WHEN Noel Redding auditioned to play guitar with the Animals in 1966, he was desperate. Since he had become a professional musician four years earlier, his career had been a catalogue of false starts and dashed hopes and he was on the point of abandoning music to become a milkman. Redding did not get the job with the Animals but the group’s manager Chas Chandler told him he had an unknown American guitarist who was looking for a bass player. “I’ll do anything,” Redding replied. The guitarist was Jimi Hendrix and, switching to the bass, Redding went on to play with his band, the Experience, on some of the most influential records in the history of rock music.

Born David Redding in Folkestone, Kent, his early career found him playing with the Lonely Ones and the Loving Kind. The latter supported the Hollies and Manfred Mann and played on the Hamburg club scene. But none of the group’s three singles charted and a disillusioned Redding returned to Kent.

The audition for the Animals was his last throw of the dice and he had to ask Chandler for the five-shilling fare back to Folkestone. But Hendrix liked the fact that Redding sported a hairdo like his own and within three weeks, with drummer Mitch Mitchell, they were on stage at the Paris Olympia supporting Johnny Hallyday. By December, the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s first single, Hey Joe, was in the British charts and a wild debut appearance on Top Of The Pops had shocked parents across the land.

As paid sidemen, Mitchell and Redding, in particular, would grow unhappy with their status as employees. But they found themselves in the eye of a whirlwind as Hendrix established himself as rock’s most flamboyant star. With singles such as Purple Haze, The Wind Cries Mary and The Burning Of The Midnight Lamp, the trio were hardly out of the charts in 1967. Their debut album, Are You Experienced? was kept from the top spot only by the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. They were introduced to America via a legendary performance at the Monterey Pop Festival in California that summer. A second album, Axis: Bold As Love, was released in December 1967, and peaked at number five in the UK charts and number three in America.

Inevitably, the attention focused on Hendrix, both for his showmanship and his virtuosity on the guitar. He also had strong views on how he wanted the bass to sound, and Redding swiftly became irritated by Hendrix’s insistence on showing him what to play. Redding also grew frustrated at Hendrix’s reluctance to record his compositions, although his She’s So Fine was included on Axis: Bold As Love. The song was an unremarkable slice of psychedelic pop and the weakest link on the album, which suggests that Hendrix’s motives were not mere selfishness.

By 1968, the tension within the group had boiled over and Hendrix spent a night in jail on a tour of Sweden, after wrecking a hotel room in a fight with Redding. During a three-month summer tour of America in 1968, the cracks widened further. When they entered the Record Plant studio in New York in June to make what would be the trio’s third and final album, Hendrix invited the Jefferson Airplane bassist, Jack Casady, to replace Redding on Voodoo Chile. Hendrix himself also played bass on several tracks, although Redding was somewhat placated when his song Little Miss Strange was included on the record. Released as a double album in October 1968, Electric Ladyland reached number six in Britain, although it probably would have charted higher had some stores not refused to stock the record because of the naked female models on the cover.

When Redding formed his own band Fat Mattress, they were given the support act on Hendrix’s last tour of America with the Experience in spring of 1969. Redding would play guitar with his new band and then, with Hendrix, play bass.

After the Experience’s final gig as a trio in Denver in June, Redding flew to London to tell the press he had quit. In reality, there was no band left to resign from. Hendrix had already decided to form a new group, who backed him at the Woodstock Festival in August that year.

In Fat Mattress, Redding was able not only to play guitar but also to record his own songs, many of them written with Neil Landon, a colleague from his days in the Loving Kind. His Hendrix connection earned the band a fat advance from Polydor, but after one album, Redding suffered the indignity of being sacked from his own group, when his colleagues replaced him with Steve Hammond.

In early 1970, Hendrix contacted him to suggest the Experience might play together again and their reformation was announced in Rolling Stone. In the end, it never happened. Hendrix decided he could not work again with Redding — perhaps because his old bass player was insistent that he wanted to play second guitar. Billy Cox took his place but by September 1970 Hendrix was dead. Redding flew to Seattle to attend the funeral.

In 1974, facing legal bills, he signed away his royalties covering his recordings with Hendrix for a one-off payment of £100,000. Thus he never received any money from the subsequent reissue of the albums on CD and, in 1990, he calculated that he had been “defrauded” of £8 million in royalties. In February 2003, he instigated fresh legal proceedings.

He continued to play music, and after Fat Mattress he formed Road and then the Noel Redding Band. Neither enjoyed much success and in the mid-1970s he moved to Ireland. He published his autobiography, Are You Experienced? in 1996, and continued to perform each week in his local pub in Clonakilty, Co Cork, although financial difficulties forced him to sell the instrument he had once played while performing with Hendrix.

He is survived by his long-time partner, Deborah McNaughton.

Noel Redding, rock guitarist, was born on December 25, 1945. He was found dead on May 12, 2003, aged 57.