It was a Sunday night in 1967, three days after one of the most celebrated albums in history had arrived in record shops, and Jimi Hendrix had already learned to play it. Paul McCartney was in the audience at London's Saville Theatre when the curtains flew back and Hendrix opened his set with the title track from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band — knowing full well that McCartney and George Harrison were watching from the crowd.
Decades on, the memory has lost none of its power for McCartney, who has named Hendrix as his favourite guitarist of all time — and that single night in London is the moment that sealed it.
The Night Hendrix Stopped Everyone in Their Tracks
When Hendrix arrived in London in 1966, The Beatles were the act every musician aspired to emulate. But it wasn't long before the name of the young American was on every pair of lips in the city. McCartney witnessed Hendrix perform at the Saville Theatre — a venue that Brian Epstein, The Beatles' manager, would regularly hire out on Sundays — and what he saw left him genuinely stunned.
"Jimi opened, the curtains flew back, and he came walking forward, playing 'Sgt. Pepper', and it had only been released on Thursday, so that was like the ultimate compliment."
The gesture reflected a mutual admiration between the two musicians. While Hendrix clearly regarded Sgt. Pepper's as an instant classic worthy of immediate tribute, McCartney saw it as proof of Hendrix's extraordinary instinct and fearless confidence as a performer.
As he recalled in an interview with Stephen Colbert, the moment still shines brightly in his memory.
'He Must Have Been So Into It'
What continues to baffle McCartney, even now, is the sheer speed with which Hendrix absorbed the material. Learning a brand new track to performance standard in under three days — and then choosing to open with it in front of its own creators — is the kind of move that speaks to a musician operating at a completely different level.
"He must have been so into it because normally it might take a day for rehearsal, and then you might wonder whether you'd put it in, but he just opened with it."
For McCartney, it remains a defining moment in his understanding of what a guitarist can be. "It's still obviously a shining memory for me because I admired him so much anyway; he was so accomplished," he said.
"To think that that album had meant so much to him as to actually do it by the Sunday night, three days after the release."
The Bassist Who Always Loved the Guitar
McCartney's reverence for Hendrix is all the more striking given his own complicated relationship with the guitar. As a young musician, his ambition was to be a lead guitarist — Eddie Cochran was his childhood idol — but after Stuart Sutcliffe's departure from The Beatles, McCartney was handed the bass role instead. As he noted in 2007, "Nobody wants to play bass, or nobody did in those days."
He accepted the position reluctantly, then proceeded to reinvent what the instrument could do, crafting melodic basslines that became as recognisable as the band's vocal hooks. His love of the six-string never went away, however — on his solo McCartney trilogy of albums, he played every instrument himself, giving him the chance to return to the guitar on his own terms.
But when it comes to the guitar in its most exhilarating, untouchable form, McCartney's answer has always been the same. In his view, no one has ever come close to matching Jimi Hendrix — and one Sunday night at the Saville Theatre is where that conviction was born.
