She Was By His Side

Jimi Hendrix’s London girlfriend Kathy Etchingham speaks out against John Ridley’s new biopic

Long in a development haze has been the new Jimi Hendrix biopic, Jimi: All Is By My Side, which hits theaters in the U.S. on September 26th. Directed by John Ridley, the film stars Outkast’s Andre Benjamin as Hendrix, a casting that many of his fans embraced, seeing parallels in their flamboyant style and stage presence.

Ridley is an accomplished writer and director — his work on 12 Years A Slave won him the 2014 Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, amidst awkward tension between him and the film’s director, Steve McQueen. Ridley and McQueen conspicuously avoided thanking each other in their acceptance speeches.

While Ridley’s Oscar win added momentum to his new project, Jimi: All Is By Side is facing some crosstown traffic. The film was denied the right to use any of Hendrix’s music, as the estate is attached to a different Jimi biopic. That second film focuses on the last nine days of Hendrix’s life, tentatively titled simply Jimi, directed by Ol Parker and starring Anthony Mackie [Captain America: The Winter Soldier]. Without Hendrix’s music or family support, Ridley’s project is facing a serious authenticity issue.

Now Jimi’s former girlfriend Kathy Etchingham is speaking out, insisting that Ridley’s film is largely a fictitious account, filled with embellishments and historical inaccuracies. Etchingham, who is allegedly the basis for “Foxy Lady” and “The Wind Cries Mary,” was a DJ in the “Swinging London” music scene. She met Hendrix on the first day he arrived in the city, in September of 1966. Etchingham wrote a memoir in 1999 covering her time with Jimi, Through Gypsy Eyes. In a post on her website, she panned the film after seeing an early screening in Australia. Although she is portrayed as a key character in the film, she claims nobody from the film ever contacted her or asked for her input.

Cuepoint spoke with Kathy Etchingham about her issues with the film and her heartfelt experiences with Jimi.

Cuepoint: I saw your post about Jimi: All Is By My Side and wanted to get a little more in-depth with you about your feelings on the film.

Kathy Etchingham: It is absolutely shocking, actually. I was sitting there watching it, and I didn’t recognize anything in it. The guy playing Jimi [Andre “3000” Benjamin] speaks only in monotone and portrays Jimi as somebody who is completely inarticulate, and who can only speak in one way, mumbling mantras and things like that.

The person who is playing me, Hayley Atwell [Captain America: The First Avenger], there is nothing about her, nothing about her character, or her personality, or events that bare anything remotely like me. Basically they just hijacked my name and personality, and applied a completely different personality on to it. I’ve never been interviewed for this film, and indeed, Hayley Atwell said that she purposely didn’t want to speak to me. She wanted to do “her own” interpretation of what I’m like, based on, presumably, John Ridley’s script.

In an interview, she actually says that. She said, “I didn’t meet with Kathy, I purposely decided that. Through trusting John’s work and his vision and his writing — and her book — that it would be about my interpretation as an actor with the material at hand, rather than an impersonation of someone.”

There you have it. This isn’t me. It was never intended to be me. It was just John’s vision of me. So that’s presumably why nobody interviewed me, because they didn't intend to tell the truth.

There are characters in the film that didn't exist, especially one called “Ida.” But one of the things I noticed is that my book, Through Gypsy Eyes, has certain events, and John Ridley has taken the basic facts from my book, and then put a completely different story around those facts. And that’s why I can say that this is made up, it’s a bunch of lies.

And it’s really annoying, because it makes Jimi look like a complete idiot. I don’t know what Andre Benjamin was thinking. I can only assume he didn’t know Jimi’s history, and everybody just went along with John Ridley.

Hayley Atwell says that she decided from the outset not to talk to me, but when I saw an interview with her — I think in an English Newspaper, The Independent, I can’t remember which one — where they’re asking her about her upcoming part in this film, and she started describing me in the most defamatory way. So I sent her a Tweet, saying “What the hell are you talking about? Research the part that you are playing.” And I got a Tweet from her agent saying “Hayley wants to talk to you.” So I sent my email address, and never heard another word. In the meantime, she must have spoke to John Ridley.

And then, a friend of mine went to see the film, and he managed to get ahold of the sales note — or whatever they’re called — that they hand out to distributors. And in it, one of the actresses, Ruth Negga, who is playing this fictitious character, says “When John interviewed Kathy, she said ‘X, Y, Z,’” giving the distributors the idea he had actually interviewed me, when he hadn’t. So I think that John Ridley is rather dishonest.

Also in the film, there is a big “Thank You To Leon Hendrix”, and in an interview, John Ridley says “It’s nice to have a family member on board,” I can’t remember the exact words. And Leon wrote a letter to the Seattle Times saying “I’ve never met John Ridley, or any of his people. I’ve had nothing to do with this film.”

And then, they promised to take it off the film. But when I went to see it, six weeks after I saw it in Sydney, it was still there, “Thank You To Leon Hendrix.” So he wants to give the film some sort of credibility, but he’s lying. Neither of us, Leon or myself, have had anything to do with the film.

I think what’s happened here, is that when he made the film, because he didn’t have the rights to the music, he had to think up a different story, and he didn’t really want to know the truth, because it would be too hard to make a film like that. He just simply made it up.

Do you feel that “the truth” was not “juicy” enough?

Yeah. During the period that he is covering, September 1966 to June 1967, Jimi was at the height of his creative powers. He had already written “Purple Haze,” “The Wind Cries Mary,” he’d written Are You Experienced, the album, and it was in the charts. The impression that the film tries to give, is that Jimi hadn’t created any music whatsoever, and that we’d spent all of our time down in nightclubs. But that wasn’t the case, Jimi was a huge star when he went to Monterey, a huge star in the UK and all over Europe. He was already performing all of these songs, “Hey Joe,” and “Purple Haze.” And in all of these interviews, John Ridley said that “Oh, Jimi was washed up until he went to Monterey.” Oh really? He wasn’t washed up at all, he was 23 years old.

John Ridley wins the Academy Award for

Best Writing,

Adapted Screenplay.

So they didn’t have the music, so they had to pad it out, basically with just banter. Half-finished conversations. It’s quite stupid, and it’s boring. There’s no music, no writing, there’s no doing gigs. I don’t know what it’s supposed to be. But the worst part about it is, because there is no music in it, they had to introduce some kind of, what they call, “Hollywood jerks” for the audience. So he used domestic violence, and it didn’t happen.

He’s said that he’s researched it, and that it’s well documented and that he’s had a fact checker. The fact checker’s never been in contact with me either. They just didn’t want to know that it wasn’t true. I think the age that we are living in now, compared to back in the 60’s, to put domestic violence on the silver screen for entertainment is appalling. He ought to be ashamed of himself.

It has me beating Jimi up. I’m 5’4, I weighed about 110 lbs at that time, and it’s got me beating him up in the street, knocking him to the ground. I’ve never laid a hand on him. His biographies have all said, nobody had ever heard anything about Jimi perpetrating any domestic violence.

You wrote in your original post: “I had been told that Jimi had beaten me with a telephone in the film and after I had protested that this was not true the filmmakers had replied that it was true because they had ‘thoroughly researched’ me.” After seeing the film, how do you think the filmmakers came to this conclusion, is there a version of this story that they could have embellished for the film?

They made a statement to the Sydney Morning Herald saying basically the same thing, that they stand by the integrity of their film, and that this domestic violence is all well documented and that they had it fact-checked. So we said, point us in the right direction, where is this documentation? We heard no response, whatsoever.

And Channel 10, in Melbourne here, reported about that. And again, they just stick by their original statement. So what I think happened is that there have been loads and loads of biographies about Jimi over the years, many of them which had never interviewed me, because for about 20 years, I never said a word, and I lived quietly and didn’t give any interviews. So what I think has happened is that he read many of these biographies. He said in an interview that he saw two or three versions of the same event, and he had to be a “historical referee” and choose which one had been most likely. But what I think he’s done is decided is which one is best for his film.

What happens with these biographers — they’re all amateurs basically — they read other people’s biographies and then they copy what’s in that and then it becomes folklore. I think that’s what’s happened, because I don’t read any of these biographies.