Hendrix autograph to go under the hammer

A Jimi Hendrix autograph acquired by a 14-year-old girl when she bumped into him in the street is going to auction.

Sara Bland went with her friends to see the band The Walker Brothers in Ipswich in April 1967.

Killing time before the show, they walked down a side street and spotted support act Hendrix, who was then-relatively unknown.

Mrs Bland said the guitarist was "very nice and pleasant" and signed her autograph book.

Auctioneer Paul Potter said Mrs Bland had been lucky, as Walker Brothers signatures "sell for fifty quid or less".

Hendrix, meanwhile, is "rock star royalty", he said, and his autograph "makes four figures on the rare occasions when it comes up for sale”.

The Ipswich show came the day after the infamous gig where Hendrix set fire to his guitar at the London Astoria, but the girls weren't aware of that at the time.

Mrs Bland decided to sell her autograph book after seeing another Hendrix autograph fetch £6,000 at auction in Scunthorpe.

She said: "I thought, I have something that might be valuable and I’m not looking at it or anything anymore, so why not sell it?"

When asked what she hoped to make from the sale, she added:“If it sells it sells, if it doesn’t it doesn’t, but whatever I get for it, jolly good. I’ll be quite happy."

The autograph will go under the hammer on Saturday at the Potters Auction Salesroom in Messingham.

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