As much as Robert Plant’s patented squeal defined the band, Jimmy’s guitar riffery was always its core. Former session musician who mutated into the scariest, meanest riff wrangler rock music has ever known. As a musician, I found it amazing what he did the way he left gaps in his playing the way it was rhythmic and melodic based around the vocal and the song. It was completely different, and far deeper. And it wasn’t just the standard bollocks that everyone else was doing. “I went back and listened to him playing live and listened to what he was actually doing. Everything about him was a contradiction to your standard rock stereotype. Phil Collen ( Def Leppard ): “I was obviously very aware of Jimi Hendrix in the early 1970s, but it wasn’t until much later – until way after I’d started playing the guitar – that I really started to appreciate him. Jimi embraced feedback as a musical source. Jimi was black in a time when rock’n’roll had been primarily a white man’s game. Jimi was left-handed, so he strung and played his Fender Stratocaster upside-down.

He took the six-string from a gentle whisper ( The Wind Cries Mary, May There Be Love) to a banshee wail ( Purple Haze, Foxy Lady) via cosmic blues through enigmatic chordal explorations to what bordered on jazz-inflected art-rock solos. The dissonance of unexpected chords clashing together was all part and parcel of Jimi’s magic.

His sound was a sonic maelstrom of squalling feedback, fuzz- drenched riffs with a remarkable sense of melody wrapped around it. He embraced the blues, rock, traditional folk, soul and country, even. Jimi’s music was an amalgam of everything we knew (and a lot we didn’t) – he turned American music on its head.

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