7. Jimi Hendrix: London Life in the 60's

Abstract

If you count back, 50 years since the Summer of Love of 1967 has passed. It has also been 50 years since Jimi Hendrix famously opened a show at the Saville Theatre in London with his rendition of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper's title track, which was released just three days previous, all while The Beatles sat in the audience. This is the same summer when his first album, Are You Experienced? spent 33 weeks on the charts and Hendrix set fire to his guitar at the Monterey Pop festival. I spent 12 weeks in Brighton, England learning about Hendrix and the London that he lived in. I had the opportunity to interview interesting characters and work with primary texts, but the main source I worked with is a newspaper call the International Times, most commonly known as IT. IT was known for its 'police baiting' small ads page, making this an incredibly interesting primary source to work with. In this project, I examined the Summer of Love, Hendrix and IT newspaper through the lenses of sexism, racism and consumerism, exposing areas where the hippies in swinging London were not as progressive as they thought. Using examples from IT, Hendrix’s life and texts from the 60’s, my project aims to highlight how instances of sexism, racism and consumerism occurred within the hippie community. In London, hippies were unable to reach unified ideas and maintained some oppressive tendencies from the dominant culture they so wished to reject.