JIMI HENDRIX was a musician who always wanted to push things “beyond the comfort zone”, according to Robert Wyatt, whose brief half-time eulogy was the most touching moment of an event in which an exotic and at times bizarre cast of performers was marshalled to celebrate the legacy of the greatest instrumentalist in the history of pop.
Starting late and ending almost three-and-a-half hours later, the show brought the curtain down on the two-week Meltdown Festival at the South Bank, curated to widespread acclaim this year by Patti Smith. And for long stretches the comfort zone was certainly avoided, a little too scrupulously so in the case of Fred Frith and Chris Cutler, whose version of I Don’t Live Today sounded like a pair of cats fighting in a ball-bearing factory.
A majority of the musicians took it upon themselves to reinvent rather than re-create Hendrix’s music, and for many the starting point was an instrument other than the guitar. It was intriguing to hear Hendrix’s compositions adapted for harp by the angelic Joanna Newsom, string quartet (the Balanescu Quartet), six-string bass (a demented Squarepusher), bass and trumpet (a besuited Flea), electric violin (courtesy of James Blood Ulmer’s Odyssey) and even the long zither by Yat-Kha, a group from Tuva in southern Siberia whose throat-singing frontman turned Purple Haze and Highway Chile into a kind of ethnic death metal. The most imaginative transformation was achieved by the Finnish accordionist Kimmo Pohjonen and drummer Sami Kuoppamäki whose unlikely version of Driving North captured the irrepressible energy of Hendrix’s music perhaps better than anyone else on the bill.
The guitarists were, understandably, more predictable. Johnny Marr and Robyn Hitchcock produced a dreary May This Be Love, while Richard Lloyd provided a more impressive, if still rather workmanlike, version of I Don’t Live Today. Jeff Beck gave a suitably mercurial reading of Hey Joe, Red House, Manic Depression and others, but his set underlined how the really hard part of re-creating the magic of those songs is in finding a singer even halfway capable of matching the spellbinding quality of Hendrix’s voice.
If such a person exists, it is certainly not Patti Smith, who started and finished the show. Slouching, spitting and swearing her way through 1983 (A Merman I Should Turn to Be), which she somehow contrived to turn into an anti-George Bush diatribe, she managed to bleed some of the fun out of an event which was obviously very dear to her heart.