Jimi Hendrix spent his first night in London in September 1966 ensconced in a hotel, courtesy of his manager, Animals bassist Chas Chandler. But the process of settling Hendrix into somewhere more permanent quickly became a priority for Chandler.
Before The Animals left on their final US tour in July 1966, some of the band had lived in the basement flat at 24 Cranley Gardens, South Kensington. While they were away, it became home to their friends, two members of Les Fleur De Lys, a band that gigged regularly on the London club circuit.
“It was an amazing ground floor set of rooms and we moved in rent free,” says Les Fleur De Lys’ former bassist Gordon Haskell. “Our manager said The Animals wouldn’t mind and that they’d be pleased we were looking after the place for them.”
According to the band’s ex-drummer Keith Guster, the pair initially shared the three-bedroom basement flat with a “weird Dutch artist”, who lived in the front room, but quickly moved out. The two musicians shared a large bedroom looking out on to the garden area.
As The Animals’ US tour came to an end, Haskell and Guster expected to be asked to leave. Instead, Chandler turned up and explained that he had just returned from the US with a new friend in tow. “He told us we were alright to stay for a bit longer,” says Guster. “Then he said, ‘I’m going to bring a guy round and he’s going to stay in the other room.’ We said, ‘Okay’ and asked what his name was and Chas just said, ‘Oh it’s Jimi.’”
When ‘Jimi’ arrived the next day he quickly disappeared into the room at the front of the house. “We hardly ever saw him,” recalls Guster. “On odd occasions he’d sit on the floor in his room drawing pictures and picking on an acoustic guitar. We were out most of the time trying to get more work while Jimi was out with Chas working on getting their band together.”
Speaking in 2011, Hendrix’s former girlfriend Kathy Etchingham recalled the flat in Cranley Gardens, but is adamant that “Jimi never lived there because he was in the Hyde Park Towers Hotel with me from the first night he arrived. He may have gone round there and met these guys and he might even have fallen asleep on the sofa.”
However, during one of his visits to the flat where Jimi “might have fallen asleep”, Chandler began to tell the two bandmates what he had planned for his protégé. “Chas explained that he was planning to put together a three- piece – Jimi with a drummer and a bass player,” says Guster. “Gordon and I looked at each other and thought, ‘Well, one of us plays bass and the other plays drums….’ I think we mentioned this to Chas and he said, ‘Well thanks boys, but we’ll see.”
“I never thought that Chas should have hired us to be with Jimi,” adds Haskell. “We were very loyal to Les Fleur and we probably wouldn’t have got into the showmanship stuff of the Experience.”
During the summer of 2011, 24 Cranley Gardens was restored as an elegant five bed-roomed house with staff quarters, a spa and swimming pool, and now has an estimated value of over £7,000,000.
Originally published in Classic Rock Presents Jimi Hendrix: People, Hell And Angels
