Handel and Hendrix, odd bedfellows

[Gob]

They're two properties side-by-side in one of London's most exclusive districts. By coincidence each address housed a famous name in music - though Handel lived in Brook Street, Mayfair 240 years before '60s rock god Jimi Hendrix.



Now the adjoining buildings have become a combined Handel and Hendrix museum in London.

Jimi Hendrix and former girlfriend Kathy Etchingham moved into the apartment at 23 Brook Street in the summer of 1968. She's been back before, but now the lower half of the space they occupied has been refurbished in exactly the way she decorated it 48 years ago.

"It was barely furnished when we took it but I thought it could be ideal for us," she says. "It really does look the way we fitted it out.

"The fireplace is the same and the shelves and the cupboard. The windows and the woodchip paper and the wonky floors - it's all the same."

Until now, the space where Etchingham and Hendrix lived has only been open for special events. Now it's become a permanent part of the reorganised and extended Handel and Hendrix in London exhibition.
It takes in what was previously known as Handel House at 25 Brook Street next door.

Etchingham says it wasn't the first place she and Hendrix lived together. "I met Jimi in September 1966 and we'd already lived at addresses in Upper Berkeley Street and Montagu Square.

"But this was the first time it was just the two of us. The only big difference today is that you can't get up the stairs to the floor above, where we had another room.

"There had been other flats I tried to rent through agents, but as soon as I mentioned Jimi people would get nervous. But a friend spotted an ad for 23 Brook Street in the old London Evening News, and the landlord said he didn't care who moved in as long as they paid the rent.

"It cost us £30 a week, which at the time was a lot of money. But it was a great place to live because it was central but there were no neighbours."



Michelle Aland, director of the newly combined museum, says: "It's great finally to have the whole house devoted to music. Visitors will probably arrive as more of a Hendrix fan or as a Handel fan, but we hope most people will want to learn about both sides of the exhibition.

"Handel lived here for more than 30 years and it's a beautiful house in its own right. Jimi Hendrix was at number 23 for a much shorter time, but he and Kathy made it their own."

Etchingham says living so centrally was a delight. "We could go shopping in Oxford Street or wander down South Molton Street. There was Fenwicks across the road. And we could walk to all the music clubs, which were more plentiful then.

"It was the swinging sixties but I think that's something people only identify in retrospect: I don't think Jimi and I ever saw it in those terms. The flat was pretty private - I liked the fact there was no bell downstairs, for instance. It felt like a cocoon.

http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-35531762

[RayThom]

"Hey Joe, I said where you goin' with that gun in your... Handel, oh... "

[MajGenl.Meade]

Ray