55 years ago today: Jimi Hendrix died, aged 27

Tori Amos:
"What Jimi Hendrix represented to me was ‘be all that you are’. I had idolised Jesus Christ and then it was Hendrix. There’s no difference in terms of the force of the feeling."

Ronnie Wood:
“Hendrix didn’t have much faith in his voice. He knew he could play but he hated his own voice. I said, ‘Don’t worry about it, it’s just like another instrument, don’t let it hang you up, just get on with it, ’cos people love what you do’. But he had no kind of self worth in that respect.”

Lemmy:
On his favourite memory of road crewing with Hendrix...
"Apart from seeing him every night, you mean? Jamming at rehearsal with him one day when Noel Redding didn’t show up. He had total control of feedback, his instrument... I tried to figure out how he did it, but there was no way you could tell. Jimi wasn’t the sort of guy you really socialised with, but I knew Noel very well on account of us sharing a flat. When I say share, he allowed me to kip on the floor for a bit. I was going to try out for the bass player’s job when Billy Cox flew home with a nervous breakdown but then Hendrix died that day, so too bad..."

B.B. King:
On meeting pre-fame Hendrix – who was then Little Richard's guitarist – on tour:
"[Jimi was someone] with whom I’d sit and talk. But I didn’t know him to be then what he became to be. Like I knew Elvis before he was Elvis when I used to record at Sun studios. I knew Jimi to be talented but to become what he really was, no way would I have predicted that or bet on it.

“He was very quiet and usually in the intermissions in the dressing-room, he would sit like I did, and maybe practice something, and discuss things with you. Like, ‘How do you do this here, this is the way I do it.’ We just talked. That’s the way usually with good musicians, they’ll never stinge about being helpful. And next time I heard him, I never knew who he was till I saw him. But he was playing well then; it was just he was never featured.”

Richard Thompson:
On hanging out with Hendrix in London:
“At the time, we didn't think much of it at all, really. We just thought that was normal. Hendrix wasn't the legend that he became, he was just a nice guy who was always at The Speakeasy Club. He just borrowed one of our guitars, which, for him, was strung upside down, and played it really well anyway, which was kind of disturbing.”

George Clinton:
“The album Funkadelic was the beginning of our psychedelic era. And Jimi Hendrix, at that time, was the king of it. I knew him as Jimmy James, and he wasn’t playing like that – he was with King Curtis. [But then he] went over to England and did that album that he did, Are You Experienced. I was like, ‘Hey shit! He’s doin’ it!'"

Chrissie Hynde:
"Can't we bring back Jimi Hendrix? Can't we bring back the greats who had this immense gift and talent and yet were kind of shy, elusive?"