Undertones – "Teenage Kicks" (1978)

I'm gonna call her on the telephone

Have her over ’cause I’m all alone

I need excitement – oh, I need it bad!

In the last 2 or 3 lines, I told you about a controversial Italian Supreme Court decision in a sexual assault case.

The defendant had admitted having sex with the alleged victim but denied having forced himself on her.  The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn his conviction was based in part on the fact that the woman who claimed she had been assaulted had been wearing tight blue jeans at the time.  

Why did that matter?  “It is a fact of common experience that it is nearly impossible to slip off tight jeans even partly without the active collaboration of the person who is wearing them,” the court said, concluding that the man might have been telling the truth when he said the sex was consensual.

Alessandra Mussolini and her grandfather

Female members of the Italian Parliament demonstrated against the decision clad in blue jeans.  The leader of that protest was Alessandra Mussolini, a member of the Chamber of Deputies who also happened to be the granddaughter of the infamous fascist dictator Benito Mussolini.

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Il Duce is not Signora Mussolini’s only well-known relative.  She is also the niece of the legendary Italian actress, Sophia Loren, who helped her get a start in the movies when she was just a teenager.  

When she was 19, Mussolini recorded an album of romantic songs titled Amore.  For some reason, that album was only released in Japan. 

The following year, she graced the pages of the Italian and German editions of Playboy:

“Every actress does topless and stuff like this,” she later told an interviewer.  “You have to.”

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Neither Mussolini’s ancestry nor her Playboy appearances hampered her when she decided to go into politics.  (We’re talking Italy, after all, so being in Playboy probably helped her.) 

When she was just 29 years old, Mussolini was elected to the Chamber of Deputies – which is the Italian equivalent of the U.S. House of Representatives. 

After serving several terms as a deputy, Mussolini successfully ran for a seat in the Italian Senate.  Later she was elected to the European Parliament.

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Mussolini broke with tradition by proposing to her future husband – police official Mauro Floriani – rather than waiting for him to get down on bended knee and pop the question.

Mussolini and Floriani on their wedding day

In 2013, Floriani was one of some 50 men – including celebrities, priests, journalists and politicians – who were accused of paying two teenaged girls for sexual services. 

The two girls were recruited by a pimp via an internet chatroom and set up in a basement flat where they earned up to 600 euros per day.  One of the teenagers told police that she had turned to prostitution because she wanted to be able to afford cigarettes, designer handbags, and “lots of clothes.”

Wiretaps revealed that Floriani was one of the men who contacted the girls most often.  He confessed that he had visited them, but said he had no idea that they were underage.

Floriani eventually pled guilty to soliciting the services of an underage prostitute, and received a one-year suspended sentence.

That might sound like a slap on the wrist, but remember that he had to face the wrath of his wife – who had called for chemical castration of pedophiles when she was a member of the Italian Parliament.  

I wonder if she thought about administering the more traditional form of that treatment to her errant hubby.

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“Teenage Kicks” – which was released in 1978 by the Northern Irish punk band, the Undertones – was supposedly the all-time favorite record of legendary BBC Radio 1 DJ John Peel.  (The opening line of that song is carved on Peel’s tombstone.)

“Teenage Kicks” is yet another record I had heard on Steve Lorber’s “Mystic Eyes” radio show and nowhere else – until I recently heard a cover of it by Ash, another Northern Irish band.

Click here to listen to the original Undertones recording of “Teenage Kicks.”

Click here to buy it from Amazon.