Special thanks to ThisDayinMusic.com.
Noel Redding, who died in Ireland on this day in 2003, was, according to his manager Ian Grant, “very kind-hearted and warm. Take away his role as the bass player in the largest rock trio of all time, and strip away all the glory of his musical career. As a human being he was a fabulous guy.”
That rock trio was the Jimi Hendrix Experience, for whom the guitar-playing Redding switched to bass and ended up working on three seminal Hendrix albums.
Born in the seaside town of Folkestone in England on Christmas Day, 1945, Redding went the art school route into the music business, playing with various bands and culminating in a residency in Germany with the Burnettes. But it was going nowhere fast and Redding was contemplating applying to be a milkman when, in 1966, he saw an ad in Melody Maker.
He didn’t get the gig for Eric Burdon’s New Animals, but then fate intervened as Redding recalled in his autobiography, Are You Experienced? “Chas Chandler came up and asked if I could play bass. I said: ‘No, but I’ll give it a go.’ So I played with a drummer, Aynsley Dunbar, a keyboard player, Mike O'Neill, and this American gentleman, quiet and very polite, who turned out to be Jimi Hendrix.”
Not that the change to bass was all that easy. Redding told Goldmine magazine: “I’d never played bass before in my life. What I did, being a guitar player, I just withdrew the top two strings and thought about the four that were left. Chas gave me a few little learners, a few pointers, and after that, I had it sussed.”
Redding impressed Hendrix with his playing and his style. “I think he liked my curly hair. After a couple of pints of bitter, he asked me to join the group,” Redding said. “I was glad to get the job and being paid ?15 a week was wonderful even if I wasn’t too sure about switching from guitar to bass.”
Starting out as darlings of the London rock and roll elite, Hendrix and the Experience rapidly became the coolest band in the world. But Redding felt they got too much, too soon. “We worked our arses off for three years, we were on the road for too long and the band got too big,” he said.
Redding left Hendrix in 1969, made some solo and band projects with Fat Mattress, Road and the Noel Redding Band, and then signed a piece of paper in 1974 that would haunt hims the rest of his days. He agreed to take a lump sum of cash in return for past and future royalties for his work with Hendrix. It wasn’t until the coming of CDs and the whole digital and re-issue age that Redding realized what a massive mistake he’d made financially.
The always-humble Redding spent his final years in Ireland, something of a recluse but he still loved to play music.
“He used to play at a pub every Friday, The Barra, in Clonakilty where he lived,” his manager Grant said. “He was just happy to pick up his bass on a Friday night and just play with his friends.”
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