Quincy Jones came up with the song named after the Japanese arthouse porn film that gave me one of my most memorably horrible experiences in a cinema.

I’m not crazy about this song by Quincy Jones, though I do like the funky bit towards the end when it starts to sound a bit like Reasons To Be Cheerful by Ian Dury.

That’s probably because it’s written by our very own Chaz Jankel of The Blockheads – something I never knew ’til now.

The main reason I’ve posted is because of the time I went to the film after which it is titled. It’s not a happy memory.

Time Out, which was my cinema-going bible back in the late Seventies, had raved and raved about a new Japanese film called Ai No Corrida. It was an arthouse classic, they said. It was “erotic” too, they said, by which they meant it had real sex, which was an exciting thing in the days before porn had been legalised.

The key takeaway was that it was OK to see this porn because it was arty and foreign, so you wouldn’t even feel guilty. could even tell your friends, and pretend you’d gone for the cinematography. Or something.
So my girlfriend and I duly went along to the Screen-on-the-Hill in Belsize Park.

There were only a handful of other people in the cinema so we sat in the middle, far from anyone else, and began to watch.

It was slow and disappointingly dull and my main memory is of (look away now if you’re of a sensitive disposition) a young woman thoughtfully taking an older man’s tiny penis – like a little finger, as I recall – and putting it in her mouth with all the enthusiasm of someone tasting an interesting new vegetable. It was not arousing. At least not for us.

About half an hour into the film, there was a slight commotion and we became aware that someone had come into the cinema late and, despite the acres of empty seats, was now sitting in the one directly behind my girlfriend.

Moments later there was the rustling of a plastic bag, soon followed by the ‘Pfft’ of a can of beer being opened. I glanced over my shoulder to see a dishevelled-looking man in a grubby coat putting it to his lips and tried to go back to the film.

A few minutes after that, trying to ignore his slurping, I became aware of our seats beginning to rock gently back and forth. “Is that you?” asked my girlfriend. It wasn’t. I turned towards her and saw that a hand was gripping the back of her seat, the fingers almost intertwined with her hair, and I began to hear heavy breathing and a kind of grunting sound.

I glanced behind me again and, to my utter horror… well, you know what he was doing.

We gathered our things, we bolted from the cinema, I complained to the manager that they should not be letting tramps off the street into a dirty movie halfway through – I may have used the word “wanker” in its literal sense – and demanded a refund, which I got.

And that’s why I’ve never seen Ai No Corrida – not all of it, anyway.
But I have heard the song.