A still from Kenneth Anger’s Invocation of My Demon Brother, which has a solo Jagger soundtrack

Might the Rolling Stones be about to… finally retire?

The name of their current tour, “50 & Counting,” may suggest otherwise, but they are looking at a perhaps irresistible opportunity to go out on a relative high. After all, not only are Mick and Keith pushing seventy—with the latter really starting to seriously lose it on guitar—but they’ve just had a widely celebrated (and long awaited) appearance at Glastonbury, and only this weekend returned to Hyde Park for the first time since their famous free concert in 1969. It’s only rock-n-roll, but surely no future tour can hope for any greater poignancy, unless, I suppose, one of them drops down dead “right on the stage.” You kind of suspect that Mick, for one, might be thinking along these lines.

Anyhow, given the weekend shenanigans at Hyde Park (where tickets were this time weren’t free, but £90 because, you know, the Stones need the money), what better time to watch or re-watch Grenada’s entire 1969 Stones in the Park documentary, a suitably impressionistic portrait of one of London’s hazier days? Besides Jagger’s white dress, his butterflies and his Shelley poetry, there’s Mick Taylor’s unveiling, and plenty of UK Hell’s Angels—a scrawny, malnutritioned bunch who look the obvious inspiration for Billyboy’s gang in A Clockwork Orange. These UK Angels handled the Hyde Park security, but thankfully made a rather less lethal meal of it than their beefier US cousins, who would of course man Altamont’s notorious barricades later that same year.

As for the Stones, I can’t tell if they’re shit here or great. Bit of both, probably. I am, however, suddenly quite daunted by the thought that they won’t be around for ever.