When my mate Macey handed me a framed print of Michael Joseph’s Beggars Banquet photograph, I nearly dropped my coffee.

There they were: the Rolling Stones in 1968, sprawled around a candlelit table like a gang of rowdy medieval revellers who’d gate-crashed Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper. Mick Jagger perches on the edge like Judas with a grin, Keith Richards lounges centre-stage cradling a mandolin, while Brian Jones, Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman look equal parts regal and wrecked. Dogs, goats and a sheep wander in and out of shot, nicking cherries off the silverware. It is chaos dressed as high art, and it is my absolute favourite picture in the world.

This is the Stones at their most gloriously, messily alive.

Joseph had been given one brief: make the album title Beggars Banquet come alive. He chose Sarum Chase, a grand Hampstead mansion, and turned it into a two-hour carnival of decadence. Dressed in fancy-dress finery, the Stones arrived dead on time at eleven o’clock, rock stars who, for once, were early. Joseph was already there, megaphone in hand, coaching a motley crew of animals. “The goat kept eating the real cherries,” he later laughed.

The band, far from the hell-raisers of legend, were cooperative, even impressed by the lighting and the beautiful room. Brian, still subdued after a police raid the night before, sat quietly while Keith commandeered the table’s heart. Mick clambered up among the dogs and simply owned the scene.

The inspiration was gloriously layered. Joseph openly cited da Vinci’s late-15th-century masterpiece, not for piety but for the frozen moment of betrayal and surprise. He also tipped his hat to the wild, grotesque crowds of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel, and to the raw street energy of 1960s photographers Horn/Griner and William Klein.

There was a sly nod, too, to Luis Buñuel’s film Viridiana, where beggars re-enact the Last Supper in glorious disarray. The result was pure Stones: opulent yet grubby, sacred yet profane.

The banquet shot never made the front cover (that honour went to the infamous graffiti lavatory wall), but it landed inside the gatefold sleeve and became the defining image of the campaign. Jagger himself hand-coloured a print the next day, “very garishly,” Joseph recalled with mock horror, and the photograph has lived on as a snapshot of five young men at the absolute peak of their swagger, yet still willing to muck about with goats for art.

Forty-odd years later, that print hangs above my desk. Every time I glance up I remember the human magic behind it: five mates, a mad photographer, some bewildered animals and one perfect, ridiculous afternoon that turned a rock album into legend.