Kathy Etchingham

Etchingham during the unveiling of a plaque in honor of Jimi Hendrix.

Kathleen Mary Etchingham (born June 18, 1946 in Derby ), called Kathy , is a former groupie . She was best known as the temporary partner of Jimi Hendrix and later through her autobiography , in which, in addition to her childhood and youth, she mainly described the scene of British rock musicians in London in the 1960s. The meeting and the temporary cohabitation with Jimi Hendrix are the main theme of her autobiography.

Life

There Ethchingham describes an unhappy childhood because her mother left the family because of another man and she grew up with relatives and in a convent school. Then at the age of sixteen she broke out of this world and made her way to London. The relationship to the unfaithful and drinking mother shaped her as well as the young Hendrix, which she cited as a main reason for her perceived kinship with Hendrix.

From the mid-1960s she made many acquaintances in what was then the London music scene. She had friendships and intimate relationships, etc. a. with Brian Jones , Keith Moon , Chas Chandler , Zoot Money and Eric Burdon . She met Jimi Hendrix through Chandler on his first evening in London and became his lover. Both moved in together and lived together in London for a few years. She also described this time in Swinging London in the 1960s in her autobiography.

The song The Wind Cries Mary on the first studio album of the Jimi Hendrix Experience Are You Experienced is dedicated to Etchingham. She also appears in a line of verse in the song 1983 ... (A Merman I Should Turn to Be) as "Katherina". The song Send My Love to Linda was originally supposed to be called Send My Love to Kathy until Etchingham objected to Hendrix.

She was the initiator of putting a plaque (1997) on the house in London's Brook Street where she had lived for a while with Hendrix. The composer Georg Friedrich Handel once lived in this house . In 2014, Etchingham criticized the biographical Hendrix feature film Jimi: All Is by My Side by John Ridley. Etchingham described the cinematic portrayal of her life with Hendrix as "absolute nonsense".

literature

Through Gypsy Eyes: My Life, the Sixties and Jimi Hendrix; Kathy Etchingham, 1999 & 2012, ISBN 978-0-7528-2725-4

Individual evidence

1. ^ Vincent Dowd: Hendrix house retuned for future . In: BBC News . February 10, 2016 ( bbc.com [accessed June 5, 2018]).
2. ↑ Shadwick, Keith: Jimi Hendrix: Musician . Backbeat Books, ISBN 978-0-87930-764-6 , pp. 97 .
3. ↑ Kathy Etchingham website . In: Original document . Archived from the original on September 13, 2013. Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved June 4, 2018. 
4. ^ Barnes, Henry: That never happened: the biopic conundrum , guardian.co.uk. October 21, 2014. Retrieved October 28, 2014.