‘An Electric Church’ London Event To Commemorate Jimi Hendrix’s 80th Birthday
The event will take place at St Pancras Old Church, featuring Hendrix biographer Christian Lloyd and artists Tom Attah and Loria Boban.
An evening of live music and speech to commemorate what would have been the 80th birthday of Jimi Hendrix will take place in London on November 30.
It’s being staged by Handel & Hendrix, an organization dedicated to promoting knowledge, awareness, and enjoyment of the baroque composer Frederick Handel via the Georgian house he lived in at 25 Brook Street; and the musical and cultural heritage of the house through its association with Hendrix, who lived next door, at number 23, in the late 1960s.
The Handel house is now a museum, currently closed, and Hendrix lived next door, on and off during his London years, at the flat of his girlfriend Kathy Etchingham. A blue plaque on the property records his residence there. A second is at his last London residence, then the Cumberland Hotel, now the Hard Rock Hotel.
A London landing
Hendrix’s 80th birthday would have fallen that week on November 27, the date of his birth in Seattle in 1942. He famously arrived in London in September 1966, after signing a management and production contract with Chas Chandler, who had just left the Animals, and that group’s former manager Michael Jeffery.
The event will take place at St Pancras Old Church, and is to be opened by Hendrix biographer Christian Lloyd, author of Hendrix at Home: A Bluesman in Mayfair. He will explore the idea of the “Electric Church,” and how this philosophy can be applied to modern-day performance. Lloyd will also be signing copies of the book.
Next, blues singer-guitarist Tom Attah will elaborate on that introduction with his “meditative and shifting soundscape” inspired by Hendrix’s work. Swedish-born, London-based headliner Loria Boban will bring the evening to a conclusion with a set reflecting the great guitarist’s commitment to free-form performance with a “new wave funky-soul” sound. Boban recently followed the EPs Moving House and The Garden with the new track “So Far Away.” Tickets for the event are priced at £15 and can be bought here.
