The “throwaway” Rolling Stones song Mick Jagger refuses to play live

There’s no stopping The Rolling Stones. Over 50 years after their formation, the band are still touring the world and releasing new music to add to their mammoth discography. With 25 albums in their repertoire, there are bound to be tracks they’ve forgotten, but one track has always been discarded.

Over the course of their existence, the Stones have recorded well over 400 songs. They’re perhaps the biggest and most established band around that still performs regularly, keeping their legacy alive and well with each huge stadium show. In 2023, they announced another world tour and released a new record, proving that they have no intention of slowing down any time soon.

But there are definitely hits and misses within their work. Not every track could be a timeless classic like ‘Jumping Jack Flash’ or ‘Can’t Always Get What You Want’. With so many songs to pick from, their live shows can be a roaring ‘best of’ tour of their hits. They have more than enough globally beloved tracks to fill a two-hour set list with the bangers only.

That’s exactly what they do. Over the course of their career, the band have played ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’ a whopping 973 times and counting. Other tracks like ‘Tumbling Dice’, ‘Honky Tonk Woman’ and ‘Brown Sugar’ are well into their thousands of live plays.

But there are tracks from their discography that the band have never played, including ‘Slave’, ‘Soul Survivor’ and ‘Dear Doctor’, mostly because they wouldn’t work live or aren’t big enough to capture the crowd. One song, however, was essentially abandoned from the beginning as Mick Jagger deemed ‘Hide Your Love’ as a “throwaway” track from the start.

“At the time, I remember thinking, ‘Oh, that was a throwaway song’,” he told Rolling Stone in 2020. “My memory was doing it once in Olympic [Studios in London], which I probably did, with me playing piano on it. And I don’t even remember who plays piano on the record…”

So forgettable to Jagger that he can’t even remember who played what on the record, ‘Hide Your Love’ was an album track on Goats Head Soup, sitting in the middling spot of the seventh track. A strangely mixed track that buries Jagger’s vocals behind an obnoxiously loud piano, it’s easy to see why the band immediately wrote it off.