...but I supect the lyric of Turning Japanese by the Vapors sums up what many of the fey indie boys may be doing. After all, the vast swell (fnur fnur) of opinion presented by the Irregulars is that Radiohead are well versed in the art.

and we can't discuss morriseys lyrics sadly as they refer to this sort thing.

I've always said Indie music has no balls

"indie foxtresses" Tanya Donnelly/Kirstin Hersh/Kim Deal/Kim Gordon/Miki Berenyi/Liz Fraser were in fact singing about, you know...doing it, but it was difficult to tell with any certainty due to the multilayered or poorly mixed vocals/squalls of feedback/cathedrals of noise that were in vogue when I was at an impressionable age. Later on Polly Harvey was definitely singing about sex among other things but as she was frankly, terrifying to behold, it had the effect of erm, dampening ones ardour somewhat.

The whole thing is underpinned by being fey, wet and wimpish isn't it? With a tedious PC pretention running though it (which sometimes boringly pops up in this fine forum actually). How else can you explain the adoration of he whose name cannot be spoken? I can just see Big Joe Turner or even Lowell George coming on stage with gardenias hanging out of his pocket.

...Indie is not the exception it's the examples you mention that are, as most music isn't overtly about sex. And maybe rather than singing about it they are just getting down to it, all talk and no trousers springs to mind.

no talk and all trousers. Zipped up tightly. Tighter than that. Bit more. Bit more, o o o, too late....

The Vaselines could be a bit smutty...I nearly forgot Monster Pussy.

has to be Olympian by Gene.

STRAP ON A PAIR!

I'd never heard of Lucille Bogan. Now I've tracked down the song in question and I'm gobsmacked.

....(sorry, were Arab strap) indie? I think it refers to something rather rude. Variation of a steely dan, perhaps?

... so no need to make a song and dance about it. The difference regarding sex (in every sense) in this decade compared to the post-free-love 1970s is wider than in 'my day' of the 1980s compared to the uptight 1950s. Think of: sex/nudity on TV; internet porn; openness in advertising; frankness in magazines; how liberal teenage girls/boys seem to be... Or am I an old out-of-touch fuddy-duddy?

Sexuality by Billy Bragg from the album "Don't Try This at Home"

I've had relations with girls from many nations
I've made passes at women of all classes
And just because youre gay I wont turn you away
If you stick around Im sure that we can find some common ground

Chorus:
Sexuality - strong and warm and wild and free
Sexuality - your laws do not apply to me

A nuclear submarine sinks off the coast of sweden
Headlines give me headaches when I read them
I had an uncle who once played for red star belgrade
He said some things are really left best unspoken
But I prefer it all to be out in the open

Sexuality - strong and warm and wild and free
Sexuality - your laws do not apply to me
Sexuality - dont threaten me with misery
Sexuality - I demand equality

Im sure that everybody knows how much my body hates me
It lets me down most every time and makes me rash and hasty
I feel a total jerk before your naked body of work

Im getting weighed down with all this information
Safe sex doesnt mean no sex it just means use your imagination
Stop playing with yourselves in hard currency hotels
I look like robert de niro, I drive a mitsubishi zero

Sexuality - strong and warm and wild and free
Sexuality - your laws do not apply to me
Sexuality - come eat and drink and sleep with me
Sexuality - we can be what we want to be

....that popular music is populated by people singing about things outside their experience? True, arguably, for prog, as I have never been to a Topographic Ocean or seen a Squonk, but there are more songs about love than songs about f***ing. I think.
Of which, however, can you find me a better song title than "Love comes in spurts?"
Yes, it's that nice Richard Hell.

which is why the whole indie/dance thing was such a big deal.

F*ck music is for dancing. And its almost always a little more black. Indie is more navel-gazing (and serious) and as far as I can tell you can't f*ck and navel-gaze at the same time.

Also its very hard to be sucidal and depressed and write good old "get down on it" music.

Which is why we loved The Stones when they "got down", (back in the day that is, before they became old age pensioners).

As Twangothan says Indie is a wee bit wet and fey which is alright for navel-gazing but no use at all for f*cking.

Never pulled at an indie disco although feyly admired many.

I stuck this up before but you just don't get this sort of stuff around these parts anymore. These girls truly carry the spirit of Lucille Bogan

And one of the most blatantly sexual songs: an account of having sex with a girl (who‘s been slapping on the suntan lotion) in her bedroom while listening to Jimi Hendrix. Doesn’t really get much more direct than this

I think the reason most indie rock isn’t directly “about” sex is because on the whole it’s hardly ever really “about” anything much. Just vague waffle.

and they were the skronkiest, indiest band ever. To be honest, I'm amazed there were any young ladies there. I'm not sure if this is of any relevance whatsoever, but I'm still amazed by this fact, some 15 years later.

Jarvis alway enjoyed a frank discussion of the topic: 'Sheffield Sex City', 'Babies', the list goes on.

I just don't think any of the media is sex obessed as people are making out most music, film, tv isn't about sex everyone says sex sells but most adverts don't use sex they use comedy.
Most music from 60's onwards was about everything but, dedicated follower of fashion , mathew and son, my green tambourine, respect, enter the sandman, ace of spades, all of folk music, even most of the stones songs or even v'zep were about love or gollum not sex. this all being said have you seen the flatmates or Taluah Gosh!

FIRST BASE: The bespectacled, spinsterish-looking girl, who works behind the desk at the local branch library, agrees to go on a date with you. At the church jumble sale, your fingers touch over a Tupperware container of second-hand hair slides. You consider moving in for a kiss, but then a strange fear grips you.

SECOND BASE: Long pregnant pauses in the conversation have given way to endearingly awkward, over-intellectualised flirting.

e.g: “Is that a rolled-up copy of Ariel by Sylvia Plath in your pocket, or are you just pleased to see me?”

Later you commit an unforgivable dating faux paux, when you claim to prefer the artfully-deconstructed syntax and vibrant imagery of Ted Hughes’ poetry, over the interminable adolescent outpourings of Plath; thereby delaying, by several months, your arrival at…

THIRD BASE: In a scene reminiscent of the ending of An Officer and a Gentleman, homemade friendship bracelets are exchanged before sparse crowds at the Belle & Sebastian fans convention. Later, in a game of ‘Truth or Dare’ you and your partner pick ‘dare’ and are sent to a well-lit closet with instructions to list the entire Sarah Records back catalogue in chronological order.

HOME RUN:. With the asexual tension stretched almost to breaking point, the relationship reaches it long awaited climax - the pair of you engaging in consensual hand-holding, while listening to the first Beat Happening album. In the aftermath you reaffirm your commitment to each other by pooling your hay fever medication.

...wonderful, wildly amusing post from backwards7!

..but, yes, and instantly recognisable. I knew it was as soon as it started.
The rest of us are so not worthy!

I am sure there are loads of TUM lovers out there - defend your genre!

*removes Little Feat and slips on another Richard Thompson CD*

Sorry, its been a long day. Have I missed something?

Maybe it takes a bit of deciphering but there's definitely some saucy stuff bubbling around Bjork.

This effort from the forgotten 80s Cherry Red residents must be top contender for the indie Je T'aime...with a touch of Benny Hill...

Kiss, lick, stroke, flick
Quiver, quiver, shake and shiver, baby, wow
Un-clasp, flop, gasp
Sopping, sopping, there's no stopping now

Blonde, brunette, or redhead
Black, yellow or white
They’re all the same
In the mating game
But I can' t complain now

Squeeze, suck, pinch, pluck
Wobble, wobble, grab and gobble, darling, moan
Un-zip, ooze, drip
Dippy, dippy, wet and slippy, groan

Blonde, brunette, or redhead
Black, yellow or white
They kiss the same
In the mating game
But I can' t complain now

Bend, peel ,slap, squeal
Doggie, doggie, shudder, on your bended knees
Thrust, pump, spurt, slump
Ciggy, ciggy, puff, puff, cough and wheeze

Blonde, brunette, or redhead
Black, yellow or white
They taste the same
In the mating game
But I can' t complain now

PJ Harvey's been mentioned. Nick Cave (bordeline indie?) - he did 'No Pussy Blues' with Grinderman, well it's frank, but not a happy song! The Smiths did do a song called Handsome Devil with the words 'Let me get my hands on your mammary glands'. Pulp's been mentioned. There's less of it about now it's true. I remember a band called The Heart Throbs (formed by sisters of late Pete De Freitas of Echo and the Bunnymen) who made an album called Cleopatra Grip - the title refers the vagina I believe. I think it's the women who aren't so shy in fact.

If that was a proper non-indie lyric, it'd be "Let me get my mitts..."

I thangyew.

Think of: sex/nudity on TV; internet porn; openness in advertising; frankness in magazines; how liberal teenage girls/boys seem to be... Or am I an old out-of-touch fuddy-duddy?

"An out of touch fuck buddy?" I thought...

Indie? Getting it? Wanting it? http://www.lyricstime.com/elastica-vaseline-lyrics.html

No sex in indie - not true, look at these lyrics from James on the track "Laid".

"This bed is on fire
With passionate love
The neighbours complain about the noises above
But she only comes when she's on top"

Time for a cold shower Mr. Booth.

Damon from Blur in another sex in an indie song shocker....

"She'll suck your thumb.... she'll make you come"

from Beetlebum.

I think the prudishness of indie has something to do with its origin in the student union bars of the mid-1980s, when the personal was seen as the political, and heterosexual activity was only grudgingly admitted as something which any right (or rather left) thinking woman would want to be associated with, involving - as it did - an act of betrayal, sleeping with "the enemy" or "patriarchy".

For a fuller flavour of this, I recommend the chapter in John O'Farrell's "Things Can Only Get Better" where student John sleeps chastely all night beside a girl he fancies, only to be kicked out in the morning for making a pass at her. There may have been worse times and places for getting laid - post-civil war England under the puritans, for example or China during the Cultural Revolution - but I doubt we shall see them again during our lifetime.

One only has to look at the indie icons of that era - Tracey Thorn or Sugarcubes-era Bjork - to get the picture. The generation before us had free love (apparently) and the generation after us were all supposed to be off their tits on Class A's. We were caught in the middle, supposedly too busy getting rid of Thatcher to be interested in getting jiggy.

Whatever happened to variety being the spice of life and all that? I'm sick of people saying "pop music should be this, pop music should be that". Why can't it be a bit of everything? So some pop music's sexy, some is speccy and some is ponderous - so what? Not everything has to be about sex, does it? If we're going to reduce everything to our most basic genetic programming, we might just as well write songs about needing a drink of water or taking a dump.
I mean, you might just as well ask: Where's a Grace Jones lyric that sums up paranoia and alienation as well as Creep? It's exactly the same sort of spuriously selective argument, just from the opposite angle.

He may be unmentionable. But..

Reeling around the fountain he fell out of bed twice, and he knows that some girls are bigger than others.

Age of Chance cover of Kiss.

Lord Bragg of Hampshire (funny how living in the country has made him such a reactionary) also sang of tights around her ankles and making love to her memory with his own hands..

Mr Momus was all filth and perversion on ice and in the surgery.

Do Primal Scream not count as Indie. And the JAMC?

And of course, the Damned. Just for David "King of Romance", there's a love song.

Not as good as Smash Hits.

...just in a defiantly 'unsexy' way. And that's kind of the point really, isn't it? Middle class white boys trying to be sexy is all a bit pathetic, really.

but as has been mentioned, Pulp, plus Arctic Monkeys, Art Brut, Hefner,etc...s'all about sex...

"Two lumps please, you're the bees' knees"
"A boy in the bush is worth two in the hand, I think I can help you get through your exams"
"I'm more impressionable when my ce-ment is wet"
"We should have each other with cream, then curl up by the fire and get off for a while"
"I've got a spacehopper, baby but it's strictly one seater, you've got to hold on baby to my special feature"

Warning: significant generalisations follow:

1. Without wanting to sound like a play on words, Indie might just be the most conservative sub-culture (for want of a better term) going. Break out of the party line, and your credentials will be shot for all time. Rather than expanding horizons into other areas, your indie-nazis will be far more impressed with someone whose dug up an obscure poem that might once have been read by Ian Curtis (and of course try to claim they new about it first) than actually examining any other forms of music/film/books etc. It must be dreadfully hard work to keep up.

2. Indie fans take themselves SOOOOO seriously. To even suggest that they might look like they are possibly trying to get someone into bed is to blow the image (regardless of how attracted they might be to the man/woman/pet rock involved). Of course analysing such behaviour is acceptable, but to cross the line of Correctness to wanting a shag is to destroy the facade of seriousness. "I thought he was serious and credible, but it was just a way of getting someone into bed."

Unfair? Perhaps. Although I do remember Bernard Sumner once described the serious, hard-core Joy Division fans as "pious wankers".

Were Pop Will Eat Itself indie or just grebo? John Peel wouldn't play it.

The saucy lyrics mentioned at the top of this thread were written during more restrictive times? Innuendo hit the spot for those who were looking for a bit of sauce, and other outlets such as Bamforth postcards sated the public appetite for sexy talk.
Nudge nudge, wink wink.
Indie kids don't need that allusion as sex and porn are now commonplace?

Mondays...At the baggier end of indie but some of Ryder's lyrics were pure filth...

From Hallelujah...." I'm Shaun William Ryder who'll lie down beside ya and fill you full of junk..." not the brown kind either...

From Loose Fit "Son I'm forty, I only went with you mother coz she's dirty..."

Plenty more too...Kuff Dam (spell it backwards), Bob's Yer Uncle etc

Also - Suede's Animal Nitrate - one of the better allusions to homosexual activity by a bisexual who's never had a homosexual experience!

Not indie, per se, but Andy Partridge of XTC has always been keen on writing about procreational matters. "Pink Thing" is all about pink things, and "The Wheel and the Maypole" has references to "ploughs" and "furrows" and "rabbits and aunt Sally's head". Too obtuse? Try "Wonder Annual" for size:

Hustle, fustle.
Push shove bustle.
So goes the dance of the milling mass.
Work, rent, mortgage.
Magic shortage.
Why queue for milk from their golden ass.

Open up your Wonder Annual.
Turn on the leaves of your private book.
Open up your Wonder Annual
and, if I may, can I lay and look?
At the gold and the silver
that will fly from your hands.

Hands of Ripper pours paint stripper.
Toasting the worms in their shallow graves
Draw your blinds down.
Sketch an unfrown.
Show me the door through which all are saved.

Open up your Wonder Annual.
Turn on the leaves of your private book.
Open up your Wonder Annual
and, if I may, can I lay and look?
At the shells full of pearl
that will float from your gate.
And if lust equals knowledge
then I side with the snake.

Is there a more perverted, salacious and lascivious lyric than Howard Devoto's "I will drug you and fuck you on the permafrost" from Permafrost by Magazine. I would mention Orgasm Addict by the Buzzcocks, except that's punk.

(I'd also mention So What by the Anti Nowhere League, but I don't want to completely ruin my credibility).

that indie has grown more prudish where once it was only a particular, right-on, fey branch of the genre that avoided the subject, it's now the boys generally that are in mainstream bands (who are referred to as indie for want of a better name), but then indie isn't what it was anyway.

Prog was always pretty prudish too. I think the comment way up above here (apologies to whoever it was by, but I can't find it now) was onto something when they said that the sexual content of music is closely related to its danceability. You don't exactly get on down, grind your behind and shake your booty to Foxtrot or Fragile, do you, so you don't get any smutty lyrics.

...have sex down to a tee.

1) The Vapors - 'Turning Japanese'' (an ode to the faces you pull when having a 'soapy tub tug'')

2) Sex Pistols (a euphemistic term for the male genitalia)

3) The Buzzcocks (a referance to the sensation a buses vibrations has on your 'part'')

4) Sex Pistols - 'Spunk'' (Live Album) (self explanatory)

5) Malcolm McClaren and Vivienne Westwood's Kings Road fashion boutique - 'SEX'' (the act of inserting your penis into...actually, I'm sure you've been aquainted)

6) Discharge (see 'Spunk'')

There's about a million more...but we'll leave it there for now.

All music is not about sex, just as it is not all about cars.I accuse you and your ilk David Hepworth of cunningly hoodwinking old timewasters like myself into filling up your blogspace. Where are all these fey people anyway?? Most people who attend concerts just look like ordinary people to me. You go to a hip hop show for instance and its not all Original Gangsters and Ho baiting B-Boys, Nooooooo!!! Its the usual assortment of bus conductors, sweater knitting grannies and punk baiting Teds.
We're not daft, are Joe Public you know.

But could it be that both indie & prog were/are white. middle class-dominated forms and therefore a little more buttoned-up?

...prog isn't really an exclusively middle class thing; that's a media misconception- there were punk musicians that had middle class backgrounds too (Joe Strummer, for one!). I think a fair amount of famed rock bands came from middle class backgrounds, not just indie or prog- their class backgrounds has never been something that bothered me but it does matter for some members of the music press.

Anyway, most of the prog musicians save Genesis had already done the blues/R & B circuit for a fair few years beforehand, a fair few went through psychedelia too.

Come to think of it, I can't think of that many psychedelic tunes that are about sex either- most of those aren't about much in particular, usually it's drug-induced waffle (which I have to say I find entertaining). There were many prog tunes about sexual matters but they tended to be a bit daft and light-hearted. Can't think of too many Yes tracks that dealt with this topic though, in fairness...

Having thought ever so long and ever so hard on this I would agree with Mr Hepworth's thrust. (ahem) Not particularly aurally stimulated by Indie as a genre it had to be pointed out to me a while ago that the cover shot on Pulp's 'This is Hardcore' is ever so rude. Really. Have a look. It's either a photo of a young lady posing with boyfriend er... just out of shot, as it were, and heaviy engaged in an act not involving trousers. Or she's miming the act of fellatio very convincingly. Top marks Mr Cocker.

... sure could sing an innuendo or two. Check out her visit to the dentist with "LONG JOHN BLUES" from DJ Bob's Theme Time Radio Hour Show DOCTORS show right here:

http://rapidshare.com/files/93627591/2.19_TTR_Doctors_Joint_20-2-2008.mp...

And I won't even get into her talk about his BIG LONG SLIDIN' THING on an earlier show, now available here:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Theme-Time-Radio-Hour-Dylan/dp/tracks/B00149ND8C...

Lordy. Lordy....

A SURLIER question would be: why do people always want Indie to be something it's not? Do Jazz Fans endlessly wring their hands about how Jazz is dying and boring because it doesn't feature enough rickenbacker guitars? Do Hells Angels spend hours in the pub debating whether the lack of hair clips means Heavy Metal is irredeemably stuck in adolescence? Do people going to massive corporate Urban Music festivals say "Yeah, it was OK, but the complete lack of pale bookish types singing wanly about their cats spoilt the weekend for me".

Part of the joy of yr Old Skool Indie is that it IS about different things, and (in theory at least) DOESN'T have to be about EXACTLY the same topics of every bloody other song ever written. It's roots are in Punk, and there are similarly very few songs about The Making Of Love in THAT genre.

And as for the person near the top saying you cannot dance to Indie Music. Sir or Madam! I beg to differ!

She's always banging on about shagging, both with and without Sugarcubes.

If I wasn't starving, I'd offer some examples...