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Clearly jealous of the attention that David Bowie has been getting, Hendrix outdoes the Thin White Duke by staging a comeback of his own – from beyond the grave.
People found it astounding that Bowie managed to keep the recording of The Next Day so completely under wraps. That’s nothing. Try sitting on 12 unreleased tracks for 43 years. Not that it’s a competition, but if it was, then Hendrix would definitely win.
Posthumous albums are always a sensitive subject. From Jeff Buckley and Tupac to Michael Jackson and Amy Winehouse, speaking for the dead is a task that would lay heavy on any man’s shoulders. Fortunately, we’re told that these songs were completed by Hendrix before his death, but still a strangely morbid sense of knowing comes when Hendrix croons “shake these earth blues away from me baby” from up in the clouds on the album’s brilliant opener.
‘Somewhere’ astounded the world when it was released in January, and rightly so – it’s a brooding and slow-burning gem filled with all of the trademark guitar flourishes of the Maestro Himself.
‘Hear My Train A Comin’ is comfortable territory for any Hendrix fan – a little too comfortable. It would sit pretty easily in the set of any dad-rock pub blues band. ‘Izabella’ deserves as much praise for six-string prowess as ‘Voodoo Child’ and ‘Crash Landing’ clearly shows how Hendrix paved the sex-rock path for the likes of Prince and Lenny Kravitz. It’s all pretty standard fare except for the album highlight of the James Brown-esque funk-fuelled runaway soul train of ‘Let Me Move You’ and the fierce Shaft soundtrack swagger of ‘Mojo Man’.
It’s quite staggering that songs of this quality were locked away for so long. This isn’t just the diluted spirit of Hendrix with rough sketches enhanced by hired hands and studio wizardry. The spirit of the great man runs throughout People, Hell and Angels with that unmistakable marriage of unparalleled guitar mastery and psychedelic poetry set in an earthly, streetwise personality.
The standard isn’t enough to change the world again, but in short: Hendrix lives.
