Germaine Greer called him a black man in a white man’s world. Back in the Sixties, politically correct terms like “people of colour” hadn’t been invented. But being black was what Jimi Hendrix did perfectly, apart from playing the guitar like it had never been. When he burst upon the rock-n-roll scene in the middle of the decade, all the famous white boys — the “cats” who ruled pop and rock and rhythm and blues — had a similar reaction, open-mouthed, slack-jawed. Much as they did not want to admit it, they were as completely bowled over as those who gathered, screaming and howling, waiting for him to smash the guitar and set fire to it.

In the two discs that make up A Film About Jimi Hendrix, some of the greatest musicians of that era — Eric Clapton, Mick Jagger, Pete Townshend — talk about the phenomenon that he was. The son of an alcoholic mother and a largely absentee father, Hendrix learnt how to play as a teen — by listening, watching and practising. All the circus tricks that amazed his audience — plucking of the guitar strings with his teeth, placing the guitar at the back of the neck and playing it — he picked up around that time.

Excerpts from a TV show reveal glimpses of the flamboyance on the outside, the shyness inside, and a distinct off-kilterness. So do you wake up every morning and work? Well, he says, swathed in his trademark psychedelic colours, I wake up every morning. The acid trips, the well-publicised destructiveness and the early death are skimmed over: this film celebrates Hendrix the man that was, and his music that is. For a lot of people, he changed the sound of rock, even more than the Beatles.

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