Top of the Pops, April 1971 – the first time I had ever seen The Rolling Stones and one of those landmark performances that has stayed in my mind.

I think it’s because I associated the programme with ‘pop’ music – forgettable fun, fancy dress, Pan’s People. This was something different.

I didn’t know much about The Rolling Stones but there was a monumental mythology around them. They were the self-proclaimed “greatest rock and roll band in the world”, a title that elevated them far beyond the weekly parade of pop stars on my telly.

It seemed somehow unbelievable that these real-life superstars who lived in tropical tax havens and flew around the world in private jets were right here IN MY LIVING ROOM! Mick Jagger, one of the few pop stars famous enough to feature on the front pages of newspapers – usually involving beautiful women and yachts – seemed like a God.

The studio stage seemed barely able to contain him; he behaved as if he, too, was somehow bemused to be in such a place, surrounded by an audience of gauche teenage girls doing self-conscious dancing in mini-dresses, rather than in a football stadium strutting his stuff in front of 100,000 adoring fans.

Anyway, Brown Sugar: has there ever been a better opening two notes to a song?

You know immediately that it’s the Stones. You can’t take your eyes off Jagger, strutting in his pale pink satin suit and peaked baseball cap and chunky necklace. Androgynous and arrogant, preening and pouting, he’s everything a rock’n’roll star is supposed to be, while the song, recorded at Muscle Shoals and featuring that great Bobby Keys sax solo in the middle, supersedes pop. It’s proper rock’n’roll – perhaps my first taste of it.

It’s still my favourite Stones single.

Never mind that its genesis is rather creepy: initially written by Jagger to celebrate his “secret” black girlfriend Marsha Hunt, it’s also a risque reference to heroin – both of them being the brown sugar that “tastes so good” – chucking in references to everything from slavery and rape to S&M and heroin.

To his credit, Jagger said later: “God knows what I’m on about on that song… All the nasty subjects in one go. I never would write that song now.” Indeed, in recent times he has changed the lyric when singing it live, removing “Just like a young girl should” and “Hear him whip the women just around midnight.”