(Credits: Far Out / Bent Rej)
Fri 11 April 2025 18:00, UK
There’s a surprising amount of mass animal murder going on in music history. I often think about the story of the day when Pink Floyd accidentally killed thousands of fish during a concert, being fined by the park that hosted them for mass aquatic slaughter. In this case, The Rolling Stones are the guilty party. The victim? Thousands of pretty little butterflies.
It was simply one of those days that was cursed from start to finish or tainted with a distinctly ‘off’ energy. I guess the circumstances demanded it. Given the context of the concert where all this went down, a display of anything other than tragic probably would have felt off.
July 5th,1969, Hyde Park, London. The Rolling Stones were putting on a free concert, and somewhere between 250,000 and 500,000 fans flocked to the city to attend. It was the first Stones show in over two years, and the band had been planning it for a while. It was supposed to be an exciting, celebratory day when they would not only return to playing live but would introduce Mick Taylor, their newest band member, and unveil the new songs he’d helped them write.
It was meant to be something beautiful. This was just before the Manson Family murders had taken place, before the tragedy of the Altamont Free Festival, before Woodstock happened and felt like the closing party for an era of optimism. But already, darkness was starting to creep in, and it hit The Stones first only two days before this planned party of a concert. Two days before a happy occasion, Brian Jones tragically passed.
By this point, the relationship between The Stones and Jones was, for lack of a better phrase, completely fucked. Jones’ worsening addiction and behaviour had led to him being pushed out. Mick Taylor was brought in because Jones couldn’t be relied on anymore; he could hardly even play his instrument. Then, eventually, on June 8th, 1969, they fired him.
Things were frosty. Kicking Jones out of the band was the final nail in the coffin of their friendship, the last blow after a long list of issues that included Keith Richards starting to date the woman Brian Jones had abused. There was too much blood in the water, and then Jones died, found in his swimming pool.
(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
The band decided to do the concert anyway, pivoting it from a celebration to a memorial at the last minute. That would have been fine, noble, even quite beautiful, in fact, if everyone wasn’t acutely aware of the weirdness. There is a lot to unpack in the fact that the band did this memorial, but yet, five days later, only Charlie Watts attended Jones’ funeral, and none of the rest of them showed up. But that’s a story for another time.
This is the story of a failed tribute—one that feels so morbidly apt for the circumstances. It’s clear that The Stones wanted to do something to represent or capture the commemorative atmosphere of the occasion. It was decided that Jagger would read a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley while a whole hoard of beautiful white butterflies would be released. It would be a gorgeous scene for a fan base in mourning, but it ended up tragic and gruesome, like the context.
The show’s promotor, Andrew King, remembered it viscerally to Uncut. “Jagger was going to release these white butterflies. I had to liaise with this butterfly farm in the West Country and the parks people who were very concerned the wrong sort of butterflies might upset the ecosystem of the park,” he said, which is all fine enough for now.
Then the issue hit, “I peeped inside, and as far as I could see, it was full of dead butterflies,” King recalled. Desperately in need of a way to resurrect the butterflies, he called for help, “So I called the butterfly farm in a panic and said, ‘They’re dead!’ And they said they’re not dead, they’re cold, they are sleeping, you’ve got to warm them up.”
So while The Stones were on stage performing a historic concert, King was backstage, essentially cooking up boxes of butterflies on hot plates, or, as he described them, “The sort of thing students use to warm up baked beans”. One of them caught fire, causing the first victims of the famed massacre.
Then, the moment came. Jagger was reading the romantic poem and then the flop. “When Mick opened the boxes, some of them flew away, but most dropped senseless on the stage,” King remembered of the scene. But that was not the cause of death, oh no; the butterflies died in a manner worse than freezing. They died under the boot of the rockstars, as King admitted, “They weren’t dead, they were cold. They only died when they got trod on.”
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