The Faces and Rod Stewart were on borrowed time together when they reached their peak with Cindy Incidentally when it reached No.2 in February 1973.

Maybe Rod was starting to think about moving to California when he wrote this elegiac song about leaving town with Cindy for a new start. Or maybe he was just thinking about leaving The Faces now that his solo career had taken off.

Soon after recording this, he ditched his band for solo stardom, his blues roots for faux soul, the carnal for the schmaltzy and sentimental, and raw passion for preening and posturing.

If he felt he had outgrown the group after three albums, it was mutual now that they were increasingly seen as his backing band, and he would soon leave them – and the UK – for good.

Leaving aside the sub-text (if it’s even there), Cindy Incidentally – surely one of the oddest titles for a single – captures everything that made The Faces great: what the guru of rock critics Greil Marcus called “Let’s go get drunk music”.

It’s everything that made them great – loose, sloppy and primal. And, to be fair, it’s everything that made Rod a great front man, the sharp lemon-yellow suit, the arrogant swagger, the strutting and smirking and phallic thrusts of the microphone stand. And that rasp of a voice.

McLagan’s bar-room piano carries the melody, while Wood’s guitar and Lane’s bass interlock intuitively, and Stewart sings, in that insouciant, throwaway style he made his own, a lyric that “combines devotion, nostalgia, wheedling, bonhomie, a ‘fuck-the-world’ flippancy and a bone-deep understanding of the transience of all things which wouldn’t have shamed Lucretius”.

Anyway, it was The Faces’ biggest and best hit, reaching No.2 in early 1973 – even if Stewart would go on to describe Ooh La La as a “stinking rotten album,” hastening the break-up of the band – and his departure to LA to avoid the 83p tax rate on millionaires like him.