"Electric Ladyland actually would be a welcome album if it was a brand new band today. It still holds up. It was actually a pivotal record in the sense that you had a guitar player, perhaps the pre-eminent one of them all, who actually took chances in terms of songwriting. He also experimented with electronics, backing tapes and all that stuff. The reason that I know all of this is because the engineer and producer on that was a guy called Eddie Kramer who engineered some of the earlier Kiss records, and he would tell us stories and everything. A double album, it had lots of great guests on it like Dave Mason from Traffic and many others. 'Crosstown Traffic' is great, very unlike Jimi Hendrix. Noel Redding, the bass player actually auditioned as a guitar player and Hendrix told him, 'I'm actually looking for a bass player', so he had to switch over to bass right on the spot, which is why his bass playing, with a pick, is not the way that most bass players play. I was still in school when I heard it, I must have been 17 or so because I remember drawing the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the name and all that, on the cover of my notebook. In those days we used to buy albums sometimes just because of the album covers. There was an art to it, there were big hardcover books talking about the art and design of album covers and there were artists and companies like Hipgnosis and places like that which specialised in just creating album covers. For instance, on Love Gun we had a painter named Ken Kelly who painted the piece, and it was a lot of time and effort. It was an art, and sadly that's gone. Now the visuals are down to the size of a postage stamp, you don't get much. I didn't actually buy this one because of the cover. I'd bought Axis: Bold As Love because of the cover."

"I picked this mainly because most people are probably familiar with the regular three studio records that came out. I would hope they are. This record, Hendrix In The West, is a compilation of live versions. I think four songs are from this San Diego show in 1969 and shortly after that tour Noel Redding was out of the band so it was the last part of the Experience. There's a version of 'Spanish Castle Magic' on the record that is just so incredible, and the bass is distorted and driving. That song alone is worth the whole record. And if you can get your hands on it, there's actually a bootleg of that whole San Diego show and I recommend that, but Hendrix In The West is a little more accessible. My friend Darren who was the drummer in Mr. Epp, we were in high school and he had one of those portable eight-track players. I think he pretty much only had three eight-tracks I can remember, and one was Jimi Hendrix's Smash Hits and another was The Who: Live At Leeds and we would play those constantly. I've always been really impressed by Mitch Mitchell's drumming. It spoke to me. I think he's maybe the best drummer in rock & roll. I just love that kind of loose, fluid feel. It's not stiff, there's sort of a jazz thing going through it. It's really propulsive. Have you ever seen 'Message To Love', the Isle of Wight set that Hendrix plays? It's weird what happened to Mitch Mitchell over the years he was playing with Hendrix. In the early days he's sitting upright and playing like he does on the records but by that almost last performance he's got a double kick drum which he's just slumped over and his back is hunched and he's really low. It's like he isn't playing the beats at all, he's just playing around it. It's like he's become a rock version of Elvin Jones - it's crazy. Rock & roll has taken its toll on a lot of people. There's a bit in the Isle of Wight thing where a couple of songs in, Hendrix just goes behind the speakers and you can hear his guitar hitting shit. And he comes back out and he's on fire. The song ends and he says "I just woke up two minutes ago!" I was like: "Gee, I wonder what he was doing back there?""