A great deal has been written about Jimi Hendrix’s death, much of it inaccurate. This is what I believe happened, pieced together from various sources.

Hendrix spent much of his brief career on the road, touring; but he treated London as his home. During the last week of his life — in mid-September 1970 — Hendrix tracked Linda Keith down to the Speakeasy club.

Though they had not remained friends since she had launched him to stardom in New York, she had recently been on his mind. He had even recorded Send My Love to Linda, an ode to her.

At the Speakeasy he handed her a guitar case and said: “This is for you.” Inside was a new Fender Stratocaster, his repayment for the instrument she had given him when he had no guitar of his own. He had never fully acknowledged what she had done for him, and the guitar was a small confession of their past.

“You don’t owe me anything,” Linda said. But he insisted and walked off with a blonde Linda didn’t recognise. This was Monika Dannemann, a 25-year-old German ice-skater whom he barely knew. Much of Dannemann’s self-inflating story has been discredited (she killed herself in 1996 after losing a court battle over her version of his death), but she was indisputably his London paramour in his final days.

The last full day of his life — Thursday, September 17 — began when he woke up late in Monika’s hotel room in Lansdowne Crescent, Notting Hill. That afternoon a car drew up while they were shopping. The young man inside, who had two girls with him, invited Jimi to tea. He was Philip Harvey, the son of a former Tory MP.

At around 5.30pm they arrived at Harvey’s opulent Kensington home. They sat on pillows, smoked hash and drank tea and wine. But at around 10pm Monika stormed out, saying: “I’ve had enough.” Jimi went outside to fetch her. Harvey could hear her screaming: “You f****** pig.”

Later that night Jimi arrived alone at a party where he complained to friends about his many problems, particularly the slog of touring. He took at least one amphetamine tablet and, considering his reckless drug use already that month, in all likelihood consumed several other drugs. Within 30 minutes Monika rang the intercom and said she was there to pick him up. Hendrix asked his friends to fob her off but eventually left with her.

Only Monika witnessed Jimi’s next few hours. She asserted that at around 4am, after drinking some wine, Jimi asked for some sleeping pills and she refused, saying he should try to sleep naturally.

Monika had 50 tablets of a powerful German sedative called Vesparax. The dose was supposed to be only half a tablet. She took one herself and fell asleep. Despite having complained of exhaustion for two weeks — in fact, he’d been pleading exhaustion for two years — sleep still eluded Jimi.

At some point early that morning he took nine Vesparax. In all likelihood he was under the impression that the pills were weaker than American pharmaceuticals and, desperately needing rest, took a handful. If he had intended to kill himself, as was later assumed, it was odd that he left 40 pills, more than enough to have assured an easy and virtually immediate death.

As it was, the nine pills he swallowed would have made him lose consciousness quickly. Some time during the early hours, the combination of the Vesparax, the alcohol in his system and the other drugs he’d used that night caused Jimi to heave up the contents of his stomach. What he brought up — mostly wine and undigested food — was then aspirated into his lungs, causing him to stop breathing.

A person who was not inebriated would have had a gag reflex and coughed out the material, but Jimi was well beyond that. If Monika had been awake, and had heard him gasp, she might have cleared his airway. Jimi’s reckless mixing of drugs and alcohol had become so commonplace the previous year that his girlfriends regularly woke up hearing him gasping and had to clear his windpipe on several occasions.

But there were to be no angelic rescues on the overcast morning of September 18, 1970. Around the time when the rest of London was waking up, he died. He was 27, and it was six days short of the fourth anniversary of his arrival in London.