Light on the purple haze

Two decades of distortions of Jimi Hendrix's increasingly hazy history have prompted former lover and friend, Kathy Etchingham, to put her history into print. Etchingham is one of three women who have played vital roles in promoting contradictory images of Hendrix. Her book throws into relief the ruthless marketing of Hendrix by his step-sister, Janie Wright-Hendrix, and the wish fulfilment fantasies of Monika Danneman, the woman in whose flat he was found dead.

Kathy Etchingham was Hendrix's lover from the day he arrived in London in September 1966, during his heyday, until it all started to fall apart for him in New York in 1969. He had described her as his ''Yoko Ono from Chester''.

Monika Danneman was a besotted fan of Hendrix's who met him in Germany in 1969. She came to England to search him out the following year. Shortly after they made contact, he was found dead in her flat. That date, September 18, 1979, was the first time Etchingham had ever heard of Danneman.

Janie Wright-Hendrix was only nine when Hendrix died. Her Japanese mother had married Hendrix's father, Al, some five years earlier, when Hendrix had long since left home. She saw Hendrix for the first time when he played Seattle in 1969, and subsequently met him three times before he died. She has since become President of Experience Hendrix, part of a recently formed family empire.

Etchingham's autobiography, Through Gypsy Eyes, was originally intended to set the record straight. Etchingham had first met Danneman in 119981, together with the surviving Hendrix Experience members. At that stage Danneman seemed eccentric but harmless. She had invited Etchingham to ring her anytime, except for the full moon, when, she said, she and Hendrix ''communed on the astral plane''. Later, one of her more fanciful fabrications was her claim that Etchingham had been housekeeper to herself and Hendrix, and would make them both tea. Etchingham retorts in the book: ''She'd have been wearing it, not drinking it.'' During the eighties Danneman reinvented her past to such a degree that she was found guilty of libel against Etchingham.

In April 1996, Danneman was found guilty of contempt of court for repeating far more serious lies. Two days later, on Good Friday, she committed suicide.

In the intervening period between Hendrix's death and the court cases, Danneman had become increasingly close to Hendrix's American family, inventing for herself a role they were willing to believe. She filled the gaps of their knowledge of his London years. No, he wasn't into drugs, people spiked his drinks or forced them on him. Yes, they had planned to get married and raise a family. Thus a gullible step-sister was raised on a fantasy figurehead. It seems hardly surprising that Wright-Hendrix appears to be following in Danneman's footsteps in perpetuating the myth of a clean-cut Hendrix.

Twenty-eight years after Hendrix's fatal overdose, Experience Hendrix, and its glossy fanzine edited by Wright-Hendrix, has been responsible for airbrushing out of some of the unhealthier aspects of Hendrix's life. She's also guilty of some ruthlessly tacky merchandising, such as a Jimi Hendrix coffee table ($4350) and golf accessories range.

Etchingham puts Wright-Hendrix into the same category as Danneman. By now, a march of misinformation seemed to have gathered pace, which contrasted violently with Etchingham's warts-and-all memories of Hendrix. ''It took my literary agent three years to persuade me to do the book. I had said no, I couldn't be bothered. But after the court case (against Danneman) I realised the reporters had got it drastically wrong.'' She hopes the book will clear up misunderstandings, although she's pretty certain the squeaky clean Hendrix family won't like it.

So who will like it? Well, Through Gypsy Eyes is a comfy read, its 200 pages easily digested in an evening. Reading it is a bit like listening to someone chatting about their life, in the same way neighbours chat about holidays over the garden fence. Sixties connoisseurs may enjoy the kiss-and-tell insider insights. But basically it's Etchingham's story, charting her life from ragamuffin 10-year-old, to respectable doctor's wife and mother. In her own estimation, only about a quarter of the book is about Hendrix.

But that quarter packs quite a punch, describing his rise to fame, the couple's flaming rows, and Hendrix's eventual decline. Etchingham saw the road turning to quicksand and changed tracks. Although she stopped being his lover, she stayed a close friend, while making no excuses for what she sees as Hendrix's own self-destructiveness brought about by a weakness for excess.

She also recounts her sexual liaisons with Keith Moon, Brian Jones, and Georgie Fame, in bizarre contrast to a passage charting her success in banking middle management. But it's in the recording of the ordinary that the extraordinary touches a chord. After a painfully broken childhood, she reunited with her mother, only to run away, to become the archetypal swinging sixties London rock chick.

Surprisingly normal in contrast to her raucous peers, she witnessed so many deaths resulting from excess - Brian Jones, Keith Moon, and later Angie Burdon. As for weird crazy chicks, Dee Mitchell, who later stalked Etchingham and threatened the livelihood of her family, was far worse than Danneman.

''I don't regret my history, but I'm not going to dwell on it,'' she says, fresh from a bout of garden clearance. ''You can't live your life in the past.'' For now she's looking forward to going back into obscurity and getting on with her gardening. The only purple haze she is looking forward to in her brain is the lingering scent of lavender.

n Through Gypsy Eyes is published by Gollancz on Thursday.