The Rolling Stones have, with a few honourable exceptions (sympathy for the devil, and perhaps Street Fighting Man), had very little of consequence to say over their lengthy career. It’s the skill and swing with which they’ve presented their unbearably light offerings that has made them one of the greatest rock n’roll bands of all time, and of this there is no better example than Waiting on a Friend from 1981’s Stones album Tattoo You.

The song was, in actual fact, first developed during the Goat’s Head Soup sessions ten years earlier, while Mick Taylor was still in the band – and his guitar overdubs, while not directly credited, made it through to the later sessions when Producer Chris Kimsey (who had engineered Sticky Fingers, without doubt the Stones’ finest album – forget the orthodox claptrap that values Exile on Main St above all else) resurrected the song. This song, along with the upbeat Start me up were the saving graces on Tattoo You, a cynically conceived album of out-takes put out to justify a lucrative Stones tour.

Amidst all the great Stones moments from the seventies, this song stands out for two different reasons. The first, a sentimental one. The song was initially shelved in the early seventies because there were no lyrics – Jagger then came through with a lyric dedicated to friendship precisely at a time when relationships within the band had broken down. A genuinely touching lyric, valuing frienship over womanising, coupled with a Michael Lindsay-Hogg video shot in New York’s St.Mark’s Place (with Peter Tosh hanging out, for good measure) made an impression with fans everywhere, perhaps overly worried about the band’s future.

The second reason, though, is purely musical and highlights the band’s overlooked key strength as musical directors (though the more cynical might use the word ‘profiteers’ instead). This song is dominated on the surface by the iconography of the Jaggers/Richards relationship, but the best music is provided by guests who – with the notable exception of Taylor – never made it as ‘official stones’. The first thing you hear on the record, after Taylor’s simple and effective guitar intro, is the gentle and soothing piano of Nicky Hopkins, perhaps the most influential session player ever. Hopkins had a long association with the Stones, first playing with them during the sixties, and contributed to albums by the Beatles, The Who, The Kinks, The Small Faces, and the Jeff Beck group amongst others. His piano sets the tone – which is as close as one can aurally get to an early summer’s evening – for the song, setting up a framework for the other musicians to converse.

The other important voice on the song is the heart-stopping saxophone playing by Theodore Walter “Sonny” Rollins, one of the Jazz world’s finest tenor saxophonists, who had come to prominence in the fifties with Miles Davis in the Modern Jazz Quartet. When his voice breaks in to the song at the one minute fifty six second mark the song has well and truly arrived, as if all this waiting was not about Jagger waiting for Richards, or Richards waiting for a dealer (as has been suggested by morbid fans who presume that patience is a virtue exclusively for the narcotically inclined), au contraire, it’s been between a guitar and piano awaiting the warm arrival of Rollins’ sax to make them complete.

There’s enough space in the song to drive an articulated lorry through, but with characteristic ‘vibe’ the stones manage to keep it all hanging together, to make one of their most over-looked songs ever. The stones have rarely been concerned with beauty, but on this track they prove themselves perfectly able to capture a beautiful and tender moment and preserve it for ever. Genius.