Nish Kumar: The Comedian & Hendrix Scholar On London’s Greatest Guitar God

When comedian Nish Kumar took his turn in Celebrity Mastermind’s famous black chair, the world’s most influential guitarist was his specialist subject. ‘I have a weird sideline in my career as a sort of Jimi Hendrix pundit,’ he tells me from his flat, a blurred poster of the American musician behind him. It’s an obsession that began at 14 on a school trip to Sheffield’s Museum of Popular Music, where he put on Electric Ladyland – the name ‘Hendrix’ ringing a bell – and heard ‘Crosstown Traffic’ for the very first time.

‘I thought it was just amazing,’ he recalls. The obsession was born. ‘It’s quite easy to get a kind of handle on what he was doing,’ Nish explains, ‘because his entire recording career is essentially just over three years’ – from winter 1966, when he arrived in London, until his death in September 1970. But what makes a Hendrix fixation particularly rewarding is that compressed intensity of his career, Nish tells me. After the core albums Are You Experienced and Axis: Bold as Love, there’s no choice but to relent to the Hendrix vortex. ‘That’s when it goes deep,’ Nish says, ‘because he did so much recording in a really short space of time that just was never released.’

Jimi Hendrix lived and performed in London from 1966 to 1970.

Hendrix found his feet in swinging London in late 1966, after being discovered by Chas Chandler, the Animals’ bassist. ‘Hendrix reportedly said “I’ll come with you, because obviously you’ll introduce me to Eric Clapton,”‘ Nish says. Clapton was at his zenith – fans were graffiting ‘Clapton is God’ around the city. ‘London was a cultural crucible in the late 60s. The Beatles – the most famous people in the world – are just sat in these 150-capacity clubs.’

But Hendrix wasn’t arriving as an established American star. He’d been backing up artists like Tina Turner and Little Richard, drifting around Greenwich Village – but he had no track record as a recording artist under his own name. ‘The first Jimi Hendrix recordings of material that he’d written himself only starts when he comes to London in the winter of 1966,’ Nish points out. But Hendrix would soon be welcomed regardless, thanks to a palpable talent that filled Yardbirds guitarist Jeff Beck with a rageful envy – or so the story goes. ‘They were all ripping off black American blues musicians, and then suddenly a black American arrives who’s been steeped in that tradition, but is also kind of mastering the innovations that they are bringing on top of it,’ Nish says. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones quickly became Hendrix’s earliest champions.

Hendrix eventually settled at 23 Brook Street with his partner Kathy Etchingham. ‘Then this great cosmic coincidence,’ Nish says, ‘he ends up living next door to the house that Handel had lived in 200 years previously. Right round the corner from Oxford Circus.’ The German-British Baroque composer George Frideric Handel left his own indelible mark on music – albeit a very different one – two centuries earlier. The two houses are now a museum dedicated to the Baroque composer and the rock legend.

Jimi Hendrix’s Blue Plaque can be found at 23 Brook Street, London.

When he called Brook Street home, Hendrix performed at London clubs like The Scotch of St James and the Marquee Club, and recorded at Olympic Studios in Barnes with engineer Eddie Kramer. On his first album, Are You Experienced, he was capturing the wild things he did live. But with Axis: Bold as Love, recorded at Olympic, something shifted. ‘That’s where he starts to see the studio as an instrument that he can also play, like the guitar,’ Nish explains.

The technical details of Hendrix’s playing reveal a musician who approached the guitar with intuitive genius. He was left-handed but couldn’t afford left-handed guitars, so he taught himself to play upside down – playing right-handed guitars with the strings reversed, a setup that gave him a completely different register. Miles Davis was baffled by Hendrix’s technical accomplishment despite having no formal training whatsoever. Davis suspected synesthesia – that Hendrix experienced music through colours, and would write it as such. Hendrix’s style ranged across genres – blues underpinning everything, but equally fluent in psychedelia and the soul-R&B-jazz palette of Band of Gypsies. Miles Davis acknowledged his influence when embracing electronic instruments on Bitches Brew. Yet he accomplished all of this in three compressed years. Electric Ladyland, despite its sprawling reputation, was recorded over about a month – the era before the 1970s obsession with spending years painstakingly assembling an album.

This is all information Nish can reel off like it’s the most casual of conversations – an encyclopaedic knowledge that served him well in the Celebrity Mastermind chair when he answered every question Clive Myrie threw at him correctly. It was a rare glimpse into the moonlight obsession of one of the nation’s foremost political comedians, who is currently touring his show Angry Humour from a Really Nice Guy. ‘It’s a political stand-up show in an era where maybe the last thing we need is more political stuff,’ he jokes. ‘Maybe what people need now more than anything else is just a break, but they’re not getting one; they’re getting me moaning at a volume.’

It’s perhaps to be expected that the part that excites Nish is performing in historic venues – Birmingham Town Hall, where Bob Dylan performed in the mid-1960s and, later, David Bowie; Hackney Empire and Vicar Street in Dublin, ‘two of the best venues for anything anywhere in the world’, the comedian says. How does he prep before stepping on stage? ‘The best thing for me is to not think about it too much, so I will often be messing around, gassing with one of my support acts literally seconds before I go on stage. That’s when you do your best work.’

 

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There has been time, too, for Nish to develop his own theories about the guitarist that is so deeply lodged into his brain – that Hendrix longed to return home to America, for one. ‘I think he always felt sore that he hadn’t been able to make it in the States,’ Nish says. Yet Hendrix loved what London offered: freedom and the sense that this city was a place where you could arrive and reinvent yourself. His return to America for Monterey Pop happened through a London connection – Paul McCartney – and for studio albums, he didn’t return to the States until Electric Ladyland. The rest – Are You Experienced, Axis: Bold as Love – were London records.

Though London is where Hendrix made it, it is also where he died aged 27 (from an overdose at the Samarkand Hotel in Notting Hill). It followed a rocky adolescence marked by absent alcoholic parents, petty crime and military service – but the guitar, which he first picked up at age 15 and was never formally taught how to play, was always his escape. ‘His story is what I think is great about London as a city,’ Nish says. ‘We accept anyone. Anybody can come here and make it their home.’

Nish Kumar: Angry Humour From A Really Nice Guy

Nish tours the UK until 27 November. See the full line-up of dates and secure your tickets at nishkumar.co.uk

Blue Plaques Talk Back, Chelsea Arts Festival

Blue Plaques Talk Back returns to Chelsea Arts Festival following their riveting launch event at the festival in 2025. This unique, immersive, live show celebrates four iconic – or intriguingly overlooked – blue plaques, chosen specifically for their connection to the surrounding neighbourhood. The result is a performance of history and culture, brought vividly to life. At this edition of Blue Plaques Talk Back, you will hear the stories of Jawaharlal Nehru, Princess Serafina Astafieva, Jimi Hendrix and James McNeill Whistler.

Featuring Nish Kumar, Mishal Husain, Dr. Carol Jacobi and Lauren Cuthbertson, hosted by Hannah MacInnes.

• Where? Cadogan Hall (5 Sloane Terrace, London SW1X 9DQ)
• When? 1pm, Friday 18 September 2026
• Tickets: From £22.50 pp.

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