Eddie Cochran crash memorial — Rowden Hill, Chippenham

On the night of April 16–17, 1960, a taxi carrying Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent, tour manager Patrick Tompkins, and songwriter Sharon Sheeley blew a tyre on Rowden Hill on the A4 road outside Chippenham, Wiltshire, and crashed into a concrete lamppost. Cochran was thrown from the vehicle. He was taken to St Martin's Hospital in Bath, where he died on Easter Sunday morning, April 17, 1960, at age 21. He had been on his second British tour, and the car was taking the party to Heathrow Airport for the flight home. Cochran had been a major star in Britain in a way that American audiences had not fully recognised, and his death devastated a generation of British teenagers who had adopted him as one of the defining figures of rock and roll.

The impact of Cochran's death on British rock music is difficult to overstate. The musicians who saw him play on that UK tour — among them a seventeen-year-old George Harrison — carried what they had learned into the music they would make in the following decade. His guitar technique, his recording sophistication (he was one of the first artists to overdub his own vocals), and the directness of his performances were absorbed into the DNA of British rock. 'Summertime Blues', 'C'mon Everybody', and 'Three Steps to Heaven' — released posthumously and reaching number one in the UK — became foundational texts.

A memorial was installed at Rowden Hill by the Eddie Cochran Memorial Project and completed in 2018: a three-step stone plinth inscribed with lyrics from 'Three Steps to Heaven'. It stands at the crash site on the A4 and has become a significant pilgrimage destination, drawing visitors from around the world on the anniversary of his death. Gene Vincent survived the crash but was seriously injured; Sharon Sheeley also survived. The memorial is the most visited Cochran site in the world.