Rockbitch, the most erotic band in history: Sex acts, the golden condom, and orgy promises
On Rockbitch’s official website, there is a pivotal opening statement: “If you search engine Rockbitch you get a lot of untruths and erroneous interpretations about who we were, what we did and why. This site is to put the record straight.”
Nevertheless, they do not go on to denounce the on-stage sex acts, the famed golden condom, or any backstage orgies. It is merely the political intent behind their message that they feared might often be missed.
You see, as they saw it, female flesh will also be seen as radical in the mainstream. In fact, Mick Jagger has gyrated away like a lemur behind a jackhammer for most of his career, and yet he is hardly regarded as a lewd atavist in the same breath as someone like Madonna. This sexual disparity is something that they set out to address in a very extreme fashion, breaking the notion of conformist norms via a medium that once thrived on this liberated outlook.
“When we first began our show,” they explain on their site, “We were trying to make a visual and musical statement about the way in which women and their sexuality are portrayed in every medium within Western culture. We wanted to express our responses to these perceptions, and we wanted to have fun – none of these contradict each other.”
“It was apparent to us that an extreme double standard regarding male and female sexual stereotypes was still an ongoing, unresolved issue – both within the structure of society, and in the minds of the public and feminist movement alike,” they continue.
“An individual’s sexuality and the unspoken ‘rules & regulations’ assigned to their gender are the basis of behaviour and identity, and have vital repercussions within our culture – as even a minor study of the history of feminist evolution relating to social change in the 20th century will demonstrate.”
So, they went about displaying this in a way that vitally incorporated a sense of fun—after all, culture is an engine of change and you need people to get involved if you want to enact that. Thus, from the get-go, they decided that if they were going to start playing rock shows in the nude and performing sex acts, and certainly audience members were there merely to ‘see boobs’, then at least they were also being exposed to taboo-busting lyrics about menstruation that they otherwise wouldn’t be exposed to.
So, with this manifesto set in stone, a collective formed that brought it to the masses. Most of the band members lived together in a polyamorous commune in France, but it was when they toured that the radical side of their message really came to the fore.
A paradigm for this is the famed ‘golden condom’. The band were clear that extreme sexual liberation and safe sex were far from mutually exclusive, so they set about showing this in a bizarre way. Towards the end of their rock sets, they hurled a golden condom into the crowd. Whoever caught this was then invited backstage to have sex with the band.
Naturally, this wasn’t possible at every gig. In 1999, at a show in Southampton, the band were “censored quite radically”. All the same, they played a well-regarded rock set and then made this fateful promise:
“We will return to Southampton for an orgy with any of the audience who care to send their contact details to us.”
Rockbitch
They received 40 entries from the 400 attendees at the gig. But when they were told that the orgies would be private affairs with the group this whittled number down to 20. When push came to shove, there was only two people who showed up on the day, and the first was in for a wild ride. As the band recall: “He was a VIRGIN, and he was, quite frankly SHITTING HIS PANTS with fear. But despite it all, he met up and shagged us rotten, baby…you may well make some sarcastic comment at this point – but you didn’t turn up, did you?”
From 1984-2003, the band and their various members continued to push for liberated moves like this one. However, it is ultimately the medium of their music that sustains. After all, rock is, owing to a slew of misled reasons, deemed an expression of masculinity in the mainstream, however, they subverted this in a way that still causes many to gulp. That alone defines the power of the band. And while many might disagree with their ways, you can’t say that they certainly didn’t make their point known.
And what was their point? Well, as they put it: “Rockbitch are expressing their lifestyle – a pagan, pro-sex, feminine utopia – a rhetoric missile composed of the music we love and an inyaface sex-ritual stage show.” It’s not my cup of tea, but unlike many at the time other than Bewitched, I’m happy to say c’est la vie and honour their odd place in cultural history because there is no doubt that they made one hell of an eye-opening mark.
