PEOPLE USED to talk about sex and drugs and rock'n'roll as if the three stimulants were inextricably linked. What was most striking, however, when we went about compiling the fifty sexiest records of all time was just how few of the records normally considered great have anything much to do with sex.

In fact, far from feeling that there were so many to choose from that it was an impossible task, people found it kinda hard to put their nominations together. In a way, I suppose, it comes down to a fairly fundamental question, and how you respond to it . . .

What is 'sexy' in a record? No one went for Barry White and his I'm-a-cool-motherfucker-with-a-big dick-and-I'm-gonna-get-the-baby-oil-out-and-rub-it-all-over-your-sweet-little-body-and-then-I'm-gonna-make-even-sweeter-leurrrrve-to-you-all-night-long-yeah-and-you're-gonna-thank-me-for-it-baby style routine. On the other hand, some people do find that there's a certain aphrodisiacal power in in scene-setters, music to create the ideal mood for sensual foreplay and long and lingering sex. What type of music is likely to depend significantly on the individual, what kind of sex you (and your intended) are planning to indulge in (and indeed what kind of drugs you're on, if any!).

There's no doubt about the erotic charge of the best dance music - Marvin Gaye's 'Sexual Healing' or Grace Jones' 'Pull Up To The Bumper' offer a different kind of sensual invitation but both have a real power to fuel the libido, and to link the synapses electrically to the groin. Dancing can be an erotic experience in itself, and the liberation of the body that it delivers mutates without much coaxing into more genitally-charged activity. Fuck it. That sounds like beating around the bush - dancing to the right sensual grooves makes good foreplay, and there's a number of good, good, oh-that's-good grooves in the top fifty here.

There's also a clutch of songs which qualify on the basis that they shatter taboos, and in doing so bring people closer to understanding and defining their own sexuality, setting the imagination free to explore, with a somewhat lesser burden of guilt attached. The classic here is The Kinks' 'Lola', in which the intrigues of transvestism are brilliantly drawn out by Ray Davies in a song of great enduring mystique and power. In the same vein, Patti Smith's surging climactic 'Gloria' takes Van Morrison's fiercely horny paen of desire and turns it into an anthem of lesbian eroticism that provokes a sweet shudder of recognition. Gay or otherwise, if you didn't know whether you approved of homosexual sex before this, you had to ask yourself. The same is true of the Velvet Underground's 'Venus In Furs', a celebration of fetishism and sleazy sex that poses an implicit challenge: to paraphrase Robbie Robertson, if you like the music now, will you learn to love the sex later?

Come to think of it, 'Somewhere Down The Crazy River' should have made the fifty here but didn't - it has the understated and mysterious quality of an intimate riddle being told, of strange perfumes coming at you from behind veiled doors, of lace being lifted to reveal more lace, of dancing around the subject without ever getting there, leaving a lingering sense that the narrator has been at the centre of some pretty exotic experiences that he's not quite going to talk about.

In fact music doesn't have to be explicit to be sexy. Another great song of naked desire which didn't make the cut is Kate McGarrigle's 'Kiss And Say Goodbye', from the acclaimed Kate And Anna McGarrigle album: it is transparently a song about an affair to begin with, but also the narrator's guile is utterly beguiling, mapping out as she does the slow build-up (letting him think he's in charge - hah!) to when she can do her lustful worst (or best, rather) before packing him off in the morning: "I do believe the die is cast/Let's try and make the night-time last/I don't know where it's coming from/But I want to kiss you till my mouth gets numb/I wanna make love to you/Till the day comes breaking through/And when the sun is high in the sky/We'll kiss and say goodbye."

It is beautifully crafted, beautiful and has a glorious ring of truth that sets the heartbeat accelerating in recognition and anticipation . . .

On the other hand there is something powerfully liberating, in hearing somebody s-p-e-l-l i-t o-u-t. Heathcote Williams' song 'Why'd Ya Do It' is a case in point, a chillingly venomous and brutally explicit statement of sexual jealousy which Marianne Faithfull interprets magnificently on her Broken English album. A great record, it would be odd to describe it as erotic, but in all its hateful spleen, it carries a charge of sexual honesty and directness that challenges delicate sensibilities - before trampling mercilessly all over them.

In a different but not unrelated vein, Millie Jackson has made some wonderfully steamy records about the sex wars, most notably the Get It Out 'Cha System album, from which 'Logs And Thangs' which almost featured in our Top 50 is taken. This is the flip side of the Barry White coin, with Millie playing the diva-as-seductress along the way. But there's also a fierce sense of sexual pride - and traducement - that makes this a great feminist record. Allied to a withering sense of humour (literally) and a powerful grasp of the vernacular of sex and you have the kind of record that turns the air blue before you even stick it in the CD. Millie is deliberately vulgar and declamatory, and about as funny, entertaining, sexy and edifying as they come in the process.

There aren't many others who do it effectively. On one side of the Atlantic, P J Harvey and Sinéad O'Connor have their moments of untrammelled desire set to music. And on the other Ice T issues invitations to 'Let's Get Butt Naked and Fuck'. But there's been precious few attempts to find a language of sex that feels right, to deal with the psychology of eroticism, to go beyond the barriers of what it's traditionally been permissible to reveal about the tangled landscapes of desire through music.

This is the terrain which Madonna has been exploring with increasing confidence and assertiveness, and in doing so she has broadened the canvas enormously for others. She has been accused of exhibitionism and lack of subtlety - but to an extent that kind of response may merely reflect the uneasiness her critics feel about their own sexuality. Which is, in part at least, what's interesting.

There is surprisingly little explicit sex in the 50 sexiest records of all time as chosen here and in particular, very little that delves into the sweet nether regions of people's fantasies, and the fascination which most people have, at one level or another, with sexual acts which are conventionally denounced as being unnatural or perverse.

Madonna has had the courage to enter this minefield, with some explosive results. People are driven by sexual desire. It is one of the most powerful human impulses, exceeded in its importance for many people only by the need to eat. (And some people kinda like to combine the two). I find it difficult to understand, then, why the subject of sex is so inadequately dealt with in every art form - Milan Kundera writes wonderfully well about sex and Oshima's spellbinding film In The Realm Of The Senses captures the narcotic nausea of desire with electrifying force. But these are exceptional. There are others who have written well about the erotic - Charles Baudelaire and Georges Bataille spring to mind - but the arena of love and sex and eroticism and desire is potentially such a fertile ground (if you'll excuse the pun) that it is remarkable how little of substance has been achieved in artistic terms on the subject.

Stupid films and thrillers about people being found tied up and lying in a pool of their own blood are a dime a dozen. But millions of people all over the world enjoy unconventional sex of one kind or another and never come to any kind of criminal grief, so what we're talking about here are crude moral(istic) tales. The twist now, of course, is that the most conventional form of sex carries a pretty high level of risk, as a result of AIDS - so that people need to be increasingly tuned in to the full erotic possibilities of non-penetrative sex.

This is part of Madonna's agenda. An AIDS information leaflet was inserted in the Like A Prayer album and she has become increasingly daring and explicit in her espousal of alternative sexual pleasures. Don't put your hand in the fire cos you're going to get burned is the conventional metaphor. "Once you put your hand in the flame you'll never be the same," Madonna whispers on 'Erotica', and in that subversion of the norm, a multitude is spoken.

There is a feminist agenda here too. Madonna may have pleaded with her lover in 'Hanky Panky' to "tie me up and spank me" but if so if was a statement of her own erotic desires. And by Erotica she was far more intent on becoming the dominant partner, issuing orders and instructions to the compliant male to succumb to her sexual overtures. The groove was more languorous and hypnotic, with tantalising flashes from other parts of a mirrored room flaring and fading seductively, the rattle of jewellery and other intimate trinkets an undercurrent in the mix.

Her most daring and controversial manoeuvre yet was Sex, the book of Madonna-centred erotic pictures released at the same time as Erotica. Again, people's own unease often translated into dismissiveness, the easiest knee-jerk response.

I'd be much more inclined to give her credit for the gutsiness and courage which the decision to publish Sex reflected. Compared with the activities of avant-garde artists like Annie Sprinkle and the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, the Madonna pictures were reasonably restrained but in terms of mainstream popular culture they were radical in the extreme. With photographs depicting scenes of lesbian sex, bondage, SM, exhibitionism, masturbation, voyeurism, group sex and downright lust in its many wonderous shades and hues, the effect was to preach the legitimacy of activities which are conventionally seen as being far beyond the pale.

The extent to which the pictures carry an erotic charge is personal - for one thing I find cigarettes which are widely featured a complete non-starter as far as eroticism is concerned, though I can see there's a stereotype of a fallen woman being played on. But there are shots in the book which tap into the electric current of forbidden pleasures, and do so with a haunting power - interestingly, the strongest are probably those which suggest that the photographer has caught the subject unawares in a private moment of intimacy.

Sex also blurs the line between pornography and eroticism not just because Madonna is so well known but because it has the character of being personal, idiosyncratic, human, home-made. Professional 'pornography' is generally dull and lifeless, the stupidly idealised physiques, frothy settings and glossy treatments being so absurdly unreal that the end product is hollow and foolish. Ordinary people are far more interesting, and the desire to photograph and be photographed is common, with people creating their own erotic history rather than passively consuming.

That impulse is also celebrated in Sex.

I have always felt that there's an excess of reticence about the true nature of sexual desire. We are in the process of recovering from the hypocrisy of the Victorian era and though things have changed dramatically over the past thirty years the censors and the moral guardians are still in control of the levers of power. I am for lust, hedonism, abandonment, desire. I am against repression, marginalisation, stigmas and guilt. And most of all I am for the glorious mystical sexual peak of complete and utter los of self towards which all the fantasies and the role playing and the sensuality and the pleasure and pain - the excitement - are all directed.

Between consenting adults whatever you want sexually is all that matters and if you're in harmony, then do it and do it and do it again. Nothing can quite compare with the pure spiritual fulfilment of a long lingering and thoroughly sensuous encounter with someone you love deeply - but don't try to tell me that casual sex, anonymous sex, ritual sex, group sex or role-playing games to mention just some of the alternatives can't be the occasion for acts of genuine love, tenderness and affection. To suggest as much is, quite simply, a lie.

We have been bequeathed a very narrow definition of what sex should be about. The Pope is still trying to tell us that it should only happen within marriage, and that condoms are out. And that's the line still being rolled out in schools and other institutions of education throughout Britain, Ireland and indeed much of the world.

Fuck all that. You gotta know what you're doing in the post-AIDS era, and be suitably safe in your sexual activities. That means you use a condom - or you start learning how to make the most of the pleasures of non-penetrative sex. Otherwise sex is good - and the new era of hedonism starts here! A sexual pioneer in popular culture, Madonna has done her bit in the cause, bravely exploring the full depth and breadth and width of her own sexual longing, and working on developing a musical language with which to express it - now it's up to you to similarly explore those sweet mysteries as they enrapture and obsess you.

Let the good times roll (now there's another one that should have made the top 50). . .

HOW WAS IT FOR YOU?

The Hot Press critics select the 50 Sexiest Records of all-time. If music be the food of love, play on.

The panel: Tara McCarthy, Niall Stokes, Eamonn McCann, Bill Graham, Siobhán Long, Joe Jackson, Olaf Tyaransen, Lorraine Freeney, Liam Fay, Stuart Clark, Melissa Knight, George Byrne, Helena Mulkerns, Johnny Lyons, Dan Oggly, Andy Darlington and Gerry McGovern.

1. Velvet Underground: "Venus In Furs" (Verve)

The sexiest record ever made? Who knows! It's certainly one of the kinkiest. Taking its title from a book called Venus In Furs by the man himself, Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch, the song is a paean to the weird and wonderful world of S and M. Musically, it found the Velvet Underground at their sharpest and most mischievous. Indeed, the album from which it comes, The Velvet Underground and Nico (the one with Warhol's famous banana on the sleeve) also featured such classics as 'Heroin' and 'Waiting For The Man'. "Shiny, shiny, shiny boots . . ." For 1967, this was mind-blowing stuff. Not surprisingly, it didn't get a lot of airplay and, indeed, still doesn't today (except as the soundtrack to an extraordinary Dunlop ad - Ed). But for those who like a bit of slap and tickle, it retains its essential, shall we say, charm.

Ian Dury: "Wake Up And Make Love" (Stiff)

Plugged into the vaudeville tradition, Ian Dury made some of the best British records ever about sex, including 'Sex And Drugs And Rock'n'Roll' and 'Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick'. However, 'Wake Up And Make Love' was probably his finest moment. "Have a proper wriggle in the naughty naked nude," sang Lord Upminster on this tribute to the joys of making out in the morning. This is funny and raunchy at the same time, a great dance record and, as the more astute among you will have noticed, it was on the perfect label.

John Lee Hooker: "Shake It Baby" (Jasmine)

There's a great tradition of lasciviousness in the blues and John Lee Hooker was - and is - one of its finest exponents. From the superb Serve You Right To Suffer album this is a cocky, rumbling boogie in which Hooker urges his partner on to ever greater depths of erotic depravity. Full of unbridled, priapic lust, it's a classic.

Peggy Lee: "Fever: (Capitol)

Set to a hip-thrusting rhythm, this classic litany of lustful legends mentions Shakespeare and Pocohantas, while still managing to be sexy with a smile. Covered by acts as diverse as Helen Shapiro, The Gorehounds, Madonna, The Cramps and The Jam, 'Fever' sounds as gorgeously seductive today as it did when it was released back in 1958.

The Jesus And Mary Chain: "Just Like Honey" (Blanco y Negro)

So how come a record about drugs manages to be sexy? Well, even if you discount Jim Reid's undeniably sensual vocal, there's always the old blues ambiguity concerning the use of the word 'honey' in a lyric. Either way, this record captures a cool allure, suggesting more than meets the ear.

The Pale: "Butterfly" (A&M)

Let's face it, historically, Irish bands haven't been either the funkiest or the sexiest on the planet. U2's conversion to sexual animals has produced some increasingly challenging material. The fab four aside, however, The Pale take the biscuit. Here - whether it's due to the rolling rhythm of the bass line or Matthew Devereux's subversive way with the sexual imagery of the lyric - The Pale managed to come up with one of the most decadent Irish records ever made.

Donna Summer: "Love To Love You Baby" (GTO)

Disco Diva La Summer caused moral outrage during this extended smooch-fest. Going even further than Jane Birkin's suggestive moans in 'Je T'Aime', she feigned a full orgasm during the song's middle section, and very effectively too, making this a real dance floor favourite in the process. For people who are into aural sex, it's an erotic classic.

Chuck Berry: "No Particular Place To Go" (Pye International)

Although it was only released on his emergence from prison in 1964, this tribute to the joys of sex in a car underlined Berry's witty way with coded lyrics which had established his reputation as rock'n'roll's first Poet Laureate. Every car song from 'Paradise By The Dashboard Light' to Bruce Springsteen's extensive treatises on the subject owe a significant debt to this tale, which provides the unforgettable image of the sexed-up horny narrator frustrated in his lascivious intentions by a malfunction of the car's safety belt mechanism.

Lorraine Ellison: "Stay With Me" (Stax)

Showbiz legend has it that this barnstorming tear-jerker was awaiting the vocal talents of one Francis Albert Sinatra until a no-show by Ol' Blue Eyes led to backing singer Lorraine Ellison stepping forward and creating a gut-wrenchingly, aching, Soul masterpiece. Subsequently, butchered by The Walker Brothers (even Scott couldn't top this delivery), David Essex, Sam Brown and any amount of would-be divas, 'Stay With Me' is an emotional masterclass, guaranteed to chill the spine, soften the heart and inspire the tenderest of sexual intentions.

Hot Chocolate: "You Sexy Thing" (Rak)

As one of the finest singles bands in the history of British Pop, Hot Chocolate have produced several fine paeans to the joys of horizontal jogging but never was their case for carnality put so directly as on this Number Two hit from 1975. Confident, sexy and strutting, this is one to stimulate the libido on the dancefloor, and with a bit of luck heaven may just be in the back seat of your cadillac on the way home.

The Kinks: "Lola" (Pye)

No collection of the sexiest records ever made could hope to be complete without Ray Davies' classic tale of gender confusion and the subsequent doubts it raises in the narrator. Like the twist in The Crying Game, Davies leaves the issue hanging dramatically with the line "Girls will be boys and boys will be girls/It's a mixed up, crazy, shook up world." So it is, and all the better for it when it comes to sex.

Aretha Franklin: "I Say A Little Prayer" (Atlantic)

There are rare occasions when a magnificent song runs slap bang into a performance of such soaring quality that a new peak in music is set and thus it was in 1968 when Burt Bacharach and Hal David's beautiful and warm love song found itself on the receiving end of what is arguably The Queen of Soul's finest vocal. As an affirmation of love and sensuality this record has rarely been bettered, offering as it does, by the way, a glimpse into the boudoir of the singer that is entirely innocent and all the more seductive for that.

The Beatles: "Norwegian Wood" (Parlophone)

Craftily disguised as a witty description of an imaginary one night stand, 'Norwegian Wood' was in fact John Lennon's way of intimating to his wife Cynthia that his lifestyle couldn't exactly be described as monogamous. "I crawled off to sleep in the bath"? A likely tale, as you can imagine. Curiously, blustering raunch like that of 'Why Don't We Do It On The Road' aside, The Beatles made very few contenders. 'Norwegian Wood' works because it's genuinely understated, mysterious and seductive.

The Stooges: "I Wanna Be Your Dog" (Elektra)

As in fondly stoked, fed and watered on a regular basis and taken for long, healthy walks in the park? 'Fraid not, not at all. Iggy Pop and his crazed cohorts have some rather more animalistic ideas in mind. Perfect for that quiet night in with a bottle of Mescal and a gram of cheap speed, this is one for discipline enthusiasts and those occasions where some real degradation is what you're after.

REM: "Star Me Kitten" (Warner Brothers)

Originally entitled 'Fuck Me Kitten', which is what Michael Stipe actually sings on the chorus, this nevertheless finds REM at their most obliquely romantic, providing a suitable headspin for that surreal moment between pleasure and emptiness. A subtle one this . . .

Frankie Goes To Hollywood: "Relax" (ZTT)

An unashamed and highly explicit celebration of the delights of oral sex, 'Relax' was unique and important in that it brought an obviously gay anthem to the mass market, if not Top Of The Pops, stuffy old Mike Reid sealing the record's success by declaring it obscene and smashing it live on air on Radio One. A great dance record and as salacious as hell, it was accompanied by a suitably steamy and over-the-top video.

James Brown: "Get Up I Feel Like Being A Sex Machine"

Never one to hide behind allusive lyrical metaphors, James Brown revolutionised bedroom gymnastics with this up and at 'em discourse on the joys of raucous rumpy pumpy. A quick blast of this in any romantic encounter will soon let your partner hazard a safe guess as to your evil intentions but the record's strength is in its stunningly euphoric quality, and it's sheer downright hedonism. A great hip-thrusting dance record it is too.

George Michael: "I Want Your Sex" (Epic)

The fact that this record carried the catalogue number LUST 1 should tell you all you need to know about the boy George's intentions. Stripped to the bone funk combined with a genuinely erotic performance, place this alongside Prince's 'Kiss' as near perfect danceable and debauched delights.

Debbie Harry: "French Kissing In The USA" (Chrysalis)

Debbie Harry is widely regarded as one of the sexiest women in the history of pop and with Blondie she made some greatly alluring records. Even in Ice Queen mode, on 'Heart Of Glass' she could be stunningly seductive. 'French Kissing In The USA' is a fairly straightforward opus describing the fun to be had indulging in a bout of tongue tennis all across the Home of the Free and the Land of the Brave. It represented one of the peaks in a solo career which could best be described as 'erratic'.

Bob Dylan: 'Lay Lady Lay" (Columbia)

From the great Nashville Skyline album, this was an evocation of frontier sex, redolent of log fires and oil lamps, a possible soundtrack for the more sensual moments in McCabe And Mrs Miller. Warm, tender and human, it's strength was in both its graphic directness and the frailty it invests its protagonist with. "His clothes are dirty but his hands are clean/And you're the best thing that he's ever seen/Lay lady lay/Lay across my big brass bed."

Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg: "Je T'Aime . . . Moi Non Plus" (Fontana)

To say that Gallic heart-throb Serge Gainsbourg had a reputation as being a ladies man would be to understate the obvious quite dramatically. Set to a memorable motif, this inspired lovers dialogue featured English rose, Jane Birkin, moaning in a most unambiguous fashion and the song provided the erotic highlight of many a teen disco in the '70s and '80s.

Ice-T: "Girls, Let's Get Butt Naked And Fuck" (Sire)

Like the best of its raunchy antecedents, this is a powerful celebration of carnal intent which gets away with being macho precisely because Mr T has his tongue firmly in his own cheek. They don't come much more swaggeringly potent than this.

Jimi Hendrix: "Wild Thing" (Tracks)

The original guitar hero was also a potent sex symbol, all tongue, mouth and groin physicality. When The Troggs released 'Wild Thing' it was impressively vulgar and slightly laughable at the same time, but when Jimi Hendrix whispered "make love with me" you could sense that they were out there in their thousands saying yes, and dreaming of bringing out the wild thing in themselves.

U2: "She Moves In Mysterious Ways" (Island)

'The Sweetest Thing' and 'Desire' would be contenders but on Achtung Baby! U2 really came of age sexually and this is that album's most sensuous moment. Locking into a dance groove, it was both libidinous and challenging. "If you want to kiss the sky gotta learn how to kneel - on your knees boy," Bono sings and the link between sex and spirituality is made.

Therapy?: "Screamager" (A&M)

A song of such energy and intensity that it's almost impossible to resist being lured onto a dance floor or, more likely, into a mosh pit. People sweat in the pit, they grope each other haphazardly, all the while bonding physically and emotionally as safety and enjoyment are entrusted to others (reluctantly perhaps, but necessarily). Pain and pleasure bang heads and all parties involved end up both drained and energised. 'Screamager', with its combination of laid back abandon and driving guitars, has the power to turn your bed (or couch, or back seat or kitchen table . . .) into a sexual mosh pit for two. Or three, or four . . .

Depeche Mode: "World In My Eyes" (Mute)

Depeche Mode have always had a keen understanding of issues of vulnerability and control, of true love and perversity being cosy bedfellows. 'World In My Eyes' builds up an image of a deep and passionate, almost destined, love, all the while undermining it with disturbing awareness of powerplays and the elemental force of pure physical desire. "Let me take you on a trip/around the world and back," the narrator proposes generously, before adding "That's all there is/nothing more than you can feel now/that's all there is." Take it however you like - it doesn't get any better than this, it doesn't matter who you're with, being here with you now is the only thing in life that matters - it's still one of the best soundtracks for intimate acts around.

Julie London: "An Occasional Man" (Liberty/EMI)

One of many tracks that could have been culled from "The Liberty Years", Julie London was the most confusingly vampish of all the torch singers, a mint-cool blonde who seemed a radiantly healthy all-American girl yet whose sexuality was always sharp in tooth and claw. If some torch singers seemed perpetually born to lose, Julie London was always a winner.

Bootsy's Rubber Band: "Munchies For Your Love" (Warners)

The Clinton clan, cunnilingus and a palpable haze of marijuana, here. Bootsy's stoned drawl tells you he doesn't just use his tongue for talking but what takes 'Munchies . . .' into x-rated sensual heaven is the gradually more and more enflamed vocal chorus as it keeps repeating: "Your love is sweet, sweet enough to eat, I'm hooked on you, Chocolate Star, I've got the munchies for your love."

Grace Jones: "Pull Up To The Bumper" (Island)

Jean-Paul Goude gave Grace Jones an image that may have started from earlier French fantasies about Josephine Baker and then cast her as a figurine of blank aggression and sculptured sexual abstraction. But the real masterstroke was Chris Blackwell's pairing of her with Sly and Robbie for a new outernational sound that mated reggae with disco. Grace purred and preened in the backseat but it was the breaks of her drivers that drove her limousine up to the bumper.

Marianne Faithfull: "Why D'Ya Do It" (Island)

Furies on 45. Savage still, this is the equivalent of vitriol on a dick, a bombardment of a faithless lover that leaves no four-letter word unsaid. Samples: "Everytime I see your dick, I see her cunt in my bed" . . . and . . . "you betrayed my little oyster for such a low bid," the whole delivered with such aristocratic scorn that you overlooked much of the shame and pain. Co-writer, English poet Heathcote Williams was last seen and read with Fungi the Dingle Dolphin!

Cameo: "She's Strange" (Polygram)

Mystery and worship as Cameo's egotist, Larry Blackmon, for once admits: "Next to her, I'm plain ordinary." The keyboards funnel down into a whirlpool of longing as Larry chants his litany: "She's my Twilight Zone, my Al Capone, my Rolling Stones and my Eva Peron . . . elusive, you see, like the Invisible Man in drag." The ballad of a man hypnotised, "She's Strange" was the dance equivalent of black magic.

Sinead O'Connor: "Troy" (Ensign)

In the sixties, girl-groups used to channel the angst when the boy walked away for another. But if 'Troy' basically sketched the same scenario, it was far more than a silly soap-opera for the kidz. Instead, it was passion at its most claustrophobic and consuming, a heady trip through a battlefield of conflicting emotions. Tenderness in the right hand, anger in the left and a fight for identity as Sinead struggled to keep her head above the emotional floods.

Big Mama Thornton: "Hound Dog" (Peacock/Ace)

The original and the best, written by Leiber and Stoller and recorded by Johnny Otis in 1952. The very Big Mama Thornton, all 20 stones of her, taunts far more than she teases or tempts the man who keeps "sniffin' round her door" who said he "was high-class but I could see through that." Dogs howl, the rhythm bumps and grinds and no little doggie was going to get the better of her.

Koko Taylor: "Wang Dang Doodle" (Chess)

Actually sex isn't explicitly mentioned here but "Wang Dang Doodle" was basically an invitation to a Chicago Blues Party where anything could happen and probably did. "Fuss and fight till daylight . . . really stroll a mess," they sing - Koko Taylor and the Chess Boys couldn't have been interested in celibates.

P.J. Harvey: "Rid Of Me" (Island)

Another end of relationship song, where sexual heat blazes into a firestorm of possessiveness and passion, and all the shame and pain gets exorcised in psychodrama. I love him/I love him not but Polly Harvey wasn't toying with daisies, more likely cursing and haunting and sticking pins in a voodoo doll to rid herself of the me who loved him.

Two Nice Girls: "I Spent My Last Ten Dollars (On Birth Control and Beer) (Rough Trade)

Well, there ain't many Austin honky-tonk dyke anthems. Two nice girls, actually there were four of them, simultaneously and refreshingly poke fun at both over-precious sisters and heartless honky-tonk men. Quotable chorus: "I spent my last ten dollarson birth control and beer/My life was so much simpler when I was sober and queer/But the love of a strong hairy man has turned my head, I fear/And made me spend my last ten bucks on birth control and beer." and if you can't laugh with them, well really . . .

The Rolling Stones: "Let's Spend The Night Together" (Decca)

Swinging London in '67 when all, well almost all, sexual taboos were being overturned. Everyone wanted to go to Chelsea and the Stones were the high priests of liberation. Few were bothering to use condoms and girls still compliantly accepted their lords and masters of Hip. And if Mick Jagger had started his career saturated in the Chicago blues, he was now learning that a touch of good old aristocratic camp and androgyny might wow the colonials. Germaine Greer and David Bowie were just around the next bend but for now this was memorably direct and uncontrived.

The Band: "Rag Mama Rag" (Capitol)

This is good dirty downhome fun, with the beleaguered male narrator complaining good-naturedly about the incessant attentions of his hard-lovin' woman. "We could be relaxing in our sleeping bag/But all you ever wanna do/Is rag, mama rag," he protests but Garth Hudson's effervescent boogie piano leaves you in no doubt about the mischievous tone involved. A wonderful tonic!

Bruce Springsteen: "Because The Night" (Columbia)

Originally recorded by Patti Smith, in a smouldering version, the Boss' own treatment just about comes out on top. This is the promise that we all understand: exhilaration, ecstasy, passion. Because the night belongs to love . . .

David Bowie: "China Girl" (RCA)

For a man who played the genderpbending game with consummate skill through the early years of his career - and his success - it's somewhat ironic to find one of his later offerings outstripping earlier contenders. Bowie was in good form on Let's Dance but there's an undeniable sensuality in this tribute to a mythical China girl. The video certainly took the lyrics literally but could this have been another veiled drug romance? Either way it's still a gorgeous noise.

The Doors: "Light My Fire" (Elektra)

Jim Morrison was one of rock's earliest male sex demi-gods - at their best The Doors smouldered and Morrison burned, and nowhere more brightly than on this dangerously sensual trip. "You know that it would be untrue/You know that I would be a liar/If I was to say to you/Girl we couldn't get much higher/Come on baby light my fire/Gotta set the night on fire!"

k.d. lang: "Wash Me Clean' (Reprise)

k.d. has become a sex symbol of great consequence, providing a star focus for gay women - and do they revel in her success. She happens also to have a wonderful voice, a strong presence and charisma to burn. This is a song of powerful sexual transcendence, a deep emotional outpouring that brooks no argument, affirming in the process the spiritual dimensions of good sex.

2. Patti Smith: "Gloria" (Arista)

Long before the phrase "gender-bending" was ever anything more than a leer in Boy George's eye, Patti Smith was up to something that was infinitely more sexually subversive, not to mention subversively sexual. On her intense and dramatic 1975 debut album, Horses, Smith pulled off one of the great rock coups by appropriating 'Gloria', Them's ultimate (male) garage band classic, and turning it on its head sexually. The neat role reversal of having this primal expression of lust and obsession sung by one woman to another hyperventilated new life into every line of the song, and reinvented it for a gay audience that in terms of seventies rock had had little to sing about. Today, Patti Smith's 'Gloria' remains one of rock's most irresistible seductions. Van Morrison has never sounded so sexy. G-L-O-R-I-A!

Most "sexy" songs in popular music are about as subtle and erotic as a rolled sock rammed down the leather pants of a male rocker, or the sight of Sharon Stone's flashed pubic hairs in Basic Instinct. And yet rock music, in particular, invariably appeals to our basic instincts.

My own, I guess, were called forth when the editor phoned and said "give me your list of the five sexiest records in rock." I immediately responded with very obvious titles like Presley's 'One Night' and Sinatra's 'Satisfy Me', in much the same way that one's flesh, rather than conscious mind, instinctively sighs "mmm, yes" as you first brush against a highly sexual person.

But then surely we all, occasionally, look at someone and secretly say "one night of sin is all I'm praying for." And, if our prayers are answered, plead "don't deny me, satisfy me one more time"? Either way, the coded message in both songs, as with most "sexy" songs in rock, is: "let's fuck," with the sole aim being physical relief.

Having given the subject more thought, however, I'd have to say that Presley's 'And the Grass Don't Pay No Mind', or Sinatra's 'I'm A Fool To Want You', are infinitely more "sexy" in the holistic sense, with each song presenting sexual ecstasy as a means of transcendence. Likewise, in Cohen's 'Take This Longing' and k.d. lang's 'Wash Me Clean', where one sense that the ultimate sexual encounter for each singer provides even a temporary release from pain, and from an awareness of the presence of death.

Similarly, the dual impetus of a physical and spiritual longing makes 'Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses' one of U2's most sexual songs and one that is also true to rock's roots in the rhythms of gospel music.

Yet, let's not get carried away by metaphysics here: more often than not sex in rock is a commodity, a product designed to make your thighs move while your hand reaches for your wallet, or your purse.

That's how it's been in 20th century pop culture since Hollywood moguls secretly christened crooner Rudy Valee "the man with the cock in his voice" and found that fans would pay to be mind-fucked by the man. Likewise, these days, to a degree, with Madonna. You can't get to fuck her, so you consume her sex through music, videos, films and, of course that book.

Fine, if that's your choice and hers. But, apart from Madonna, and a brace of equally assertive women, rock 'n' roll still is, fundamentally, "a dysfunctional male music system" - to quote Zrazy - which sells, above everything else, the Neanderthal notion of a universe that revolves around the cock. Indeed, 'Rock Around the Cock' rather than 'Rock Around The Clock' could be its theme song, with the subjugation of women, homosexuals and lesbians as an insidious subtext.

Now, you may not wish to read such messages into "sexy" songs like Presley's 'Power of My Love', or similar recordings by Prince. I didn't, at first. Yet to deny these facts is to further perpetuate the myth that rock 'n' roll has always been a liberating force in terms of sexuality.

In relation to male sexuality that may be the case. However, I'd hate to find that if we all listened really closely to our own personal list of five "sexy" records we'd realise that at least one, or more is "sexist" rather than sexy. It kinda takes the fun out of it all, doesn't it?

• Joe Jackson

Sex is a sacrament. Holy Communion between mind, spirit and body, the Holy Trinity of the human animal. This music we call sexy is our sacred music. Holy Trinity of rhythm, harmonies, voice. In it are reverence, solemnity or intensity, rapture, playfulness.

Our sacred music may be tribal, hypnotic rhtyhms, throbbing into a crescendo of frenzy, ecstatic union with the unknowable force of all being. It may be mystical, with chant-like voices inducing transcendent trance, pulsing tidal toward peak, only to ebb away with perfect restraint to return once again more empowered. It may obsolve us of our sins, gently blessing the movements of our bodies, the force of our breath.

There may be in it the strangely pure yet sinister erotic quality of Gregorian Chant. This sacred music may be serene, emotional, violent. It may be everything we would feel towards the Divine.

Eros is a contrary god. He demands our surrender to the role of the senses, banished from Eden because it distracts from duty. Eros also demands that we control the impulse to explode, with the promise of finer sharper delights to render us senseless, should we endure this sweetest torture until we are lost, martyrs to rapture, transported beyond the body by the body, its beat its rhythm replicated in our holiest music.

In the subtleties of erotic alchemy, we are lost and found where aggression meets tenderness and taboo is there to be revered all the more through its transgression. Face to face with the horror and the glory of being human, mortal, this music grinds, slides, thrusts, defiant as we celebrate this transient body which shall fail us and rot. Stripped of civilisation, exposed, vulnerable, faith is our only hope.

The singer soothes or incites to riot as the music licks the sweat from our bodies. We cry out, tear flesh with toothed claw, this anguish, this violence, endurance of the exquisite draws us to that music which allows no turning back, no surrender, yet offers consolation, promise. In erotic interchange we are timeless, immortal, but so close to death. And there is a deathly quality to some of our sacred music as there usually is. The pulse of life was never stronger but the end is ever near.

And when we reach that moment, when the singer's voice cracks, saws, burns with cold helpless fire, all is over. That which we seek brings about our downfall. Life signifies death. Orgasm signifies the end.

At least for now. At least until the risen slowly picks up again, grinding merciliessly with a grin on sweat sparkled face, building once again towards oblivion, towards death, in celebration of life.

Passion transcends death, and there is a defiant victory in our sacred sexual music which reflects this. And still the beat goes on, insistent, hypnotic, relentless. And still the beat goes on...

• Fay Wolftree

3. Madonna: "Justify My Love" (Sire)

Madonna would probably sue if she didn't appear somewhere on this list. After all, she has spent her entire career in pursuit of what she sees as the ultimate Holy Grail of pop sex goddesshood. Every career move has been choreographed to shock, outrage, provoke and incite. A lot of the time this works, wonderfully, but when it fails, well, it fails. 'Justify My Love' was one of her good calls, however. A straightforward song about wanting to fuck, and wanting to fuck now, it was transformed into something with a sharper edge by the breathless urgency of Madonna's vocals. The strange musical undertow adds an intriguing touch of menace. Definitely Madonna's most compelling seduction.

4. Kate Bush: "Running Up That Hill" (EMI)

Sensuality has always been at the core of Kate Bush's work. With a voice like hers, could it have been otherwise? From the extraordinary 'Wuthering Heights' onwards, Bush has written and sung about passion with a depth and ingenuity of which few others in popular music have seemed capable. Her strong theatrical sensibility (she's a trained mime artist) has also encouraged her to mischievously play around with sexual imagery in her artwork (remember the record sleeve of Lionheart, for example) and in her award-winning videos. 'Running Up That Hill' was taken from 1986's Hounds Of Love, a concept album of sorts that once again found Bush in the love trenches. By any standards, it's a powerful song and is worthy of such prime position here because of its deceptively simple handling of such a complex area as sexual obsession, in all its various forms. Its ultimate triumph, of course, is that it's a damn sexy song to listen to.

5. Marvin Gaye: "Let's Get It On" (Motown)

Sexy songs don't come much sexier, or more blunt, than this 1973 shagarama. Having won the hearts and minds of millions with '71's What's Goin' On, his collection of right-on songs about social issues, Marvin decided to target his listeners in other biological areas - below the belt to be precise. He'd always been smooth, sexy and stylish but this was something else, total aural seduction. A whole album of sweating and smooching may have been a little OTT but it was the record's title track, 'Let's Get It On', which floored most people, and bedded quite a few too. Soothing and stimulating, a stone-killer groove layered with sweet soul vocals, the song still manages to evoke a satin-sheet sensuality. 'Sexual Healing', of course, was Marvin Gaye's other great leg overture but even that boudoir classic is outclassed by 'Let's Get It On', his original and best.

6. The Pointer Sisters: "Slow Hand" (Planet)

"I need a lover with a slow hand/I want a man with an easy touch/Not someone who'll come and go in a heated rush." Self-explanatory really but no less affecting and sensual for all that. Ruth, Anita, June and Bonnie (who quit the group in the late seventies) began their careers singing gospel in a church in their native Oakland, California but, away from the altar and pews, their harmony singing was well capable of igniting the kind of aural flames that were almost pagan in their carnality. Their 1979 version of Bruce Springsteen's 'Fire' was a case in point and scored a massive American hit for the sisters. By 1981 when they released Black And White from which 'Slow Hand' is taken, their choice of material had become predictable and safe. 'Slow Hand' itself, however, was neither and remains one of the warmest, sultriest and most instructive sex ballads of the lot. Your complete guide to manual dexterity in a three-minute pop song.

7. Prince: "If I Was Your Girlfriend" (Paisley Park)

In truth, there are any number of Prince tracks which could have ended up on this list. Almost everyone who voted nominated a different choice but 'If I Was Your Girlfriend' came closest to being a compromise candidate, just. One of the outstanding tracks on 1987's Sign O' The Times, 'If I Was Your Girlfriend' is an almost creepily intense trip through the wires of desire and possession. "Would you run to me if somebody hurt you/Even if that somebody was me?", Prince asks at one point in his takeover bid for the entire consciousness of the object of his obsession. On one level, this is certainly disturbing stuff, and there's plenty more where that came from, but ultimately, this song is as much about acquiescence as it is about control. It takes the trite old cliché about "getting to know you, getting to know all about you" to its ultimate conclusion. Being Prince, there is, of course, a musical bark to match the lyrical bite. In this case, a pulsating, gyrating backbeat that adds further layers of urgency to his pleadings and fantasies. Carnal dementia at its best.

POOR ADOLPHE Sax. Back last century when he invented the saxophone, he thought he was merely adding to the classical repertoire, creating a new tone - colours for any future Wagner or Berlioz. Instead he would become responsible for the ultimate acoustic phallic symbol and aural exciter of the next century.

Yet the sax was a slow developer since New Orleans jazz preferred the clarinet and brass. It didn't really bud into puberty till the thirties when the Texas and Territories bands assembled in the wild and wide open town of Kansas City, Count Basil discovered Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young, and titans like Ben Webster and Chuck Berry put the bawd into the blues.

Then the sax became the sexual trigger, the cue for masculine display and sexual peacockery in every black ballroom. Illinois Jacques blazed out 'Flyin' Home' in Lionel Hampton's band and the young Malcolm X lindy-hopped, and as the dance band tradition crossed the points of bop and railroaded into early R'n'B, the sax sole, especially the tenor, became the clarion call for all the hedonism that repelled straight America.

It wasn't so much the Devil's music as the Goat's. The tenor was the American Pan Pipes; outrageous, lubricious yet also capable of a teasing erotic sensitivity that told its initiates that the horn of plenty wasn't always an insatiably bulging phallus. Tenor men might swagger but hear Johnny Hodges' also with Duke Ellington and you experienced a seduction that lasted through till both parties' mutual satisfaction.

Just like Nineties' rappers, the sax wasn't always P.C. Hear blue-collar release when Jimmy Witherspoon comes home drunk and cursing and Ben Webster, who could also play sweeter than his honey-pie, unfurled the most elementally dirty sole I've ever heard which doesn't so much culminate in a climax as a tidal wave. Then the tradition would continue through the involvement of King Curtis with the classic R'n'B of The Coasters onto the great Motown cruising musk of the erroneously underrated Junior Walker.

Somehow the sax mimicked sex like no other instrument. It was the groin, the tongue and all the endurance of the lungs that promised a good time would be sweet but not necessarily short. Then when jazz got too cool in the Fifties, tenorist Archie Shepp would revive all the veterans' harmonic and breathing games for the avant-garde.

Yet the pretty school could still romance. Through Weather Report, Wayne Shorter has been associated with the soprano but his earlier tenor playing with Miles Davis and The Jazz Messengers, sometimes attained a sexual elegance and serenity far beyond the rut.

Of course Parker, Rollins, Coleman and, above all, Coltrane took the sax into new spiritual realms. But for the middle third of the century, it was the sax that wrote the invites to America's party out of (sexual) bounds.

• Bill Graham

YOUR SEXIEST records, the boss said. The ones that reduce you to a state of near total incoherence, he explained. Songs that jelly your knees, lap at your earlobe and finger your G-spot (which, I have long ago discovered to be sited - for (im)pure convenience and abject pleasure - on the tip of my left knee-cap) like nothing else on earth.

Of course, I replied, grinning at the hedonistic distraction it'd provide as I tottered up the back of Lugnaquilla in search of alternative physical exertion. It was the Sabbath after all. What else is a girl to do?

So what is it that sets the brain waves along tracks marked "arousal," trundling past vales of inertia, bypassing ascetic bothereens and barren drumlins until they perch upon the debauched delights of a libido alight?

I'm not too sure but I think it has something to do with the frequencies. I have friends who get off on Hot Chocolate (the band and the modest bedtime elixir), Errol Brown's falsetto catapulting them to passionate summits every time. There are even people who are easy prey for the eunachian efforts of Bros. and Bobby Brown.

But me, I reckon if the music lacks my personal frequency, it's consigned to the safe-even-for-Spuc-trained-ears bin that belches out incessantly throughout the daylight hours in radioland these days.

Sex is touch and taste. It's rhythm and melody defined by subtlety and not by the sledgehammer. It's the weeping of a cello (any cello) and the moaning of a harmonica (Van's). It's even been known to be tiptoeing through the sombre orchestrations of Catalani's 'La Wally', a piece that sends me into an embarrassing frenzy whenever I catch even the slightest glimpse of Diva.

It's not about words or ideas. (The lyric sheet has never made it into my bed). When it comes to sex and music, novel positions are as essential in the alignments of crotchets and quavers as they are in the compatibility of the mind and body.

Woody Allen reckoned that "sex with someone you don't love is an empty experience, but as empty experiences go, it's not bad." But a carefully chosen musical accompaniment can fling even the most mercenary couplings into a crashpit of ecstasy from which there is (on a good night) no return. Put 'Ghosts' on the turntable and I'm anyone's. 'The Sweetest Thing' (U2) and the libertine in me takes rightful possession.

The sexiest music must be capable of fingering, touching, coaxing. Promising and delivering. Phallic offerings like those of Led Zeppelin or Def Leppard are merely the premature ejaculations of stunted adolescent fantasies. Gabriel Yared's soundtrack to Betty Blue on the other hand offers suggestions that differ every time it's played. Now sensual, then rabidly arousing, occasionally gently caressing.

It's like letting the Kama Sutra fall open randomly - whatever page it alights upon you're guaranteed a good time. (Now you'll have to excuse me while I grab a cold shower.)

• Siobhán Long

8. The Pretenders: "Brass In Pocket" (Real)

Perhaps it was the cellophane-tight leather outfit which Chrissie Hynde wore on Top Of The Pops. Perhaps it was the way she purred "I'm gonna use it." Perhaps it was the slinky guitar chorus. Whatever the reason, 'Brass In Pocket' attracted immediate attention as a very sexy song indeed. Unleashed from The Pretenders' 1980 eponymous debut, 'Brass In Pocket' shot straight to number one and firmly placed the band in the big league. Hynde's vocals have always come loaded with criminal intent but rarely has she sounded so insolently sexual as on this record. Similarly, James Honeyman-Scott's inimitably swaggering lead guitar-playing also found its perfect pose amid its grooves. Lyrically, 'Brass In Pocket' was about assertiveness, self-determination and, of course, a fervent desire to get it on. Have brass, will travel. Have libido, will travel even further.

9. Lou Reed: "Walk On The Wild Side" (RCA)

Lou Reed is the only artist to appear more than once in this list. It's no surprise really given that Reed, both as Velvet Underground lynchpin and in his solo guise, has always walked on the wilder side, that decadent locale where anything goes and just about everything comes as well. Transformer, his 1972 album, had decadence written all over it but its most glorious perversion was undoubtedly 'Walk On The Wild Side', an extravagant ode to kinkiness and transexuality. Based on real life characters who used to hang around Andy Warhol's Factory during the V.U. days, the song recounts the hussles and hassles of people for whom sex is a way of life and often even survival. Sleazy, seamy and sexy stories told against a musical backdrop that is every bit as sleazy, seamy and sexy. 'Walk On The Wild Side' is a ride (musically speaking of course).

10. Elvis Presley: "One Night Of Sin" (RCA)

A song with a history that tells us more about society's fear of any expression of overt sexuality than it does about the song itself. Written by Smiley Lewis, Elvis originally recorded the track as a potential single in 1957. His record company, RCA/Victor, however, refused to release it because of its lyrical content and the "suggestive" title. A sanitised version was concocted with the title 'One Night (With You)' and in which the line "One night of sin is what I'm praying for" was replaced by the preposterous "One night with you is what I'm paying for." This was released as a single in 1958 but, despite the "clean-up" job, most U.S. radio stations still refused to play it. Lyrically bowdlerised or not, the lustful yearning in The King's voice was unmistakable. The original version of 'One Night Of Sin' wasn't actually released until 1983. And while Presley has recorded many more subtly libidinous songs, it remains one of his more uninhibited and primal carnal howls.