It also helped that she had come to Jagger’s attention at the same party where she had met Oldham. The singer was dating the model Jean Shrimpton, and Faithfull was in a relationship with the musician John Dunbar, but it was an immediate coup de foudre when they met, even if she attempted to dismiss Jagger as “a cheeky little yob”.

In her words, London was about to embrace “free love, psychedelic drugs, fashion, Zen, Nietzsche, tribal trinkets, customised existentialism, hedonism and rock-and-roll.” She, almost inevitably, would embrace all of those things.

She did not commit to Jagger immediately. She married Dunbar in May 1965 and had a child by him in November that year, but the relationship was doomed, in part because of her free-spirited sensibility and partially because she was widely regarded as the most desirable woman in London at the time. She rejected Bob Dylan, causing him to tear up a poem he had written for his ‘Chief Prospective Consort’, had an unsatisfactory one-night stand with Brian Jones (“a wonderfully feeble guy, quite incapable of real sex”) and a rather better time with Richards, which she called “the best night I’ve ever had in my life.”

Yet Keef, ever the gentleman, said the following day “Go on, love, give [Jagger] a jingle, he’ll fall off his chair. He’s not that bad when you get to know him.” She went to a party that the Stones were attending, and everyone else gradually left. Then, as she later wrote, “I was left with Mick and that, as they say, was that.”