On September 11, 1970, NME’s Keith Allston interviewed Jimi Hendrix in England.
The interview turned out to be Hendrix's last; he died a mere seven days later—September 18, 1970—at age 27.
You can hear the entire 30-plus-minute interview below. It's well known that Hendrix was set on branching out into a new musical phase in his later years, with collaborations with Miles Davis—and even Paul McCartney, apparently—in the planning or near-planning stages.
In the interview, Hendrix is contemplative and not totally sure where he’s bound next. He's also pretty funny, as the following exchange proves:
Do you feel personally that you have enough money to live comfortably without necessarily making more as a sort of professional entertainer?
Ah, I don’t think so, not the way I’d like to live, because like I want to get up in the morning and just roll over in my bed into an indoor swimming pool and then swim to the breakfast table, come up for air and get maybe a drink of orange juice or something like that. Then just flop over from the chair into the swimming pool, swim into the bathroom and go on and shave and whatever.
You don’t want to live just comfortably, you wanna live luxuriously?
No! Is that luxurious? I was thinking about a tent, maybe, [laughs] overhanging … overhanging this … a mountain stream! [laughs].
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