Handel Hendrix House turns ten with a rock concert in a 900-year-old church

Electric Church returns to St Pancras Old Church on Thursday 13 August at 7.30pm, with guitarist Marcus Machado headlining alongside Omar Ríos Meléndez to mark ten years of Handel Hendrix House sharing Jimi Hendrix’s London story.

Handel Hendrix House opened its Hendrix rooms at 23 Brook Street in 2016, ten years after the museum first opened next door dedicated to Handel. The two very different musicians shared a party wall and, for one night a year, the museum marks that strange coincidence with a concert built around Hendrix’s own idea of music as something closer to a spiritual experience than entertainment. This year’s edition takes place in St Pancras Old Church rather than the museum itself, and it’s the tenth anniversary edition.

Marcus Machado

Machado started playing guitar at two years old, which tends to be the kind of detail that sounds exaggerated until you hear him play. Rolling Stone named him Best Next Young Gun, and Guitar World has praised him for pushing rock, funk and soul guitar somewhere new. His collaborators include Pharoahe Monch, Daniel Caesar, Pete Rock, Jon Batiste and Jose James, and his most recent album, Blue Diamonds, moves between R&B, funk, jazz, hip hop, heavy rock and psychedelia without settling on any single one of them.

Omar Ríos Meléndez

Opening the night is Omar Ríos Meléndez, a Nicaraguan guitarist, composer and music educator based in London who has been playing since he was 11. His style pulls from flamenco, Latin American folk, classical guitar, jazz fusion, rock and blues, and he’s performed across Spain, Germany, Russia, the US and the UK. He’s become a regular at Handel Hendrix House’s Baroque & Roll weekends, which gives some sense of how comfortably he moves between centuries of musical tradition in a single set.

The London x London Take: St Pancras Old Church is a genuinely atmospheric room for this kind of concert, reputedly one of the oldest Christian worship sites in England, and a rock guitarist playing under its low, dark ceiling is a better fit than it might sound. Machado’s range makes him a strong booking for a night built around Hendrix’s belief that electric music should move people rather than just entertain them. Worth going in with no expectations beyond a proper guitar showcase in a setting you don’t get very often.