Exhibition looks at Jimi Hendrix's London years

LONDON (AP) — They were both immigrants in Britain who changed the face of music — one with a harpsichord and a composer's pen, the other with an electric guitar.

George Frideric Handel and Jimi Hendrix also shared an address, living 200 years apart in adjoining 18th-century London houses. Now, 40 years after Hendrix's death, a new exhibition about his London years brings these two unlikely neighbors together.

Hendrix, who came to London as an ambitious but little-known guitarist in 1966, was aware of his link to the musical past. He bought recordings of Handel's "Messiah," and obligingly gave tours of his apartment to music students who knocked on the door looking for traces of the composer.

"He once claimed to have seen a reflection of Handel's face in his shaving mirror," said Martin Wyatt, deputy director of the Handel House Museum, which is mounting an exhibition about Hendrix's London years that opens to the public Wednesday.

"Hendrix was convinced he was living in Handel's house — but actually he was living next door."

Handel lived at 25 Brook Street — a Georgian house in the tony Mayfair area — for 36 years until his death in 1759. The museum devoted to his life uses the adjoining upstairs apartment where Hendrix lived as offices.

Museum curators hope to raise money to restore the apartment to its 1960s glory and open it as a permanent Hendrix exhibition.

For now, members of the public will be able to visit for 12 days next month. They will have to use their imaginations to picture the small, whitewashed rooms with their utilitarian desks as they were then, decorated in garish 60s style with red carpets and turquoise velvet curtains, chock-a-block with guitars, amps, rugs and knickknacks.

"All the photos look really classy until you see them in color," said the museum's learning and events officer, Claire Parker.

Handel had paid 60 pounds a year for the house, the equivalent of about 5,000 pounds ($7,700) today. Hendrix and his girlfriend Kathy Etchingham paid 30 pounds a week — a consierable sum for the 60s, equivalent to about 350 pounds a week today.

By all accounts Hendrix enjoyed the domestic side of London life — though the appliances were not always up to his modern American standards.