Inside Marshall’s £3,800 Crushed Velvet Homage to Jimi Hendrix

2 mins read

Sixty years ago, Jimi Hendrix plugged into a Marshall amplifier and quietly rewired what electric sound could become. Marshall Group built the architecture. Hendrix shattered it open. Now, that dialogue returns in material form: the Marshall x Hendrix™ 60th Anniversary Collection—a limited-edition release that reframes legacy as object, texture, and tone. This is not nostalgia. It is amplification as cultural artefact.

THE ACTON III: VELVET, VISION, AND COSMIC DESIGN LANGUAGE

Hendrix’s influence was never purely sonic. It was visual, tactile, and deliberately otherworldly. The Hendrix™ 60th Anniversary Edition Acton III translates that world into a domestic object that feels closer to design studio sculpture than consumer tech.

Wrapped in crushed velvet and punctuated by a silver control panel, purple detailing, and soft LED glow, the speaker carries a clear reference to Hendrix’s late-’60s wardrobe language—fluid fabrics, metallic jewellery, and cosmic abstraction.

The all-seeing eye motif sits embedded into the design, echoing his fascination with sci-fi symbolism and expanded perception. Powering on the unit triggers a custom sound cue drawn from archival Hendrix material, including a rare instrumental version of Have You Ever Been (To Electric Ladyland)—a detail that shifts the product from speaker to sonic archive.

“From his fashion to his lyrics and of course, his music, there are so many different stories we could tell when it comes to Hendrix,” says Emma Rydahl, Senior Industrial Designer at Marshall Group. “We started with materials and pattern exploration, looking at different fabrics and running test prints with a psychedelic track in mind.”

THE 1959 JMH HALF STACK & FUZZ FACE® PEDAL: £3,800 AS SONIC OBJECT

If the Acton III is interpretation, the 1959 JMH Half Stack is reconstruction.

Built around the 1960 AJMH 4×12 angled cabinet and 1959 handwired head, the system revisits the tonal architecture that defined Hendrix’s most volatile era—tight low-end pressure, midrange bite, and a high-end that never fully settles.

Visually, it leans into controlled chaos: black Tolex disrupted by oil-slick purple swirl, silver hardware accents, and a faintly futuristic LED pulse. The aesthetic sits somewhere between archival replica and imagined relic. Every unit is handbuilt at Marshall’s Bletchley factory in the UK, grounding cosmic referencing in industrial reality.

Paired with it, Dunlop’s Fuzz Face® Distortion pedal completes the circuit—offering the same textural distortion Hendrix used to push sound into instability rather than clarity.

Used together, the system doesn’t replicate Hendrix. It approximates his volatility.

“Jimi was a formidable musician, a real force of nature,” says Terry Marshall, Co-founder of Marshall Group. “He took everything to a new level… and there’s no doubt we grew with him.”

THE DROP

Jimi Hendrix didn’t just play through Marshall amplifiers—he expanded their vocabulary. This collection treats that moment as something closer to architecture than memory.