When I think of The Rolling Stones I think of Jagger pouting and strutting as Keith chops out a guitar riff with a fag in his mouth. Angie isn’t like that at all.

It’s about as untypical a Stones song as you can find – a slow acoustic break-up ballad. But it cast its spell at the time, and was the lead single on what would become the first Stones album I ever owned, the somewhat neglected Goats Head Soup.

I remember my parents being appalled when I opened up the LP sleeve and revealed the photo of an actual goat’s head. In soup. But they would have liked Angie if they had ever heard it.

Keith came up with the tune, including that piano melody – played by Nicky Hopkins – and most of the lyrics, though Jagger added his two penn’orth, inspired by his break-up with Marianne Faithfull.

For years I laboured under the misapprehension that the song was about Angie Bowie, assuming that Jagger’s ladykiller ways must have exteded to her, while some thought it was Angie Dickinson. But but it seems not.

Nor, apparently, is it about Keith’s recently born baby daughter Dandelion Angela, as he had once claimed in some album liner notes, only later to say he came up with the title before she was even born, picking the name at random.

Anyway, it’s one of those ballads for which the word “aching” comes to mind, especially the wistful whispered bit which gives Jagger a chance to pout into the camera (and microphone) at close quarters.

The string arrangement is by Nicky Harrison and if you listen carefully you can hear Jagger’s ghostly guide vocal behind the voice, giving it a haunting sort of echo.