REVOLVER:IT'S 50 seconds of sleaze, and if the idea was to capture the sound of expensive whiskey and cheap sex with a vaguely voodoo-ish background, they nailed it in one. The intro to Gimme Shelteris one of rock'n' roll's great moments, rightly regarded by Keith Richards as his best-ever work and adored by many – not least Martin Scorsese, who happily confesses to a chronic fixation with the song (he's used it in three of his films).

Rolling Stones anoraks may have it that Gimme Shelter is the band’s “best recording” but not their best song (a distinction that matters perhaps a bit too much to some people). But it’s difficult to gainsay a song that, although never publicly admitted, had such a big lyrical influence over Marvin Gaye’s classic What’s Going On, released two years later in 1971.

Gimme Shelteris the ultimate end-of-the-1960s narrative, speaking as it does about the horrors of the Vietnam war and the vaguely apocalyptic threat of the times. And there's the bitter personal backdrop to it: the writing of the song marked the exact time when Jagger and Richards went from being best friends to mutually suspicious members of the same band. As Richards recounts in his autobiography, Life, Jagger was having an affair with Richards's then girlfriend Anita Pallenberg, and the opening guitar riff is the first he ever wrote while off his head on heroin.

Sales of Gimme Shelterhave spiked over the past few months, with the song doing as brisk a business now as it first did in 1969, thanks to its use in one of the best-selling videogames of recent times – the Vietnam War-set Call of Duty: Black Ops,which has sold about seven million copies to date.

Looking at the comments on the various forums dedicated to Black Ops, you don't know which is more tragic: that gamers had never heard of the song or the band before, or their ignorance about the Vietnam War.

The Stones and their notoriously vigilant music publishers don't just license their music to any old tat, and a break with tradition was needed to get Gimme Shelteron to Black Ops. Usually the game developers will stick something up online about how they envisage using a song in their game, but this time the company had to travel to the relevant publishers with a locked laptop and allow band members to make their own changes to how the song would be embedded in the action.

Such a level of control is unheard of in the music licensing world, but with both parties realising the multimillion appeal of the Call of Dutyseries, everyone – including Jagger and Richards – signed off on this.

If you take a look at the many trailers for Black Opsavailable on social-networking sites you'll see how beautifully the music blends with the action, and why so many spotty young gamers are writing "wot is the name of dis band?" and "I luv dis song – is it by Pearl Jam?" in the comments section.

However, the real star of this show is the always-uncredited Merry Clayton, who was brought in to the studio when all agreed that what the song needed was a female vocalist. Clayton, who is also the female voice on Sweet Home Alabama and is all over Neil Young’s debut album, is the only woman ever feature to so prominently on a Stones track.

And she really goes for it: you can hear even her powerful voice crack as she belts out the anchor line “War, children, it’s just a shot away – it’s just a shot away”.

The Stones (and Merry Clayton) would never be as good again.

Mixed bag

OMG! The Monkees have reformed and are coming our way this May (Irish date TBA). Sadly, Mike Nesmith won't be
with them; we're guessing that's because his mother invented a correction fluid similar to Tipp-Ex and, as heir,
he's now richer than God.

Once charming ingenue but now shrieking diva Duffy says she's going to quit music because none of us bought her
piss-poor second album. Sorry love, it doesn't work like that – we sacked you before you sacked us.