Rolling Stones Hyde Park Concert — London

On July 5, 1969, the Rolling Stones played a free concert in Hyde Park before an estimated crowd of 250,000 to 500,000 people — one of the largest concerts ever held in Britain. It was Mick Taylor's first public performance as the band's new guitarist, two days after the death of Brian Jones, who had been fired from the band and found dead in his swimming pool on July 3. Jagger opened the show by reading Shelley's elegy "Adonais" as a tribute to Jones, then released thousands of white butterflies into the crowd. The gesture — mawkish by some accounts, genuinely moving by others — set the tone for an afternoon of strange, tender grandeur.

The concert was free and unannounced in any commercial sense — word spread through London and thousands simply appeared. The Stones had not played live in over two years and the performance itself was rough, the sound poor, the band underrehearsed. None of that mattered. The scale of the gathering, the collective grief for Jones, and the sense that something historic was happening carried the day. A BBC film crew recorded the event; the documentary was broadcast shortly afterward and remains one of the most vivid documents of the era.

Hyde Park has hosted many major concerts since 1969 — British Summer Time, concerts by the Stones themselves in 2013 and others — and has become one of London's most significant outdoor music venues. The bandstand area where the 1969 concert took place is a public open space. No formal memorial marks the event, but the Hyde Park concert is indelibly associated with the end of the 1960s in British popular culture.