All of us from time to time entertain thoughts that would not meet with the universal approval of our peers. I, for instance, fantasise about aiming a fierce slap round the tanned, hairless chops of the delightful 14-year-old Olympic diver Tom Daley. But I never tell anyone, because I know I will never do it, and people may well think worse of me.

But hey, Rock’n’roll is outlaw country, so maybe I should write a song about my Junior-Olympian-slapping fantasies. After all, if there’s anywhere that you can say the unsayable it is through the medium of popular song, right? Well, that’s the theory anyway.

In reality, of course, some listeners might find the simmering subtext (or just simmering text, come to that) of violence against children to be offensive, and I would find myself forced to resign from songwriting and give my royalties to children’s charities as journalists from the Daily …xpress grilled my parents on how they could ever have given birth to such a monster.

But who knows – maybe the tune would be so sublime that no one would notice the words. After all, some of the following songs are still regularly heard despite relaying the kind of messages that might, in different circumstances, have resulted in pressure groups picketing the BBC and demanding that they pay for everyone who heard the songs to have them surgically cleansed from their memory.

YOUNG GIRL

It might be very difficult for someone to release a record now which addressed a young lady with words such as Beneath your perfume and make-up, you’re just a baby in disguise, and though you know that it’s wrong to be alone with me that come-on look is in your eyes.

Still, at least he acknowledges he’s in the wrong with that memorable chorus of Young girl, get out of my life, my love for you is way out of line. Better run, girl, you’re much too young, girl.

However, in the 21st-century moral climate, I suspect that within days of its first radio aring, Mr Gary Puckett’s home address would be published on the internet, and a torch-carrying mob would descend on his house in Basingstoke, threatening to string him up from the nearest lamppost for even daring to express such taboo sentiments. His property would be daubed with misspelled insults and his car windscreen smashed, which would be all the more unfortunate since the Gary Puckett who wrote the song now lives in Florida.

DOES YOUR MOTHER KNOW

I bet you were just waiting for these notorious Scandinavian filth-mongers to be featured in this chapter, weren’t you? They present a similarly awkward scenario, with Bjorn singing, You’re so hot, teasing me, so you’re blue but I can’t take a chance on a chick like you.

Quite right, sir. But he can at least wax lyrical about her undeniable youthful charms, when he sings, there’s that look in your eyes, I can read in your face that your feelings are driving you wild, but girl you’re only a child.

Once again there’s the suggestion here that these young girls are lust-filled temptresses, who are desperate (as any woman of any age naturally would be) to sleep with the fella with the pea-green dungarees and bowl cut out of ABBA. Or even the chubby one with the beard. Then again, this was the 1970s, when pea-green dungarees, bowl cuts and beards added up to a planet made of sex. Still, unlike other ABBA hits, at least this song isn’t still being played today to millions of people in a Broadway musical and a Hollywood film. Oh, hang on …

AQUALUNG

A multitude of lyrical sins can be accounted for by the old stand-by, ‘They’re not my words, I was describing a character’. Jethro Tull lyricist Ian Anderson would probably also argue that he had his tongue firmly in his cheek, and even now, these gnarled prog-rockers would probably avoid a visit from Her Majesty’s constabulary, despite lines like Sitting on a park bench, Eyeing little girls with bad intent. But they might find airplay a little hard to come by with passages such as Snot running down his nose, greasy fingers smearing shabby clothes. Drying in the cold sun, watching as the frilly panties run.

In hindsight, you probably didn’t need to provide all that detail, Ian. And perhaps next time you perform it you could do an updated version, which describes how the character described is ‘watching as the frilly panties run and a baying mob approach after reading about his recent move to the area in the pages of the News Of The World’.

IT’S A MAN’S MAN’S MAN’S WORLD

The authors of other verses in this chapter would doubtless point out, with some justification, that at the time they were written, social attitudes towards such trifling matters as sexism, racism and intercourse with children were considerably different. For instance, James Brown was probably regarded as displaying quite a progressive, chivalrous view of the fairer sex when he made the observations that Man made the cars to take us over the road, Man made the trains to carry heavy loads … This is a man’s, a man’s, a man’s world. You might think that an unenlightened viewpoint even by 1960s standards, but wait! He then makes the qualifying point that while men were responsible for producing pretty much every last molecule of the modern world, it wouldn’t be nothing, nothing without a woman or a girl.

Thanks for that, James, but doesn’t half the world’s population still get a slightly raw deal from that appraisal? Are you familiar with the term ‘damning with faint praise’? I mean, what exactly were these women, or girls, doing to make themselves so indispensable? Just standing around looking pretty, waiting for their men to come home from building skyscrapers and inventing the internet? Even the most obvious natural talent of women – to reproduce the men who make the cars, trains and electric lights – is not deemed worthy of a mention. Still, that lyric is practically a groundbreaking treatise of feminist philosophy compared to these next examples.

STRAY CAT BLUES

Don’t let the title alarm you too much – the Stones may have been pretty wild in their late 60s pomp, but as far as I’m aware, they didn’t include any animals in their sexual experimentation. They’re not out of the woods yet though – the ‘strange stray cat’ they speak of would appear to be a young girl, who Jagger greets with the words I can see that you’re fifteen years old. No, I don’t want your I.D.

Why, that’s very open-minded of you, Mick, thanks. He shows further hospitality later in the song when he invites her friend to ‘join in too’, adding that it’s not a ‘hanging matter’ or a ‘capital crime’. Weren’t the 60s wonderful? Such a gloriously innocent time.

Folklore has it that on their subsequent US tour, Jagger changed the lyric to ‘thirteen years old’ – just his cheeky little joke, you understand. And of course, all this is fiction – surely the Rolling Stones didn’t really indulge in sex with under-age girls? Bill Wyman was unavailable for comment at the time of going to press.

HE HIT ME, AND IT FELT LIKE A KISS

Hmmm. Where do we start with this one? The title pretty much spells out the problem. And singer Barbara Alston justifies the actions mentioned therein by pointing out that if he didn’t care for me, I could have never made him mad, but he hit me and I was glad.

Maybe the song’s real-life origins might lend some mitigation. Or not, as the case may be. Husband & wife songwriting team Carole King and Gerry Goffin got the idea for this song after their babysitter, ‘Little Eva’ Boyd, told them about her relationship with an abusive boyfriend. She insisted he only hit her because he loved her. The resulting song, however, sung in the first person, features singer Barbara Alston admitting she had ‘been untrue’, thereby suggesting that she somehow deserved to be hit.

Phil Spector, the group’s producer, svengali and noted champion of women’s rights (this was a man who used to insist his wife Ronnie Spector drove around with a blow-up doll version of himself to fend off potential suitors) insisted on its release, against the group’s wishes, but even back in the more innocent age of 1962, listeners were outraged, and the single was soon denied airplay. Still, every black eye has a silver lining, and it did at least inspire an infinitely superior song title in the shape of Spiritualized’s 2003 track ‘She Kissed Me (It Felt Like A Hit)’.

HONG KONG GARDEN

Punk rock never had any truck with petty social rules or niceties. Yet when Siouxsie sang, Slanted eyes meet a new sunrise, a race of bodies small in size, she seemed to be expressing a knowledge and empathy with immigrant peoples that had more in common with pre-punk figures such as, say, Bernard Manning. Chicken chow mein and chop suey, they rhymed questionably with Hong Kong Garden takeaway, displaying all the searing wit of the bloke who goes into a Chinese restaurant and asks for ‘flied lice’. But let’s not be too hasty in our condemnation. After all, Miss Sioux has since claimed that the song was ‘kind of a tribute’ to immigrant communities who were harassed by skinheads in the late 80’s.

It’s certainly an interesting way of showing respect for other cultures, especially coming from a band who once wore swastikas on stage. I’m sure they meant well, though. Anyway, must dash – I’m off down the Notting Hill Carnival dressed in an Afro wig and boot polish, with a T-shirt which reads ‘Respect due to dem Fuzzy-wuzzies!’ I’m hoping for a warm reception.

EVERY PICTURE TELLS A STORY

Once The Beatles had taken the world by storm, the globe became a playground for tight-trousered troubadours eager to export some culture (usually a culture of sexually transmitted bacteria) to their foreign cousins. But like latter-day Marco Polos, they did at least report back on their experiences, to educate us in the customs and peoples they met there. As Rod Stewart put it in this postcard from the edge:

OK, so I kind of made up that last line. But don’t dismiss old Rod for any lack of chivalry, or indeed romance. He goes on to inform us how she won his heart, then refers to her once more as the ‘slit-eyed lady’. How she must have loved that pet name. Sadly, history does not record whether she affectionately dubbed him ‘parrot face’ in return.

GIRLS

You know The Beastie Boys now as enlightened Renaissance men with a passing interest in eastern philosophies, but back in the mid 80s they thought it would be a hilarious jape to act as if they were semi-retarded frat boys with all the intelligence and sensitivity of adolescent bonobo monkeys ¹. They summed up their attitude with the charming lines Girls! To do the dishes! Girls! To clean up my room! Girls! To do the laundry!

They were, of course, being ‘ironic’. Except they later admitted that they soon found themselves becoming exactly the kind of meatheads they had once intended to mock. Lead MC Adam Horowitz is now married to former Riot Grrrl pioneer and hardcore feminist Kathleen Hanna. Something tells me that this one doesn’t get many airings when they’re flicking through the family albums.

PLAY THAT FUNKY MUSIC

He was a lyrical poet, in case you didn’t know it, but I don’t think we could really include fascist sympathies among Vanilla Ice’s many crimes. Yet he was surely asking for trouble when he wrote, Now you’re amazed by the VIP posse, steppin’ so hard like a German Nazi. Given his impeccably chiselled, blond, Aryan looks, we are forced to confront the nightmare of an army of Vanilla Ices annexing the Rhineland, not to mention rocking the mike like a vandal and cookin’ MCs like a pound of bacon. Thankfully it didn’t happen on this occasion, thanks to him being dropped by his record company for being an international laughing stock. But people, we must be forever vigilant that we never again give a platform to such evil madness.

FANTASY SONG TITLES TOP TEN: FASCISM

1. SEVEN NEO-NAZIS OF RHYE

2. SHE COMES IN THE FALANGE

3. NEEDLES AND PINOCHETS

4. THIS OLE HOUSE AREST

5. KNOW WHAT AMIN?

6. PAPA’S GOT A BRAND NEW GULAG

7. SHE’S THE ONE PARTY STATE

8. OH WHAT A NIGHT OF THE LONG KNIVES

9. JUMPING SOMEONE ELSE’S TRAINS THAT RUN ON TIME

10. I’D LIKE TO TEACH THE WORLD ETHNIC CLEANSING

IN THE SUMMERTIME

Life was more carefree back in 1970. Pornography hadn’t yet been fully invented, only rock stars took drugs, and you could leave your front door open. You might get robbed and your house wrecked by rampant teenage delinquents, but you could if you really wanted to.

Mungo Jerry’s perma-grinning, sideburned singer Ray Dorset was briefly the poster boy for this joyous universe when he wrote, In the summertime when the weather is fine, you can stretch right up and touch the sky … have a drink and a drive, go out and see what you can find.

Can you spot the deliberate mistake in this lyric, readers? That’s right, there’s no way a human being would be able to literally stretch right up and touch the sky. And anyway, is the sky something tangible, which one can touch in any meaningful sense?

OK, maybe it was that second line that caught your attention, about having a drink and a drive.

This was, of course, 1970, when people could drive under the influence of drink without any ill effects (people could hold their ale in those days), so you can’t really blame Dorset for including that carefree couplet.

However, he then continues on his theme, and openly advocates other serious acts of wanton law-breaking, suggesting that you speed along the lane, do a ton or a ton and twenty-five and later, Make it good in a lay-by.

Honestly, didn’t he realise he was an important role model to young people? It was bad enough sporting a pair of the most titanic sideburns in the history of facial hair, but to recommend travelling at 100 or 125 miles per hour along what is evidently barely even an A-road, let alone a dual carriageway, is surely incitement to the kind of speeding that would endanger both lives and driving licences. And as for his little roadside suggestion, indulging in sexual activity in such a public place is a sure-fire way of finding yourself up in front of the beak on a charge of outraging public decency. Worse still, other couples might approach them in the mistaken belief that the lay-by was a popular spot for ‘dogging’². So if you’re listening to this record in the modern era, be sure not to take its suggestions literally. Have a drink (but not more than two pints or you’re officially binge drinking), have a drive (but not at the same time, and remember to wear a seatbelt), go out and see what you can find – let’s just hope it’s not a drunk man with ludicrous facial hair being cut out of his overturned car at a notorious accident black spot.

A MAN NEEDS A MAID

Neil Young has a voice that naturally lends itself to yearning emotional resonance. When he sings, he emits a gentle, strangely soothing whine, which immediately invokes empathy, even on the occasions when he sounds alarmingly like Kermit The Frog singing ‘Halfway Up The Stairs’. This song from his classic album Harvest starts off in a familiar melancholic vein, but then you realise he’s singing about housework.

I was thinking lately I’d get a maid. Find a place nearby for her to stay,’ he simpers. OK, that’s fair enough. You’re not short of a few bob, you’re not in danger of transgressing any employment rules, and you’re demonstrating an admirable concern for your employee’s well-being. Just someone to keep my house clean, he continues, fix my meals and go away.

We can’t really argue with that. But then we come to the chorus. A maiiiiiiiid … a man needs a maid, he sings longingly, with more emotion than you might expect for someone who has come home to find stagnant washing up and pubes in the plughole. He later bleats, When will I see you again? so this must have been a maid with particularly formidable scouring skills. Yet I doubt his heart is aching for want of some light dusting and the loading of the washing machine. Either he has confused this maid with a romantic companion, or he has failed to make any distinction between a female partner and an unpaid domestic servant. Maid? Wife? They’re evidently one and the same in Neil’s world.

But Neil, what will you do if she actually wants to talk to you, maybe enjoy some quality time together as a couple, or possibly cuddle up in front of the telly watching New Tricks when you’ve got more important things to do, like sing about your bandmate’s heroin overdose? Send her back to her place nearby? Shut her in the coal cellar?

And ultimately, what exactly was your message for womankind here, Neil? I’d guess at something along the lines of ‘Keep on rocking in the free world … and by the way, love, my socks need darning.’

¹ Notoriously highly sexed members of the primate family. The Russell Brands of the jungle.

² For those readers unacquainted with suburban sex practices, this reputedly involves voyeuristically inclined motorists driving to pre-arranged spots in order to observe other couples enjoying intercourse in their cars, and sometimes joining in. No one has ever actually witnessed this except Stan Collymore³.

³ Depressed former Premiership footballer who claimed that in the depths of his despair, he indulged in the activity described above, presumably attempting to alleviate his existential crisis by masturbating onto strangers’ windscreens. Not to be confused with Stan Cullimore, former Housemartins guitarist, a perfectly happy man and, as far as we know, sexually as straight-laced as they come. No pun intended.

CHAPTER 3

DOES YOUR MOTHER KNOW?