Top five creepiest car songs of all time

There’s plenty of sexual innuendo lightly disguised in the lyrics of ‘car’ songs, especially in some of the more popular tunes from the 1970 and 80s. Back in the day these tracks might have been dismissed as a bit of fun. But with the benefit of hindsight, we now reckon these five songs are downright creepy, and maybe just a little bit wrong.

This isn’t the song about a leisurely Sunday drive you might think it is. In fact, the drum beat intro to Foghat’s 1975 classic ‘Slow Ride’ is said to mimic the bang of a headboard, and not the beat of a hotted-up engine. When interviewed by Loudersound in 2016 Foghat drummer Roger Earl said “Of course Slow Ride is about sex. All rock ‘n’ roll songs are about sex, aren’t they?” Perhaps they are, and with lyrics like “the rhythm is right” and “we can roll all night” you can see how Slow Ride might be confused for a car song. Sorry folks, it’s just eight minutes and fourteen seconds of making sweet, sweet love.

If “he’s gonna slide in head first” and “I wanna make your motor run” aren’t thinly veiled sexual innuendo then Meatloaf’s reprise of “barely 17 and barely dressed” certainly is. Like most of the songs in our Top Five Creepiest Car Songs, Meatloaf’s 1978 ‘Paradise By The Dashboard Light’ goes into explicit detail about making love in the backseat. It was a popular theme in the 1970s and 80s, and one that songwriter Jim Steinman says made it the “ultimate car-sex song”. To him, perhaps it was, but the tune managed just 39th place in the US Billboard charts, and didn’t rate a mention in Oz.

The title of Hot Chocolate’s 1976 funk-disco tune says it all; and in case it doesn’t, the voyeuristic line “there’s people ev’rywhere, people who like to stare” sure does. The song describes taking a girl for a drive far from the “bright city lights” to a moonlit country paddock where “heaven” resides in the driver’s backseat. It’s not as creepy as some of the other titles in our top-five – I mean at least Hot Chocolate is somewhat polite about it. But in 2020 the idea of driving a girl you’ve just met to a remote location for sex is reason enough to make your skin crawl a bit.

Ted Mulry spends half of his 1975 hit ‘Jump In My Car’ trying to get a girl in his car, but when he doesn’t get his way with the hitch-hiking girl, he kicks her out again. It was a theme that seemed to resonate with Australian listeners who, umm, drove the song to the number-one place on the ARIA charts for six whole weeks. But dig deeper into the song lyrics and you’ll find lines that include “I’ll get her yet” and “it costs nothing to try” the catchcries of a stalker if ever we heard them. Hindsight is always 20:20, especially in 2020, and we reckon ‘Jump In My Car’ deserves its place at number two on our ‘creepy’ list.

“Hey you! Get into my car!” The opening line of Billy Ocean’s 1988 is a little confronting in politically-correct 2020. It’s the sort of line that would have you reaching for your iPhone and dialling 000 if it was heard in any inner-city street today, but in 1988 it was enough to take the light and catchy pop tune to number one on the ARIA charts (for five weeks). “Touch my bumper, let’s make a deal” and “like a road runner coming after you…” song writers Billy Ocean and ‘Mutt’ Lange really had the touch of stalker about them, didn’t they?

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