“We will piss anywhere, man,” Mick Jagger apparently said to an outraged garage mechanic who took umbrage at the band using his Romford forecourt as a urinal in 1965. This was the Rolling Stones’ ultimate Grundy moment, defining them as public enemy number one in the eyes of polite society. They were fined £5.
Jagger continued to stoke the band’s reputation for foolhardy acts the following year when, during a concert in Berlin, he goose-stepped around the stage dispensing Nazi salutes. He may not have actually mentioned the war but he certainly didn’t get away with it: the first 30 rows of seats were instantaneously demolished.
But of all the Rolling Stones’ ill-judged actions, one single event stands out as their most public folly of all, and it transpired in the wake of the aforementioned death of Brian Jones.
Wishing to celebrate the life of a man that they’d only just sacked, the band decided to play their free Hyde Park concert as a tribute to their fallen former colleague. Mick Jagger wore a dress and recited Shelley – two follies for the price of one right there – before releasing thousands of white butterflies into the sky.
"Early on the morning of the concert, I went down to Paddington Station to collect these boxes of butterflies, they came in these things like wine boxes, about half a dozen," promoter Andrew King told Uncut. "I peeped inside, and as far as I could see it was full of dead butterflies. 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.
"How the fuck were we going to warm them up? We had these old hot plates, the sort of thing students use to warm up baked beans, and so we put the boxes of butterflies on them to warm them up. I think one of them caught fire."
Not being the keenest of lepidopterists, no one in the Stones camp realised that butterflies needed air and so, after being cooped up in cardboard boxes all day in the heat of the English summer sun (and crushed by a Hells Angel who apparently fell on one of the boxes) the majority of the unfortunate insects simply dropped onto the stage as Jagger capered about on their corpses. In a dress. On national television.
"The butterflies were a bit sad, really," drummer Chalie Watts told The Sun. "They looked good from the audience, but actually, if you were near them, there were an awful lot of casualties. It was like the Somme before they even got off the ground.”
Of course, Sir Mick went on to compound any embarrassment he might have felt in Hyde Park by spending a significant amount of the Rolling Stones’ 1976 tour riding around on an enormous inflatable penis, which must have seemed like a good idea at the time but, in retrospect, seems almost as foolhardy as accepting a knighthood.
