Hendrix memorabilia from plastic trunks under bed to go on show
SkimNews Take
The exhibition's focus on ordinary personal effects implicitly reframes Hendrix's extraordinary public persona by emphasizing his shared human experiences over his mythical status.
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- Handel Hendrix House will open an exhibition of previously unseen Jimi Hendrix memorabilia on 19 June at 23 Brook Street, the Mayfair flat where the guitarist lived from 1968 to 1969, with exhibits funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund.
- Patricia "Trixie" Sullivan, now 83, kept Anim Records corporate files, contracts, diaries and personal documents in four plastic trunks — first under her bed in Spain, then in her grandson's shed in Dorset — after collecting them from bailiffs who had entered manager Mike Jeffery's London office following his 1973 death.
- Restaurant receipts from Mr Love, a ground-floor restaurant in Hendrix's building where he ate steaks and hamburgers, are among the exhibits, including one bill of £32/16s/6d (about £485 today) covering meals over a couple of months; Hendrix once said the problem with English food is "you get mashed potatoes with just about everything."
- Curator Claire Davies said Sullivan was "the absolute epicentre of everything that Hendrix and the Experience were doing" and "clearly running the show" during her 1966–1973 tenure booking studios, organising tours and negotiating contracts, raising the question of why her role has been historically overshadowed by manager Mike Jeffery.
- Exhibits also include Sullivan's diaries from Hendrix's January 1969 Germany tour (a Munster entry: "great crowd nearly rioted – broke many chairs damage $250"), dry cleaning tickets for a striped suit and gold jacket, work permits, phone bills totalling tens of thousands of pounds, and invoices showing he bought Persian rugs worth about £30,000 in today's money.
- Sullivan told her grandson Jonathan Garcia Sullivan that Hendrix was "quite introverted" and "self-doubted himself a lot," and that the Brook Street flat was "the only place he felt truly at home" during his London years; the flat shared with girlfriend Kathy Etchingham has been meticulously recreated for the show.
Why it matters: The exhibition reframes Hendrix's London years through the overlooked figure of Trixie Sullivan, the assistant who quietly preserved the archive and, per the curator, "ran the show" — material that has been physically stored in trunks under beds and in garden sheds for over 50 years will now be publicly accessible for the first time, with National Lottery Heritage Fund support.
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