"He just looked unusual - stunning really.... He was fresh and he had a very soft sort of American accent."

Writes Kathy Etchingham meeting her long-ago boyfriend Jimi Hendrix (who was not a star at the time).

[One evening] Etchingham was trying to make mashed potato and not doing a very good job of it.

"He comes along and tastes them with a fork and says they're all lumpy," she recalls. "I knew he couldn't cook himself and that's how the argument started. It ended with my screaming and shouting, throwing the plates on the floor and marching out."

Etchingham spent the night at a friend's and Hendrix missed her so much that he sat down to write one of his biggest hits, The Wind Cries Mary.

Mary is Etchingham's middle name and the guitarist would sometimes use it to wind her up.

"The Wind Cries Mary" is about an argument over mashed potatoes!

***

A broom is drearily sweeping
Up the broken pieces of yesterday’s life potatoes
Somewhere a queen is weeping
Somewhere a king has no wife
And the wind, it cries Mary