Phil!
“I’d been a Jimi fan right back to when I saw him for the first time on TV performing Hey Joe but didn’t start going to gigs until later in 1967. When the amazing line-up for the winter package tour headlined by Jimi was announced, I quickly snapped up a ticket for the early show at Nottingham’s Theatre Royal – couldn’t do the late show as the last bus home left at 9pm and having only recently left school, I was a few years off owning a car! I have a number of very strong memories from the night – Keith Emerson of The Nice throwing his old Hammond around, The Move’s Trev Burton walking out and kicking over an amp, Syd Barrett failing to show and The Nice’s Davey O’List standing in for him with Pink Floyd, Andy Fairweather-Low in white suit going down on his knees to sing Gin House with the totally-out-of-place teenybop band Amen Corner.
But it was The Jimi Hendrix Experience I was there to see. As I faced the stage, Jimi stood to the left, Noel to the right with Mitch in the middle. Jimi was wearing a wonderful jacket with horizontal waves of orange, beige and black which I have never seen in a photo. I think he was also wearing a white ruffled shirt and orange trousers but it’s the jacket that sticks in the mind. Being an early show, Jimi didn’t really pull out the stops. I recall an entertaining but workmanlike trot through the hits and a couple of album tracks including some trademark playing with teeth and behind the head. Again, ICan’t be 100% sure but I’d say the set list included Hey Joe, Purple Haze, Wind Cries Mary, Burning of the Midnight Lamp, Foxey Lady and Spanish Castle Magic. There was certainly no Killing Floor, Like a Rolling Stone or Wild Thing which at that time I had read about but never heard. So that was the first time I saw Jimi live. I spent the next couple of years waiting in vain for the next UK tour. Sadly, it was never to be.”
After the shows the bands drive over 300Km by coach to their accomadation: ‘Royal Station Hotel’, Neville Street, Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
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From the Jimi-Hendrix lifelines webpage again
Alex Triantafyllou: “ Jimi Hendrix signed and inscribed programme page signed at the Theatre Royal, Nottingham, on the night of December the 3rd, 1967.”
