Explicit Content

Innsbruck 2014

I have often remarked in this blog that pop music seems to have remained stuck in a groove for decades. In the case of music aimed primarily at a white audience attempting to dance, or kids posing with a hairbrush in front of a mirror, quite possibly since the late 1960s. However, at least one remarkable change has taken place, lyrically, which reflects another remarkable change in society. That is, the emergence of sex from behind the curtain of respectability. Sur-pri-i-ise! To anyone who grew up in the decades when censorship (and self-censorship) ran the show, the sheer frankness of today's lyrics about sexual proclivities that weren't even generally known to exist by the majority population not so long ago is fairly astonishing.

Despite any retrospective myth-making, sex was a scarce commodity in Britain in the 1960s, even more scarce than good, nutritious food. With all due respect to Philip Larkin, sexual intercourse did not start in 1963, but 1972 (I know this for a fact: I remember it well, and still cringe with embarrassment whenever I think about it...). The advent of the Pill may have, in Fay Weldon's words, separated having sex from making babies (a connection, sad to say, that has never securely established itself in the male mind), but society doesn't change overnight. Even married couples lived with the constant anxiety of inadvertently adding another member to the family (such as myself, I suspect: I'm eight years younger than my sister). Anything remotely to do with sex – really to do with sex, rather than its symbolic sublimations, like loud, rhythmic music, or shampoo adverts – was still a strictly under-the-counter, plain-wraps business. Even so-called "top-shelf" magazines were laughably innocent affairs, compared to the filth you can completely accidentally stumble across on the internet. Or so I'm told. I remember, one school summer vacation day in 1968, taking a bus to another nearby town with a friend, so he could buy a copy of Health & Efficiency – a naturist publication, M'lud – without fear of recognition and denunciation as an onanistic pervert by any passing relatives or friends of the family.

If you had to make an "elevator pitch" to describe a lot of the more memorable pop of the 1960s, it might go like this: from and for boys, heartfelt but disguised pleas for full sexual intercourse, or at least a little, you know, satisfaction; from and for girls, heartfelt pleas not to be discarded or maligned for facilitating same, or laments after having done so. The word "love" occurs in those songs an awful lot, but when Steve Winwood or Robert Plant wailed about lovin', they were not talking about the same thing as Dusty Springfield or Carole King when they asked: will you still love me tomorrow? Or rather they were, but from a completely different end of the, um, telescope. Once you start to unwrap them, even those innocent boy-girl songs of the early Beatles reek of sexual frustration. I mean, come on, what else is "Please Please Me" all about? I suppose a song which openly begged for a hand-job would never have got past the record company. And, no, that's not what "Willy and the Hand Jive" is all about.

But then there was the magnificent example of Little Richard. I've loved the music of Little Richard since I was nose-high to a juke box. But how a raunchy, rambunctious song like "Good Golly, Miss Molly" ever got recorded, let alone broadcast is unfathomable. Even without the lyrics, it's all hangin' out, baby. But with... For God's sake put it away, Richard. I suppose, in those days, it was still possible for the censorious mind to associate the verb "to ball" exclusively with dancing. BBC Home Service translation: Golly, my dear Molly, how you do enjoy cutting a rug! Our jitterbugging up here in your room is such fun, we can't hear your poor mother imploring us to stop making the lampshade jiggle about!

Of course, songwriters have always been able to resort to double entendre and euphemism. Music-hall songs are rife with the sort of crudely-nudging lyrics that would get the censors all hot and bothered. A little of what you fancy does you good, eh? Phwoar! Once you've set the appropriately louche tone with an audience, even a Methodist hymn can sound like an invitation to depravity,  something which has dogged many an innocent conversation between a bishop and an actress. But even at the most sophisticated level of songwriting the habitual (and in the case of gay songsmiths like Cole Porter, necessary) self-censorship of overt meaning could result in songs that seethe with an unspecific but unsettling sense of transgression: I've always found Porter's "I've Got You Under My Skin" particularly creepy, for example.

My father was a very patient man who loved music, and he would encourage my own curiosity about it by explicating the lyrics we'd hear on the radio. I'm certain it was his careful unpicking of songs like "Red Sails in the Sunset" (Nat King Cole version, obvs [1]) or "Mack the Knife" (Bobby Darin, unfortunately, not Bertolt Brecht: "scarlet billows ... hup, hup ... start to spread ... woah, yeah...") that set me on my literary-hermeneutic path. This would have been the late 1950s and early 1960s, so the broadcast diet on the BBC Home Service was largely big numbers from musicals, light orchestral confections, and recent hits and "standards" from the less excitable popular artists. You have to remember, this was a time when the BBC's notorious "Green Book" guidelines were designed to squash the merest hint of smut or naughtiness. But even at that family-friendly end of the broadcast spectrum, the lyrical opacity that obscured the actual meaning of any song concerning relations between the sexes – which, after all, must have been at least about 70 per cent of them, once you'd discounted novelty songs and instrumentals – meant there was a lot of explication to do, and he had to pick his way carefully, and sometimes evasively through the metaphorical minefield.

So, in fact, it was my father who explained to me how to make "whoopee" at a very young age indeed. No, really. Whoopee being a bowl of desiccated coconut with raisins or sometimes sweets – generally Spangles – scattered in it, and eaten with a teaspoon. Yum! Why, what else did you think it was? Oh, that! No, a whoopee cushion is so-called because desiccated coconut makes you fart. I know it's true because my Dad said so.

Innsbruck 2014

1. It seems the lyric writer, Jimmy Kennedy, often saw an actual red-sailed yacht off the coast of Northern Ireland. Dad's version was better, though: the sails were white, but the setting sun made them appear red. Of course!