The new Hendrix film, Jimi: All Is By My Side, is entertaining – but is it true? Henry Barnes talks to the friends and families of those portrayed in biopics about the line between artistic licence and lies

The tens of thousands of parakeets that squat and squawk in the trees of south London could be Jimi Hendrix’s fault. Some say he released a pair of them into the sky above Carnaby Street in the 1960s. They were birds of their time. They advocated free love. They bred and bred, and their descendants are here to stay.

It could be true, it could be false. Either way, it’s a harmless urban myth about Hendrix. Another – more ugly – story will be raked over this week with the release of Jimi: All Is By My Side, a biopic about the rock legend written and directed by the Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave screenwriter John Ridley. The film includes a scene in which Hendrix, played by Outkast rapper André Benjamin, clubs his girlfriend Kathy Etchingham around the head with a telephone handset. Soon after, Etchingham, played by Hayley Atwell, is shown overdosing on sleeping pills, before waking up in a hospital bed.

These stories, which have their roots in a book written by Hendrix’s former band-leader Curtis Knight, have been debunked by many who were close to the guitarist. Etchingham says she was never interviewed by Knight. She took legal action against the publishers of the book, which was pulped in the UK, though extracts remain online. She wasn’t consulted for Ridley’s film, which she calls “absolute nonsense”.

“I’m defending myself, not Jimi,” she says on the phone from her home in Melbourne. “Jimi’s gone. You can say anything you like about a dead person. What I am is collateral damage.”

Ridley, meanwhile, says he’s simply retelling stories that have been reported previously. “There’s few people alive who have done more for Jimi’s legacy than Kathy Etchingham,” he says. “She’s got every right to dispute it, but she’s got to dispute it with the people who originated these stories.”

Biopic directors wield great power. They can lionise or denigrate; they can use mass media to superimpose a subjective view on to a legacy. But where does that leave the people who knew and loved the subject? How do you compete with a stranger’s sexed-up account of real life?

Oli Wilson, son of the late Factory records co-founder Tony Wilson, has first-hand experience of seeing a loved one fictionalised. “Films aren’t made for the three, four, five people in a family,” he says. “They’re made for the three, four, five hundred thousand that they want to get to go and see the film. A very personal subject can be taken away from you.”

Michael Winterbottom’s film about Tony, 24 Hour Party People, was released in 2002. It’s a meta-comedy, constantly breaking the fourth wall to tell viewers it’s yanking their chain. In jerking us around, it’s accurate to the spirit of its subject. Oli calls it a tremendous tribute to his dad, because his dad was always in on the joke. Tony even appears in a scene in which he plays a TV director telling “Tony Wilson” (played by Steve Coogan) he’s talentless.

“My dad took the piss out of life, and the film takes the piss out of him,” says Oli. “I mean the poster said, “Twat” on it, on his face! It was a send-up.”

There are two legacies for Tony, hesays: one as “Tony Wilson”, and one as his dad. He’ll often recommend people watch the film to get an idea of who Tony Wilson was. The public perception of his dad is now drawn from reality and the film; they’re twisted around each other.

“You’ve got to be aware of how powerful film is,” says Frank Cottrell Boyce, 24 Hour Party People’s writer. He remembers going to Tony’s wake and seeing quotations attributed to him on the walls. “They weren’t from Tony,” he says. “They were from the movie. In the movie, I had Tony quoting WB Yeats, which he never did. Tony liked to quote abstruse Marxist theory and I thought that was a bit boring, so I changed it. I said to Oli, ‘Is that not a bit weird? Because he didn’t do that – that was me.’ And Oli said, ‘Well, Tony was so keen on not disappointing people that he just took up quoting Yeats afterwards.’” This, however, is Cottrell Boyce’s recollection; Oli doesn’t remember the conversation and says he never heard his dad quoting Yeats.

Cottrell Boyce says it’s down to the film-maker to judge how much they are prepared to upset a family in order to tell a story. Sometimes, you owe it to the story to offend them. Sometimes, the subject’s take is the only version you can tell. He remembers talking to Eric Lomax about his experiences in a Japanese PoW camp during the second world war. Lomax was tortured and forced to work on the notorious Burma Railway, and Cottrell Boyce drew on his recollections for The Railway Man screenplay.

“Eric had come through something dreadful partly by settling on an account of himself,” says Cottrell Boyce. “He’d been telling the same story for 15 years.” Still, Eric’s account leaves his first wife and their three kids out of the story. That was hurtful, says Cottrell Boyce, but it was the version Eric wanted to tell. “His account was keeping him sane,” he says. “It would have been wrong to divert from it. My wife put it beautifully. She said, and this is paraphrasing Yeats, ‘Tread softly because you tread on his nightmares.’”

We all tell stories about ourselves. Often the versions we tell don’t match up. Cheryl Strayed is the bestselling author of Wild, a travelogue that describes the 1,100-mile hike she took along the Pacific coast following the death of her mother and the breakup of her marriage. Strayed’s version of her story has been adapted by Nick Hornby into a forthcoming drama starring Reese Witherspoon. Strayed gave Hornby feedback throughout the screenwriting process. Even then, her take on the truth got twisted. There’s a scene where Cheryl is shown having sex with two men in an alley. Strayed understands why it’s there – “It’s a shorthand for my promiscuity at the time” – but it’s not what happened.

“Who’s telling the truth,” she says, “and what does truth mean? I think that gets really complicated when we translate to the screen. With film, they almost always make changes that are not the literal truth. The form demands changes.”

Strayed feels responsible for the real people she met on her hike, though. She says the film-makers have either accurately reproduced her versions of them or changed them so much they wouldn’t be recognisable. “I don’t feel like I have the right to other peoples’ lives,” she says. “I have the right to my own. I’m saying to people, ‘Here’s my story, as I know it.’ I think sometimes people misunderstand that. They think subjectivity obliterates their obligation to the objective truth.”

It’s tempting to embellish a narrative, to entertain many by pissing off a few. Etchingham has been campaigning against All Is By My Side on her Facebook page. She plans to take legal action against Ridley should the film be released in Australia. Still, she thinks her right to reply is limited. “I can only defend myself through social media,” she says. “I have no voice.”

That may be the problem with the form: everyone has an angle, but biopics give the film-maker a platform to say their piece louder than anyone else, even the people closest to the subject. They have a megaphone. It’s up to them to point it in the right direction, says Cottrell Boyce. “The moral position is to say everything, which nobody ever does or ever could,” he says. “The moral position really is to behave well.”

• Jimi: All Is By My Side is out in the UK on 24 October and on current limited release in the US.



• Reviews of Jimi, Wild and The Railway Man

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