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In September 1966, a DJ and hairdresser from Derby walked into the Scotch of St James nightclub in London. "There were stairs winding down to the basement and everybody was leaning over the banisters to listen to this guy sitting in the corner of the club playing," remembers Etchingham, who was then just 20. "They were enthralled." The lighting in the club was so low that she could barely see Jimi Hendrix, who was then just 24 and newly arrived from New York. His talent was obvious, but at this stage his new English manager, Chas Chandler, hadn't even found him a backing band.
When the set was over, Chandler introduced Etchingham to Hendrix. With his army jacket, Afro hair and flowery shirts, the black American was unlike any man she had ever met before. "He just looked unusual - stunning really," she says. "He was fresh and he had a very soft sort of American accent." Within minutes, Hendrix was whispering: "I think you're beautiful" in her ear. Etchingham acknowledges the line was corny, but she says that coming from a man like Hendrix, it worked. Within hours, they were heading down Piccadilly towards Hendrix's hotel.
Hendrix, unused to London traffic, was nearly hit by a car when he looked the wrong way while crossing the road. "He stepped out and a taxi just brushed across his chest," Etchingham says, "I dragged him by the back of his coat and pulled him back. You've got to look the other way, I told him." Etchingham discovered that Hendrix was an "experienced and imaginative" lover who could make sex more romantic than she'd ever known it before.
The Jimi Hendrix Experience, circa 1967
But the next morning, the couple were interrupted at the hotel by another woman with designs on the young guitarist. "She burst into the room at about 11 in the morning, screaming, swearing and calling him a bastard," Etchingham says. "She grabbed a guitar, lifted it by the neck and was poised to bring it down on our heads while we were in bed." "I dived under the covers and half under Jimi, while he shouted 'put it down, put it down'." The guitar was Hendrix's only instrument at the time, and he was desperate to stop it being smashed.
To the couple's relief, the woman eventually backed down, merely flouncing out with the guitar before disappearing in a blue Jaguar. Hendrix eventually got his guitar back and started living with Etchingham. The couple, both former runaways, had a lot in common. In long, late-night conversations, Hendrix would tell her how his father used to beat him "senseless" for trying to learn the guitar by putting string on a broom. Etchingham told him about her alcoholic father and how her mother had walked out on the family when she was 10. In a romantic gesture, the guitarist cut off a lock of his girlfriend's hair with scissors. Following a voodoo superstition, he put it in his boots so that his body would always be in contact with part of hers. "Jimi was very funny, very entertaining," says Etchingham.
More BBC News - Kathy Etchingham: Life as Jimi Hendrix's 'Foxy Lady'
