‘You Can Leave Your Hat On’ – Joe Cocker

As it turns out, eroticism comes in a lot of different forms. When Randy Newman first started instructing the woman of his dreams to take off her coat, her shoes, and her dress—slowly, of course—back in 1972, he probably could never have anticipated that allowing her to leave her hat on would become the iconic sentiment of strip teases everywhere, even half a century later.

But that sensuality really only kicked in the best part of 15 years later, when Joe Cocker made ‘You Can Leave Your Hat On’ most famous through his 1986 cover version, which then went on to be famously featured in the steamy film 9½ Weeks. Tom Jones took that one step further in 1997 when the song became the pièce de résistance of The Full Monty. It transpires that leaving your hat on can travel a lot further than you think.

‘Whip It’ – Devo

You can envision the scenes when Devo broke out of obscurity in 1980 with their first worldwide hit. ‘Yes, we’ve finally done it!’, they would have cheered. Imagine the slightly crushing disappointment, then, when they realised that the public were not enjoying their song ‘Whip It’ for its intelligent political commentary, but because they thought it was a kink.

Yeah, alright—get your head out the gutter. Mark Mothersbaugh reckons the song was actually written as a bit of a pick-me-up for Jimmy Carter before the 1980 US election, not some ode to sadomasochism. But let’s be honest, no matter what it was meant to be, a lyric like ‘Whip It’ is always gonna spark certain mental images, whether you’re keen on ‘em or not.

‘Closer’ – Nine Inch Nails

Surprisingly enough, the song ‘Closer’ by Nine Inch Nails never received any commercial airplay prior to a radio edit being produced. I wonder why. After all, sentiments like “You let me violate you/ You let me desecrate you/ You let me penetrate you/ You let me complicate you”, and “I wanna fuck you like an animal” make for the perfect teatime listening, no?

The radio edit version may as well just be a track of silence in this respect, because by the time you’ve cleaned out every uncouth lyric, there’s basically nothing left. But this was equally the precise thing that cemented Trent Reznor as an industrial rock icon back in his day, because of his lack of fear to voice some of his deepest, darkest flaws and fantasies. Let’s just hope he doesn’t actually do that in bed.

‘Fetish’ – Joan Jett and the Blackhearts

If reading this list so far hasn’t made you uncomfortable enough already, it’s time to brace yourself for the most disturbing thing of all: a woman talking about sex. While this is only meant as a tongue-in-cheek jibe, there does seem to be a running theme in the kinky songs out there that they’re largely only performed by men. Again, food for thought.

As such, although certain people may want to recoil in horror at the notion, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts creating a song as crude as ‘Fetish’ really was more revolutionary than you might like to believe, especially within the hard rock scene of the 1990s. To give you an idea, the words “Gaze down, it’s time to be my dog/ I’ll push to get you in that fog” are probably the safest lyrics in the whole thing; do with that information what you will.

‘Dirty Movies’ – Van Halen

I’m not sure what this says about Van Halen as a whole, but when doing my research to compile this list, they were most definitely the band that cropped up the most often with a whole selection of saucy songs to choose from. Believe it or not, amid some other options about certain fairly questionable fetishes, ‘Dirty Movies’ was actually one of the cleaner sentiments.

I can’t possibly comment on whether David Lee Roth and co were drawing from personal experience on this one, but an evening at the old-school erotic cinema clearly still provided a wealth of inspiration. The prom queen turned porn star turned out to be an underrated gem within the Van Halen songbook, but it doesn’t mean that it’s any less worthy of a bit of acknowledgement within these already dirty waters.

‘Mistress for Christmas’ – AC/DC

Anyone fancy a bit of filth for the festive period? It’ll be back upon us in much closer time than you might like to think. As a result, to get you really feeling in the mood, you might as well stick a bit of AC/DC on the airwaves, as their song ‘Mistress for Christmas’ is the perfect answer for all your wintertime passions.

You can just picture it in your mind’s eye, can’t you: it’s December 25th, all the family are crowded round the dining room table donning their shitty paper hats, and you decide to put a playlist of carols on to soundtrack your dinner. Then Angus Young bursts out the speakers: “Jingle bells, jingle bells/ Jingle all the day/ Just can’t wait ’til Christmastime/ When I can grope you in the hay”.

Christmas ruined, for sure. The band could get a new job in predicting catastrophes; however, as they confirmed, the song is actually about Donald Trump. If only they hadn’t released it and the world might not have fallen to bits.

‘Love in an Elevator’ – Aerosmith

I did make clear at the beginning that this is a safe space; your kinks don’t have to just be restricted to the confines of the bedroom. If you’re ever looking to shake things up, why not take a leaf out of Steven Tyler’s book and get down and dirty in an elevator? OK, after actually speaking that into existence, it may not be such a great idea. 

Tyler himself can vouch for that impracticality through the Aerosmith song ‘Love in an Elevator’, released in 1989, which he based on his real-life experience of making out with a woman while riding up and down in a lift. The only issue was that they also ended up with an audience.

“It felt like a lifetime waiting for those doors to close,” he admitted. But despite the embarrassment, it can’t have affected the frontman all that much, as he still decided to lead with the song for Aerosmith’s aptly-titled album Pump. 

‘Under My Thumb’ – The Rolling Stones

The Rolling Stones really ended up in the dog house in 1966 when they released their song ‘Under My Thumb’, and no, that’s not a euphemism. Centring on the narrative of Mick Jagger gaining control of a dominating woman, roundly referring to her as a “pet”, a “Siamese cat”, and a “squirming dog”, it’s a tune that represents the tip of the iceberg in terms of kinks that haven’t aged well.

Regardless of anyone’s modern opinions on the matter, ‘Under My Thumb’ is nevertheless a song which has wormed its way into Rolling Stones history for the rest of time, even though they would really rather forget. This was the very same song that the band were performing at their infamous Altamont Free Concert in 1969 when 18-year-old concert-goer Meredith Hunter was killed.

‘Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?’ – The Beatles

Paul McCartney is widely cited as one of the greatest songwriters to ever live, but it turns out he also has a bit of a feral fascination with animals humping each other. Yes, you read that right. This is even to the extent that he devoted an entire song to this very act, in the form of ‘Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?’, as featured on the White Album.

I’ll hand it over to the man to explain himself. While on a retreat in Rishikesh, India, “A male [monkey] just hopped on the back of this female and gave her one, as they say in the vernacular,” he said, “Within two or three seconds, he hopped off again and looked around as if to say ‘It wasn’t me!’ and she looked around as if there’d been some mild disturbance. And I thought, ‘that’s how simple the act of procreation is’. We have horrendous problems with it, and yet animals don’t.” So beautiful it brings a tear or a twitch to your eye.

‘Walk on the Wild Side’ – Lou Reed

In a list that has exposed us all, literally and metaphorically, it’s only fair to finish on the most famous sex-fest of them all: Lou Reed’s ‘Walk on the Wild Side’. Between the discussion of male prostitution, oral sex, and transgender people, any hint of taboo for 1972 was firmly flung out the window, and subsequently captured the dirty imaginations of the world.

“I always thought it would be kinda fun to introduce people to characters they maybe hadn’t met before, or hadn’t wanted to meet,” Reed claimed, and he certainly took that mantra seriously. Simultaneously, by celebrating the misfits and what they got up to behind closed doors, the song also brought their version of sex and drugs and rock and roll to the mainstream. That just shows the power of that lusting pull.