It really tickles me, it does - Quincy Jones having this discofunk hit with a cover of a Chas Jankel song named after the original Japanese title of a triple-X rated film of extreme erotica - known in the West as either In The Realm of the Senses or Empire of the Senses.
And there's everybody in the Top of the Pops studio dancing away completely oblivious!
Spoilers alert (should you wish to watch said film), this is the plot:
In 1936 Tokyo, Sada Abe is a former prostitute who now works as a maid in a hotel. The hotel's owner Kichizo Ishida molests her, and the two begin an intense affair that consists of sexual experiments and various self-indulgences. Ishida leaves his wife to pursue his affair with Sada. Sada becomes increasingly possessive and jealous of Ishida, and Ishida more eager to please her. Their mutual obsession escalates until Ishida finds that she is most excited by strangling him during lovemaking and he is killed in this fashion. Sada then severs his penis. While she is shown next to him naked, it is mentioned that she will walk around with his penis inside her for several days. Words written with blood can be read on his chest: "Sada Kichi the two of us forever."
It's a bit like if Earth Wind and Fire had done a boogie-down version of Story of the Eye.
Ai No Corrida actually translates as "Bullfight of Love"
Now here's a slice of Japanese audio erotica that's far more sonically compelling
With an animation to go with it too
The relationship between disco and pornography is pretty direct - "Love to Love You Baby" as sexMuzak, Patrick Cowley's Moogy sideline in gay porn soundtracks and the eroto-spiritual inspiration he drew from San Francisco's bath houses
“Patrick was all about sexually charged atmospheres, places where rituals could happen. It was about mythologizing, really dramatizing the experience”” - Jorge Socarras, musical collaborator.
“When Patrick wasn’t at the studio, he was at the bathhouses” - Maurice Tani, business associate
Disco often evokes a “future-love paradise” redolent of sci-fi films like Barbarella (with its rapture-inducing Excessive Machine) or Logan’s Run (with its Love Shop) or Woody Allen’s Sleeper (with its Orgasmotron)
