Pop music
No sex, please
Marcus Berkmann
It was possibly the catchiest record of the Summer That Never Was. 'Sex On The Beach' by T-Spoon was a staple of subur- ban disco, a guaranteed floor-filler in the cheesier Mediterranean resorts and a firm favourite with the under-fives and the men- tally distressed. So it came as no great sur- prise when the BBC banned it a couple of weeks ago from Top of the Pops. People, it seemed, didn't like the lyrics. 'I want sex on the beach,' sang someone. 'I want sex on the beach. I want sex on the beach. I want sex on the beach.' Who could deny such a simple request? But the Corporation, according to the Sun's reliably accurate `Bizarre' column, deemed the song 'too raunchy'. So it was extracted from the nation's premier chart show, and the fol- lowing week dropped from two in the chart to three.
The song is, of course, complete drivel, although that need not concern us here. The two anonymous Dutchmen who creat- ed it, neither of whom sadly is called Wim, have been churning out rotten dance records for several years. They aim no higher than this and almost certainly know no better. All you can object to in the song are those six little words.
And people have been objecting. The BBC received 'dozens' of complaints when the song was played on Radio One's Sun- day chart show. Many grown-ups who never listen to Radio One the rest of the week still tune into the chart show, if only to grumble about how dreadful it all is and how no one writes tunes any more. They hear 'I want sex on the beach' and they are appalled. Do children hear this salacious rubbish? Aren't Pinky and Perky recording any more?
So the ban is in place, presumably until an eminent panel of BBC executives decides over lunch that it isn't. Like all such bans its only effect is to make the peo- pie who have banned it look ridiculous. For pop music has always been rude, salacious and subversive: that's one of the main rea- sons it exists. It cries out to be banned, it yearns for it. Pay a record like this some attention and you dignify it with a signifi- cance it otherwise wouldn't have. And then remember all the other incredibly rude, salacious and subversive records that have been released over the years. Were they all banned? Should they have been?
`Rock 'n' roll', as any fule kno, is a euphemism for sex, whether on the beach or elsewhere. When Big Joe Turner record- ed 'Shake, Rattle And Roll' in 1954, he wasn't talking about babies' toys. Pop musi- cians have been singing about it in ever more explicit terms for decades. James Brown was calling himself a 'Sex Machine' nearly 30 years ago: these days, you'd prob- ably hear the song on Radio Two.
Think of some of the records the BBC has banned over the years. Frankie Goes To Hollywood's 'Relax', banned on the ini- tiative of poor old Mike Read (where is he now?). The epic gruntathon that was Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin's `Je T'Aime . . . Moi Non Plus'. Chuck Berry's 'My Ding-A-Ling', which may have been dismal and embarrassing but was about as subver- sive as Are You Being Served?. All these songs, once banned, went straight to num- ber one.
The songs that weren't banned were usu- ally even ruder. Lou Reed's 'Walk On The Wild Side' (prostitution, drugs and transvestism) was never banned because none of the people in charge understood any of the references. Sade's 'Your Love Is King' is magnificently rude: 'Touching the very part of me/That's making my soul sing/I'm crying out for more . I'm com- ing.' And if you don't know what The Pre- tenders' Brass In Pocket' is about, don't let me be the first one to tell you.
And what of Marvin Gaye's 'Sexual Healing', another Radio Two favourite? `Baby, I'm hot just like an oven, I need some loving,' he oozes over a musical back- ing that Q Magazine recently described as `like fingertips brushing buttocks'. This one song has probably been responsible for the birth of more babies than any other in pop history.
Which brings us to Madonna, whose entire oeuvre has been based around the sexual act, from 'Like A Virgin' (`touched for the very first time') to the notoriously rumpy 'Justify My Love' CI wanna make love in a train, cross-country'). Top of the Pops did ban that one, but most of the oth- ers slipped through the net.
As indeed did another fantastically stupid dance record, which appeared on the show several weeks ago. 'Horny', as it was known, featured someone singing `Horny horny horny/I'm horny horny horny' over and over again for four and a half gru- elling minutes. Perhaps it's the beach that's the problem. After all, that sand does get everywhere.
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