LONDON?It may be 40 years since legendary rock guitarist Jimi Hendrix died in London, but his spirit lives on as the flat he called home is opened to the public and musicians hail his enduring influence.

Hendrix, whose hits included "Purple Haze" and "Hey Joe", was aged 27 and already a worldwide star when he choked on his own vomit in a hotel on September 18, 1970 after swallowing sleeping pills and drinking red wine.

He had hit the big time just four years earlier after moving from the United States to London, where he eventually settled into an apartment in the upmarket Mayfair district with his then girlfriend, Kathy Etchingham.

The flat -- where Hendrix seems to have lived a life of domesticity and music-making mixed with episodes of rock and roll behaviour -- is being opened to the public in September in a rare move by its owners, the Handel House Museum, to mark the anniversary of his death next month.

Despite focusing on a very different musician, composer Georg Friedrich Handel, who lived in an adjoining house, the museum is also holding an exhibition on Hendrix from this week featuring items like a guitar and a doodled self-portrait.

Etchingham says the 18 months between gigs which Hendrix spent at the flat -- then decorated in vivid 1960s style and littered with guitars but now a mundane office -- were the first time he felt he had a real home of his own.

"We revelled in having our own little place where Jimi could get off the rollercoaster of fame and fortune and hide himself away," she wrote in her autobiography.

"We were able to be like any other young couple, watching Coronation Street (a British soap opera) and drinking milky tea rather than Scotch and Coke."

Hendrix also enjoyed shopping in a local department store for the turquoise velvet curtains and flame-coloured carpets which adorned the flat along with drapes, prints and rugs, Etchingham said.

Stars including John Lennon came to the visit the cramped, 18th century building, while one member of the band Traffic is said to have fallen down the steep stairs and through a pane of glass at the bottom after a few drinks.

Hendrix even believed he had received a visitation from Handel himself, according to Martin Wyatt, the deputy director of the museum and the exhibition's curator.

"He was shaving one morning and came tearing down the stairs and said to Kathy: 'I've just seen this old guy in a periwig (a wig worn by men in the 18th century) walking around'," Wyatt told AFP.

"Kathy did point out to him that actually, Handel had lived next door and she didn't quite see what Handel would be doing in the bathroom."

The museum is eventually hoping to turn Hendrix's flat, which adjoins Handel's house, into a permanent exhibition.

Such anecdotes back up the description of Hendrix as a quiet character, despite his larger-than-life stage persona which included setting his guitar on fire and distortion-laden epic solos, sometimes played with his teeth.

He was a "very quiet, very, very nice, fun-loving guy", said Roger Mayer, who made guitar pedals and effects for Hendrix which were used on songs like "Purple Haze".

"The actual lifestyle was by no means as wild as some people might have imagined it would have been," Mayer told AFP.

"Obviously Jimi, when he performed, couldn't be completely stoned or out of it because you couldn't play that well and be stoned."

But it is the flamboyant legend of Hendrix which lives on to this day.

Charles Shaar Murray, author of "Crosstown Traffic", a book on Hendrix and his musical legacy, says it was the sheer power of the American's imagination which made him so distinctive.

"It's not because he was the fastest or the loudest, it's because of what you hear of him coming through the guitar," he told AFP.

"He was probably the most expressive electric guitarist of the last half century, the one with most mastery of sonic and emotional nuance and the most vaulting imagination."

Crispin Weir of Regent Sounds, one of the string of guitar shops on Denmark Street, London's traditional rock music hub where Hendrix once recorded, put it more simply.

"He's certainly the top of my list," he said. "I don't think anyone has come close since and I don't think they will again."