1970 The Jimi Hendrix Experience: Voodoo Chile

Jimi Hendrix has always fallen into a select band of artists who I admire more than listen to, and 'Are You Experienced' is one of the best albums I hardly ever play. An odd thing to say maybe, but I think the main reason for this is because, to my ears anyway, Hendrix always falls squarely between two stools.

Although undoubtedly loud and heavy with a blues influence, his music is rarely something you could stack alongside the straight, no nonsense rock that was purveyed by other seventies blues rockers like Groundhogs, Ten Years After etc. Conversely, the psychedelic overtones and improvisations that keep his music shifting are never anything I’ve found interesting or enjoyable enough to warrant close listening.

'Voodoo Child' is a case in point. Although, like 'Bridge Over Troubled Water', it's a track more suited for the company of other tracks on album than alone as a single (can’t blame Hendrix for this, he’d just died so this was a shameless cash in on the record company's part), that opening riff should have entered the classic rock canon and the nation's consciousness as surely as the der der Der of 'Smoke On The Water' or Slash’s squally lead on 'Sweet Child O' Mine' have. The fact that it hasn't can be put down to Hendrix squandering and abandoning it for dead once the main body of the song kicks in.

Or rather than squander, perhaps it’s fairer to say he doesn't play ball the way you'd expect - while the riff to 'Smoke' re-appears throughout and drives the song to the end (a trick employed by most bluesmen old and new), Hendrix follows a left field jazz/be-bop muse and riffs on the riff to stretch and twist it in improbable directions. Technically it's impressive, but abandoning the traditional blues structure - and make no mistake, at heart VC is your typical testosterone fuelled, macho blues pissing contest ("Well, I stand up next to a mountain, And I chop it down with the edge of my hand") - for a series of radical chord and key changes makes for a restless song. And it's restlessness doesn't nag me into listening to it again and again and again the way other macho blues pissing contests like 'I'm A Man', 'Wang Dang Doodle' et al do.

Like his contemporary Captain Beefheart, Hendrix is to be applauded for taking the lid off an established format and letting its essence run free by turning the usual apocalyptic lyrics into apocalyptic music that dips it’s toes into jazz; after all, why sing about the end of the world when you can show us what it's like by making your guitar sound like it? But just like putting roller skates on an arthritic pensioner to get them moving, the impression of speed is admirable yet false, short lived and not something that bears too much repeating.