Mitch Mitchell helped to provide the beat to the rock revolution of the late 1960s, when his drumming underpinned the explosive guitar pyrotechnics of Jimi Hendrix. Along with Ginger Baker and Keith Moon, he was in the influential vanguard of British sticksmen who created the template for modern rock drumming. Much influenced by the great US jazz drummers, he brought the busy invention of jazz to the more four-square thump of rock and combined rhythmic flair with a prodigious power and stamina.

Hendrix’s favoured line-up of the “power trio” — guitar, bass and drums — gave Mitchell space and freedom, and the guitarist fed off the drummer’s rhythmic patterns in a dynamic and frequently thrilling fashion.

A highly versatile drummer, Mitchell was equally adept at underpinning Hendrix’s more tightly structured studio compositions or buttressing his wildest inventions during long on-stage jams.

After Hendrix’s death in 1970, Mitchell’s career inexplicably lost focus. He failed an audition for Paul McCartney’s Wings on the grounds that his style of drumming was “too busy” but he continued to play sessions and performed with a wide range of other respected musicians.

Times Archive, 1970: Jimi Hendrix

In direct contrast to the violence of his music, Hendrix was a gentle, peaceful man

• Noel Redding

Multimedia

• Video: Jimi Hendrix Experience play Purple Haze

• Video: Mitch Mitchell drum solo

• Video: Mitch Mitchell interview

BACKGROUND

• Live fast, die young: The 27 Club

• Hazy days

John Mitchell was born in 1947 in Ealing, West London. He seemed destined for a career in acting: he attended drama school and as a child landed small parts in TV shows such as Whacko, Jennings at School and Emergency Ward 10 and appeared in the “Ovaltiney” commercials. His theatrical training included learning to tap dance and from there perhaps it was not a giant leap to tapping a rhythm on drums rather than a wooden floor.

While still at school he took a Saturday job in the London music shop run by Jim Marshall, whose amplification systems were vital to the development of 1960s rock, enabling bands to generate a louder noise than ever before.

After teaching himself to play the drums, he honed his skills deputising on an adhoc basis in various bands, including Screaming Lord Sutch’s group and Johnny Kidd & the Pirates.

He finally opted for music over acting in 1964, when he joined the Riot Squad, whose line-up included the future Deep Purple organist Jon Lord. Eventually he tired of the Mod band’s inability to break out of the club circuit, and left for the more lucrative life of a studio session drummer, until he received an offer to join Georgie Fame and his Blue Flames.

Within days of Fame’s decision to disband the group, in October 1966, Mitchell had a call from Chas Chandler, the former bass player with the Animals, who was managing an unknown US guitarist he had brought to London, named Jimi Hendrix.

Chandler and Hendrix auditioned two drummers, Mitchell and Aynsley Dunbar. Both were highly proficient with a suitably powerful style, and either could have landed the job. According to Chandler, it was eventually decided on the spin of a coin. Noel Redding was added on bass, and the new trio became the Jimi Hendrix Experience. The initial contract was merely for a two-week tour of France, but Mitchell immediately felt liberated after the straitjacket of session work and Fame’s tight pop arrangements: “It felt good to have the freedom to play whatever you wanted within a small framework of people. It was the first time I’d played in a trio and been able to play really loud,” he recalled.

The French tour went well enough for the arrangement to be made more permanent, and Redding and Mitchell were each put on retainers of £15 a week. The group’s first single, Hey Joe, was released at the end of 1966 and soon reached No 6 in the charts.

It is no exaggeration to say that over the next two years the Jimi Hendrix Experience revolutionised rock music. Further hits singles followed with Purple Haze, The Wind Cries Mary and Burning of the Midnight Lamp.