As a young guitarist on London’s mid-1960s music scene, David Gilmour had a chance to catch any number of famous and up-and-coming musical artists. He was still a couple of years from joining Pink Floyd when he decided to stop into Blaises Club, a gambling casino located in a hotel basement, on December 21, 1966.
“When I was living in London, and I was completely broke — and this is long before I joined Pink Floyd — there was a club in South Kensington called Blaises,” he tells Rick Beato. “And if you were a member of that club — and it cost five pounds or something to be a member — you could go free from Monday to Thursday, or Tuesday to Thursday. So I'd go there quite a lot, because it was free.
“And one night, I went in there, and it was rammed with people. All the Beatles, and all the stones were in there. I thought, This is a little bit unusual!”
Gilmour soon discovered what had drawn London’s biggest musical acts to the club that night. Following a set by Brian Auger and the Trinity, a slim figure made his way onstage.
“A kid came in with a guitar case, got up on the stage, opened his guitar case and put [the guitar] on the wrong way round,” GIlmour recalls. “He plugged into an amp and started, and the entire place was just —.”
He gives a look of astonishment.
“Jaws dropped. It was absolutely extraordinary.
“I went out the next day, trying to find records by this character Jimi Hendrix. And there was James Hendricks, of [American vocalese trio] Lambert, Hendricks, Lambert and Ross.
“But he didn’t exist.
In fact, Hendrix’s first record, “Hey Joe,” had been released five days earlier, on December 16, 1966, but perhaps the spellings of his first and last names confused record shop workers. Either way, Hendrix’s first album, Are You Experienced, wouldn’t come out until May 12, 1967, nearly five months later. When it did, Gilmour was ready, with money in hand.
“As soon as it came along,” he says, “I thought, Yes, Jimi!! I want a slice of that!”
Gilmour became such a Hendrix devotee that he sought out every opportunity to see him perform. That led to his extraordinary experience running the PA for the guitarist's set at the 1970 Isle of Wight festival.
“I helped mix the sound for Hendrix at the Isle of Wight in 1970," Gilmour revealed to Prog magazine in 2019. “Not a lot of people know that.”
The 1970 festival, the last of three consecutive music events on the island, was held from August 26 to 30 and is acknowledged as the largest music festival of its time, even bigger than Woodstock. Artists who performed include Rory Gallagher, the Doors, the Who, Miles Davis, Joni Mitchell, Jethro Tull and Free, among many others.
Hendrix performed in the early hours of August 31 with drummer Mitch Mitchell and bassist Billy Cox. His set, however, was plagued by problems from the sound system, with the chatter from the security personnel’s walkie-talkies heard at one point during his performance of “Machine Gun.”
Although Pink Floyd’s sound system was used for the festival, the group didn’t perform. Gilmour says he was there simply as an attendee.
“I went down to go to it and I was camping in a tent, just being a punter,” he told Prog. “And I went backstage where our main roadie guy, Peter Watts, was trying to deal with all the mayhem, with Charlie Watkins of [British musical instrument maker] WEM, and they were very nervous. They were going to have to mix Hendrix’s sound. I did some mixing stuff in those days, and they said ‘Help! Help!’ so I did."
Gilmour recalled working from the side of the stage with a WEM Audiomaster mixer. He would eventually come to own the very guitar strap Hendrix used at the Isle of Wight and attach it to his Black Strat, the famed Fender electric guitar he played on classic Pink Floyd cuts like “Money,” “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” and “Comfortably Numb.”
“My lovely wife Polly [Samson] bought me, as a present, a Jimi Hendrix strap, that you can see,” he told Prog. As he explained to the interviewer, it was not a copy of a Jimi Hendrix strap but the real thing. “No, the Jimi Hendrix strap, that he’s [wearing at] a lot of his later shows, at the Isle of Wight in 1970,” he explained.
He added that he didn’t get a chance to meet Hendrix at the festival. “Not then. I had met him previous to that, once,” he offers. “I didn’t know him.”
Despite his fondness for Hendrix’s style and choice of main guitar — a Fender Stratocaster — Gilmour never attempted to emulate him. His own style is slower, more fluid than fiery, owing in large part to his inability to play fast.
“I wasn’t gifted with enormous speed on the guitar,” he told Beato in a previous interview. “There were years when I was younger where I thought I could get that if I practiced enough. But it just wasn’t ever really going to happen.”
In related news, Gilmour recently revealed that he is at work on his followup to last year’s solo record, Luck and Strange.
