Whatever turns you on, turn it on!

Have you ever considered what the soundtrack of your sex life would be? Anyone who is a fan of music – and considering you’ve got a copy of hotpress in your hands, I presume that includes you – has songs in their past that evoke particular memories, some of them sexual.

I had my very first kiss listening to The Cure. His name was Wayne. We were sitting in my bedroom, burning candles and incense – as you do – and as Robert Smith sang ‘A Forest’ he leaned over and kissed me. It was a beautiful moment, melancholy and sexy, which I unfortunately ruined by accidentally nipping his tongue with my teeth. Oh dear… I have great memories attached to that song, but I still wince slightly with embarrassment whenever I hear it.
Had I been wiser, I might have chosen the soundtrack to the night I lost my virginity with more care. We were listening to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon. It’s a fantastic album but given the circumstances, something other than “I’m alright Jack, keep your hands off my stack” may have been more appropriate to the moment of my deflowering. To this day, I can only listen to Dark Side Of The Moon when I’m alone.
I may not be a princess, nor Jewish, but I certainly was horny the day an ex-boyfriend and I cut class and ended up naked on my bed. I decided to liven things up by handcuffing him to the windows security bars all to the oh-so romantic strains of Frank Zappa’s Sheik Yerbouti. Woo hoo! But the real excitement came during a particularly intense moment (in the sex, not the music) when he pulled the curtains, and the curtain rail, down on top of us.
Ministry’s ‘So What’ wouldn’t strike many people as a sexy song – the lyrics alone would frighten most people off, never mind the fact that the music is a kind of industrial dirge. As the song kicked off during Ministry’s show at the Temple Bar Music Centre in 2003, the crowd went wild and I ended up with beer all over my head. A complete stranger came to the rescue. He licked the beer off my back and saved me from the mosh. I never saw him again as he got lost in the fray, but the song always reminds me of his tongue running along my spine – and still gives me shivers.
If you care about music, it’s impossible to have any kind of meaningful relationship with somebody who doesn’t. The man that answers ‘everything’ when quizzed about their tastes is a man I could never get intimate with, even for an evening. That – or a fondness for Celine Dion, Bryan Adams or any band with a hairspray budget – is the death knell to any sexual interest on my part.
If you meet someone you find sexually intriguing, chances are you’ll ask them what kind of music they like. If they have enough in common with you, a serious relationship may be on the horizon. On the other hand, if their tastes are at odds with your own, chances are it’ll never be more than a fling. No matter how good the sex is, you’ll probably still want time off to go to gigs. And so will they – and one day you’ll end up paying for falling in lust with their tongue-flick technique by spending hours listening to the collected works of Jon Bon Jovi. You have been warned!
Shakespeare wrote that music was the food of love, and since we crawled out of the swamps and learned to play music, human beings have used songs to seduce one another. If you can play and sing, good for you – a lifetime of groupies may await. The rest of us mere mortals - and those, like me, whose singing is more likely to make your ears bleed than your heart melt - have to rely on the talents of others to set the right tone and seduce our way into their beds.
When you have sex with someone for the first time, or have dragged some gorgeous creature back to your lair in the hope of ending the evening with arms and legs entwined, it’s of the utmost importance to find the right soundtrack. It has to be appropriate for the event and something you both like, but not too distracting. The last thing you want is for someone to stop midway through the event to tell you that you really have to listen to the next song. You’re favourite new band may be fucking brilliant, but what you want here – surely – is brilliant fucking.
AOL did a poll with porn star Jemma Jameson to find the world’s 69 – ha ha – sexiest songs. Most of the usual suspects made the top ten – Marvin Gaye, Barry White, Nine Inch Nails and Britney – but would you really want to have sex to any of these songs? I don’t think so.
Marvin Gaye’s ‘Let’s Get It On’ may be a great song, but could you seduce someone with it? No way – it’s far too obvious. How about Britney’s ‘I’m A Slave 4 U?’ No good either, at least not for me. The lyrics would make me feel far too self-conscious. And while you might well want to fuck someone like an animal, Nine Inch Nails’ ‘Closer’ is probably too aggressive for the first evening you spend together. Most importantly, it can’t be too romantic – nobody could have mad, passionate, filthy, exciting and raw sex listening to Barry White. It’s not possible, and probably illegal.
I asked around, and like me, most of my friends had sexual memories attached to songs that most of us wouldn’t think of as sexy. These included Cowboy Junkies, His Name Is Alive, Leonard Cohen, The Wonderstuff, The Prodigy, Infected Mushroom, Foetus, Bob Dylan, Arcade Fire and many, many more – none of which got even a peep on AOL’s sexy song list.
The funny thing is that the songs that remind us of sexual experiences are probably the very ones that are not obviously sexy in any way. But whatever your sexual soundtrack, it’s hopefully as varied and as interesting as your sex life.