When Jimi lived here at 23 Brook Street – on and off for 18 months in 1969 and ‘70 – he would scarcely have imagined that his presence would earn it the first English Heritage commemorative plaque ever dedicated to a rock star. The first-floor flat belonged to his girlfriend, Kathy Etchingham.

In March 1969 he greeted a female reporter at the door naked and conducted the interview from his bed with a supply of marijuana, hashish, amyl nitrates and assorted pills close at hand.

The plaque was installed on the front wall on September 15, 1997, before a gathering of guitar gods come to honour the mightiest of them all. Pete Townshend, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page and Pink Floyd’s Dave Gilmour listened as Etchingham recalled the day Hendrix learned that Georg Friedrich Handel (1685-1759) had lived and died right next door, at #25, and sent her out to buy some Handel albums for him.

The Jimi Hendrix Experience broke up after the final date of their mid-1969 American tour, at the Denver Pop Festival.

On August 18 Jimi – seen here with Al Kooper and Chandler during the recording of “Voodoo Chile” – played at Woodstock with a new band, Gypsy Sun and Rainbows, featuring his old army pal Billy Cox and Mitch Mitchell, along with Larry Lee, Juma Sultan and Jerry Velez.

That line-up segued into the Band of Gypsys – Jimi, Cox and Buddy Miles, Mitchell rejoining Hendrix for a spring-summer 1970 tour of the States, during which work began on a new double album, “First Rays of the New Rising Sun”, not fully released until 1997.

On August 30, 1970, fresh from opening his own Electric Lady Studios in New York, Jimi performed here at the Isle of Wight Festival — as headliner. A quarter of a million people came to see him.

From here, Hendrix, Cox and Mitchell went on to another show in Arhus, Denmark, where Jimi walked offstage before the second song was over, and then three shows in Germany, including the Love and Peace Festival in Puttgarden on September 6. The scene was anything but loving and peaceful. A bike gang was in charge and the drunken mob booed throughout his abortive set. Hendrix cleared out, and during the next act’s set, the stage was burned to the ground.

Billy Cox had to be hospitalised after a bad run-in with PCP, and the continental tour’s last two shows, both in Rotterdam, were cancelled.

Jimi was was “officially” staying in Suite 507/508 at the Cumberland Hotel during the last weeks of his life, but he more often than not crashed at the homes of various friends around London.

Billy Cox was, for now, a virtual vegetable from his drug ordeal, and Jimi was being harassed by cutting reviews and crippling lawsuits over his music rights. He told several reporters that he was settling down, cutting his hair and dispensing with his jewellery. The fire was going out.

He went to Ronnie Scott’s jazz club at 47 Frith Street on September 16, 1970, to see his friend Eric Burdon performing with War, but Eric’s manager turned him away because “he was ripped”. “It was the first time I’d ever seen him without his guitar,” Burdon said. “I knew he was in trouble.”

Hendrix was back the following night, though, joining War onstage to jam on “Tobacco Road” and “Mother Earth”, and despite a sloppy start he ended up at full throttle.

Hendrix spent the night at the apartment of his friend Danny Secunda, with Danny’s guests Alan and Stella Douglas and an old girlfriend from New York, Devon Wilson.

On September 17, 1970, Jimi went out shopping with his German girlfriend, Monika Dannemann. They spent a good part of the afternoon at the Kensington Market, which was famous for the kind of groovy gear Hendrix had helped make popular.

They ran into Devon Wilson and Stella Douglas, who invited Jimi to a party that night. He left Monika behind and went with them to Danny Secunda’s place, where he swallowed some acid and a “black bomber”, a mix of amphetamine and sedative. Monika came to collect him later and they went out for a drink, then headed to her apartment.

Monika had a basement flat here at the Samarkand Hotel, at 21-22 Lansdowne Crescent. They got home on the evening of September 17 and had some wine, then at Jimi’s request she drove him to an address she couldn’t remember later, where he said he had to meet some people, though evidently not friends. She picked him up again an hour later, and they went home and slept.

When Monika awoke at at about 10.20 on the morning of the 18th she found him sleeping normally. She went out for cigarettes and when she returned she dicovered he’d been sick. She couldn’t waken him, and realised he’d taken a handful of her sleeping pills.

It’s been reported by some sources that Jim left a message on Chas Chandler’s answering machine early that morning: “I need help bad, man.”

Dannemann phoned Eric Burdon, who told her to call an ambulance immediately. The American model Alvenia Bridges was at Burdon’s place and agreed to go over, arriving at the hotel at the same time as the ambulance.

Jimi’s body was taken to St Mary Abbots Hospital on Marloes Road at 11.45am on September 18. Dr John Bannister attempted resuscitation but later admitted that, contrary to the ambulance attendants’ assurance to Monika that Jimi was going to be alright, Hendrix was “obviously dead” on admission.

The autopsy determined that he’d swallowed nine Vesparax sleeping pills, far beyond the recommended dose, and later vomited in his sleep, slipped into unconsciousness and suffocated. Jimi Hendrix was 27.

Monika Dannemann was 51 when she allegedly committed suicide, doubtless feeling guilty and at the time facing a libel case filed against her by Kathy Etchingham.

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For the record, if you can call this blog a record, I wasn’t the least bit surprised that Jimi had quickly joined Janis Joplin in rock heaven – it was heroin, after all, that the Mounties supposedly found in his luggage in Toronto. (No heroin was found in the autopsy.)

And, to tell the truth, I hadn’t bought tickets for the Gardens show because the music that Jimi was making at the time was no longer very interesting to me, and reviews of his concerts were appalling. Friends who did see the Toronto gig were muted about it, as apparently was Hendrix.

But I often found myself defending Jimi and his lifestyle in subsequent years. It became increasingly obvious as the media came to grips with the truth – and with the untruths of its earlier, sensationalistic “pack reporting” – that Hendrix had been feeling trapped for a long time.

He was one of the early pop-culture cases of someone getting too famous too soon and too fast. People expected him to be always “on” and always the leader and, just like Kerouac, he tried to oblige with the help of stimulants, when all he really wanted to do was read a book or write a song, or at least just sit quietly on one side of the party and let someone else do the entertaining.

Jerry Hopkins, a former Rolling Stone writer who now lives in Bangkok, authored a book, “The Jimi Hendrix Experience”, which isn’t nearly as good as his Jim Morrison biography “No One Here Gets Out Alive”, but certainly has its moments.

At the loveless, peaceless Love and Peace Festival in Germany just before he died, Jimi was onstage facing a wall of cruel chanting, Hopkins reported. “Go home! Go home! Go home!” Hendrix cursed the belligerent crowd and played a song he’d recently composed, although the lyrics already had a long pedigree in the blues.

I should have quit you a long time ago
I should have quit you a long time ago
Now you got me crying on the killing floor
Lord knows I should have gone
I just got here today, y’all
And now you got me crying on the killing floor

Hendrix should have listened to the crowd in the first place and just gone home.

It took Seattle a long time to get around to honouring its son, and even then it needed a massive financial goose from Paul Allen, who co-founded Microsoft with Hendrix tunes running in his head. For its part, Seattle city council put up a statue of Jimi on Broadway in 1997 and called a downtown boulder the official Jimi Hendrix Memorial. Then they had a debate over whether to name a park for the famous druggie.

Paul Allen is my age and has the same first name, but he’s also got $22 billion, and he’s having more fun with it than God has in mind when he gave it to him.

Not only does the Paul G Allen Family Foundation doles out truckloads of cash to good causes in the Pacific Northwest, Paul got behind SpaceShipOne and is helping SETI try to intercept extraterrestrial phonecalls.

He also built Seattle a Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame and, with Jimi in mind, the Experience Music Project (EMP), a 140,000-square-foot interactive music museum, which has the world’s largest collection of Hendrix memorabilia and stacks of other musicians’ instruments.

It also holds the record for the most complaints about a public building’s exterior appearance.

It hosts concerts in its Sky Church, which was a Hendrix notion. What was never a Hendrix notion was the grotesque lawsuits that continue over his legacy to this day. Allen did his bit in 1993 by financing the Hendrix family’s court battle for the rights to his music, after the estate administrator allegedly sold them without permission.

All the tortes and testimonies are detailed on the depressingly mercenary official Hendrix website, which only a lawyer would enjoy visiting. Meanwhile at the EMP website you have to look carefully for any mention of Jimi, so frantically is the museum seeking a broader appeal.

Sadly, the best mainstream online source of information about Jimi Hendrix is Wikipedia, which has a very thorough entry on the man and his music, although it’s all couched in a gloomy disclaimer about missing verifications.

Back in Washington, Jimi’s body was moved not long ago to a different spot in Greenwood Memorial Park in Renton.

He’d verbally requested to be buried in England, but his dad took him home and stuck him in the family plot. Now he’s got a big marble dome providing some shade. You can’t cool off Jimi Hendrix, though.