There had been voyeuristic songs before, of course, but when it arrived a decade after Andy Williams’s chaste and breezy 1967 single Music To Watch Girls By, The Stranglers’ 1977 hit Peaches was something else again. Lecherous and horny, a boorish beach party’s worth of lust funnelled into four filthy minutes, the band’s second single wouldn’t be their last song to court controversy/draw accusations of sexism. On purely musical terms, however, Peaches was genius. A gutsy slab of punk and cod-reggae, it remains incredibly hooky.
Adopting a belt-and-braces approach, United Artists Records released it as a double A-side with Go Buddy Go. But, like the Sex Pistols’ God Save The Queen, Peaches soon fell foul of The BBC censor, which banned it on grounds of indecency. Perhaps it was the single’s cover art depiction of a peach in pink bikini briefs, or maybe it was the anatomical antics that had frontman Hugh Cornwell codifying the word ‘clitoris’ as ‘clitares’ as the song’s narrator ogled female sunbathers.
