Jimi Hendrix and the Parakeets of London

There are certain stories that London refuses to let go of. They perch on the edges of parks and pavements, whispering themselves into pub conversations, guidebooks, documentaries, and the half-remembered comments of taxi drivers. Stories that don’t particularly care whether they’re true – only that they’re ‘alive’….

and one of these stories squawks.

If you’ve ever walked through Richmond Park, lingered by the Thames at Kingston, or stood under a plane tree in south-west London and wondered why the branches suddenly sound like a tropical aviary, you’ll already know the birds. Bright green flashes against English grey. Long tails. Rose-pink collars. Ring-necked parakeets, bold as brass and noisy as gossip.

And somewhere along the line, someone decided they must be Jimi Hendrix’s fault.

The story goes like this:

Sometime in the late 1960s, at the height of Swinging London and ‘psychedelic excess’ (ahem), Jimi Hendrix – guitar genius, cultural lightning bolt, occasional agent of chaos, absolute God etc. – released a pair of parakeets into the London air.

Some versions say it was accidental, others that it was deliberate. A peace offering. A gesture of freedom. A moment of cosmic whimsy involving Carnaby Street, a cage, and the idea that nothing should ever be owned. Adam and Eve, the birds are sometimes called. Which tells you immediately this is not a scientific explanation, but a creation myth.

From those two birds, the story claims, came the thousands that now haunt London’s parks, stealing food from squirrels, shouting over dawn birdsong, and nesting in places no sensible tropical creature should survive. A psychedelic inheritance. A feathered echo of the 1960s that simply refused to die.

There is, of course, ‘no evidence’ that Hendrix ever owned parakeets, let alone set them free.

Ornithologists will tell you – patiently, kindly – that London’s parakeet population almost certainly arose from multiple escapes and releases over many decades. Pets that slipped cages. Aviaries damaged by storms. Birds released by owners who no longer wanted them long before Hendrix ever set foot in Britain – Sightings even go back to the Victorian era.

But folklore has never been especially interested in ‘evidence’.What matters is that the story ‘fits’.

Hendrix lived in London at exactly the right moment. The birds look like they belong to a psychedelic album cover. And London, eternally haunted by its own cultural afterimages, likes to imagine that something of the 1960s is still alive in its trees. Loud, colourful, unruly, and impossible to ignore.

Even David Attenborough couldn’t resist mentioning the legend in ‘Wild London’, offering it up not as fact, but as part of the strange ecology of the city itself: where animals don’t just live among people, but among stories.

And stories, like parakeets, are adaptable things.

Last year, after I’d already written about the rumour in ‘Tales From the Rumour Mill‘, Si and I went to see Robert Plant and found ourselves walking through Kingston upon Thames and Richmond Park. That’s when the birds appeared – not metaphorically, not in memory, but right there. Screeching overhead. Flashing green against ancient oaks. Entirely real.

I was thrilled. There’s something quietly delightful about that moment: writing a rumour, then being confronted by its physical manifestation. Folklore stepping out of the margins and into your afternoon. It doesn’t matter whether Jimi Hendrix had anything to do with them. The myth has already done its work.

Because perhaps the real truth is this: cities generate their own wildlife myths the way forests once did. We no longer blame spirits for strange noises in the trees – but we’ll happily blame a dead rock star for invasive parrots.

And somewhere between biology and belief, London’s parakeets continue to thrive. Not caring who freed them. Not caring whether the story is true. Only that it’s told.

Like all the best rumours, it refuses to stop squawking.

Chmielna street, Warsaw
2023-05-24

#Graffiti of Jan Wiesław Polkowski aka Czarny Roman (1950 - 2017) - #homeless who became an element of #urbanfolklore.

He told passers-by that he was immortal and "the awareness of the immortality of murder". Also predicted the dates of death of people he met in cafes.

#streetart #urbanart #art #homeless #schizophrenia #Poland

Last night Miles (our 20yo) and I attempted this movie called Superdeep, but it was "so cringe" (his words) that we switched to something else. It was a 99 cent rental - worth every cent!

BUT hey #folklore and #urbanfolklore fans, there was an #urbanlegend in the 90's - the Well to Hell (easily Googled) based on this idea? I was in high school then (going to a Christian youth group - which I was later kicked out of, lol) and I don't remember this, but reading about it this morning was fun!