The theory is that sex sells. And sex sells music.

The connections between music and sexuality are long-standing, ‘rock’n’roll’ itself being a slang term for sex, and there are many ways in which artists have explored sex and love through the medium of sound. Some of the records discussed in this book are experiments in expressing sexual desire through musical forms, mixing musical and sexual sounds. Others use sex purely as a marketing device or as ‘whimsical entertainment’ (sexualised images on LP covers, for example). Other records examine the politics of sexuality and/or offer a subversive take on the relationship between popular music and eroticism.

As an accessible form of entertainment, the LP was part of the ‘democratization’ of sexuality and erotica, something that was previously only available to the upper classes collecting erotic and pornographic materials on their many travels around the globe. Recorded music extended the reach of sexual content from literature, with books such as An ABZ of Love by Inge and Sten Hegeler (1963) or Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex (1972), into the audio-visual realm.

The ‘stirrings of the soul’, the animation of the spiritual and the emotional, is what ‘heavy conscious creation’ is about and the sexual aspect of this is significant and profound.

Canadian electroacoustic composer Robert Normandeau once claimed that ‘music, unlike other contemporary art forms, has hardly dealt with eroticism as a genre’. This book tries to fill in the gaps that this statement implies.

And the “two minutes and fifty-two seconds of squelching noises” that Johnny Rotten spoke about are here, sometimes literally, in musical form.

With contributions from David Kerekes and Jennifer Wallis.