Good fucking music!

They've been playing a song by Rock Zombie, "Rock Motherfucker," on a local radio station for the past few weeks. Rock Zombie is not a group that I'd go out of my way to listen to but this particular song has seeped into my brain and I'm now humming it to myself on a regular basis. This in turn has got me thinking back to the early days of profanity ridden, socially unacceptable music lyrics.

I was only a nipper when the Sex Pistols burst onto the scene in the mid-70's. I had a mate, Spud, who was a year or two older than me, who had just bought The Great Rock & Roll Swindle (I have a recollection that he bought it from a dim-witted schoolmate for less than a quid). One day when his parents were out, he invited me round to listen to it - I couldn't believe what I was hearing. The song that I enjoyed the most was that catchy sea shanty "Friggin in the Riggin," and even though most of the lyrics went right over my head (*just had a childhood flashback) I loved to belt out the last line of the chorus - "there was fuck all else to do."

The Pistols paved the way for a wave of vinyl smut and controversy. Up next was the Dead Kennedys with the classic, "Too Drunk to Fuck," in 1981. Me and my mates listened eagerly to the Sunday chart rundown on Radio 1 to see if it had got into the top 40 - it made number 36. We all wondered how Tony Blackburn was going to introduce the song title, but he just casually referred to it as, "a song by the Dead Kennedys," and moved on to number 35. Later on in the week, we went down to the record store, Its Records, to see if they had it displayed - they always had the top 40 singles up on the wall. Sure enough, there it was occupying the 36 slot. The title of the song had been covered by a bit of red tape but you could still see the title through it - we thought this was just the best fucking thing ever. Their next release was the tamely entitled, "Nazi Punks Fuck Off!"

Around the same time, whilst the new romantics ponced around in leather trousers and pirate shirts, Anti-Nowhere League made an appearance, bringing profanity to a whole new level with, "So What!" This was the B-side to the cover version of Rlaph McTell's, "Streets of London" - contrast is an understatement. The law were under orders to confiscate any singles they could find but my old mate Spud (or possibly his older brother) managed to get his hands on a copy:

Well I've fucked a sheep
And I've fucked a goat
I've had my cock right down its throat
So what, so what

The Bard himself must have turned in his grave, but we played this so much that, 30 years later, I can still remember every word. The Metallica version isn't bad, but you wouldn't try to fob off a reproduction of the Mona Lisa as the real McCoy, would you?

By 1982 the novelty was starting to wear off - as lads in our early teens we were becoming harder and harder to shock. Peter and the Test Tube Babies offered some amusement for a while with their first album, Pissed and Proud. This included such gems as, "Elvis is Dead" (what a fat cunt he was), "Transvestite (is this some kind of joke, you're really a bloke), and "Keep Britain Untidy." After that, everybody jumped on the Iron Maiden bandwagon and a whole generation of little devil worshippers was born.

*Flashback

When we were about 10 or 11 we (our gang) thought that 'wanking a woman' meant having sex with her. There was a good climbing tree in our neighbourhood which we referred to as the, "wanking tree." Looking back now, I'm not sure how we thought we could successfully 'wank a woman' up a tree, and when the older lads heard us talking about going to the "wanking tree" they probably just jumped to the obvious conclusion. We even composed a little song, "Did he wank my woman last night?" which EMI failed to pick up. Ah well... their loss.