The fully restored, long anticipated and much contested film of Jimi Hendrix Live at the Royal Albert Hall in 1969 was finally shown for the first time, at the Royal Albert Hall, on the 21st of October, 2019.
Reposting this article for a nice looking new FB group called https://www.facebook.com/CinematicHistoryPast, who did a piece on the photo of the master on stage with a child.
According to the French music publicist Yazid Manou – the man who tracked me down after many years and identified me as the child who ran on stage and whispered something in the guitar god’s ear -one reason for the public screening was that, in order to keep the copyright from running out, the owners needed to have shown the property commercially within fifty years of the original claim. The chance to see this high resolution film – which looks great and has a slightly blue cast, presumably because of the green cast of the original – is amazing and a huge cause for celebration for the fans of Hendrix.
This iconic film is often referred to as the Holy Grail of lost music films.
Royal Albert Hall – Approximate schedule: 5:30 pm restaurants and bars open. 6:30 pm Boxes open. 6:45 pm Auditorium doors open. 7:30 pm The Jimi Hendrix Experience: The Royal Albert Hall. Event ends 9:35 pm .
My father, Tommy, knew Jimi socially and shot a multi-camera concert film called ‘Watch Out For Your Ears’ a year or so prior to the Albert Hall concert. It featured Jimi, The Animals, and Traffic (who filled in for The Who when they pulled out of the gig). Watching Jimi’s electric performance in that film is how I became infatuated with Hendrix. All musicians in that circle were connected to each other in some way and half of Traffic ended up onstage at the Albert Hall, including Chris Wood, Dave Mason and Rocky, the percussionist. I presume this is how we ended up visiting Traffic at the house in Buckinghamshire, when I became totally star struck at the sight of a young Winwood on the lawn playing frisbee among all the freaks.
I didn’t meet Hendrix until at the Albert Hall in ’69, when my father Tommy introduced my brother and me to him backstage prior to the show. Jimi hoisted me up onto his shoulders and ran around the dressing room with me. And then, presumably too excited to contain myself, at some point during the performance I ran onto the stage and whispered something in Jimi’s ear. Who knows what I said. It could have been a song request or maybe I asked the address of his tailor. What exactly it was remains a mystery.
The black and white photo of that stage encounter only showed up for me at Christmas of 2013 when Yazid Manou, a French music publicist for Sony music and a photo-sleuth, contacted me on FB. I was blown away, of course. The picture is now in the Handel and Hendrix museum, at 23 Brook Street in Mayfair, along with some blurb on my father.
The piece on the rather good looking new FB page is here: https://www.facebook.com/CinematicHistoryPast/posts/pfbid029Qqz1hhnyE77ZJsiweYf272CuG1pjP3AnwSae6BoVBNezLfMGMMszZECs16dHrHql?comment_id=564279162952219&reply_comment_id=2780393232143479¬if_id=1728662917157927¬if_t=comment_mention&ref=notif
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