Outrage and obscenity: the best song the BBC ever banned
While less remembered now, for decades, the BBC forever wavered on a tightrope of reflecting the youth’s pop trends while fulfilling the role of moral guardian.
Such a cultural tug of war played out most starkly on the radio. As far back as the 1930s, the BBC’s Dance Music Policy Committee stepped up to the task of filtering the American music-hall and blues’ wry penchant for innuendo and smutty lyrical winks away from good, honourable UK households.
As the Second World War was heating up and national patriotism was to be upheld, one directive in 1942 instructed: “We have recently adopted a policy of excluding sickly sentimentality which, particularly when sung by certain vocalists, can become nauseating and not at all in keeping with what we feel to be the need of the public in this country in the fourth year of war”.
The DMPC persisted on with their noble crusade for years, warding off George Formby’s seaside bawdiness, overzealous religious offense at Frankie Laine’s supposed “sentimental mockery of Christian prayer” on his ‘Answer Me’, and Eddie Calvert’s theme to 1995’s The Man with the Golden Arm given a black mark due to the film’s allusion to drugs, despite being an instrumental.
Yet, such censors became laughably fusty in the countercultural age, the DMPC largely irrelevant by the 1970s, with moral decisions left to individual producers. This could still play out in hilarious fashion, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark’s anti-war synthpop classic ‘Enola Gay’ blocked from any airing during the BBC’s children’s programming due to the word “gay” in its title, and infamously, DJ Mike Reid steadfastly refusing to play Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s scarcely veiled homoerotic pop hit ‘Relax’ on his Radio 1 show.
The late 1980s and early 1990s would see a surge in song bludgeons, Auntie Beeb battling two moral fronts. One was the explosion in acid house. After the shock horror of Steve Wright decked in a smiley face tee introducing D Mob’s ‘We Call It Acieed’ amid a tabloid paranoia around the free rave movement, the dance number quickly found itself withdrawn from internal playlists. While not outright banned, the BBC did receive a slap on the wrist from the Broadcasting Standards Council for showing The Shamen’s ‘Ebeneezer Goode’ on the flagship Top of the Pops, taking umbrage with the “Eezer Goode! Eezer Goode!” refrain sounding awfully similar to a casual praise of MDMA pills.
Then there was the Gulf War. After the Iraqi forces invaded Kuwait and Operation Desert Shield was brewing in 1990, the BBC, in cahoots with fellow public-service broadcaster Channel 4, banned a total of 67 songs from the airwaves and TV screens. Anxiously trying to avoid any hit that would cause unintended offence, everything from Cher’s ‘Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)’, Bruce Springsteen’s ‘I’m on Fire’, and Pat Benatar’s ‘Love Is a Battlefield’ was scrubbed from playlists during the conflict.
Stone cold classics would occasionally fall foul of the BBC’s puritans. Dropped amid the height of 1967’s Summer of Love, DJ Kenny Everett was prevented from spinning The Beatles’ celestial ‘A Day in the Life’ pop gem after the BBC Light Programme’s preview of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band balked at the implicit drug references to “I’d love to turn you on” and “found my way upstairs and had a smoke / somebody spoke and I went into a dream”. “
We have listened to this song over and over again, and we have decided that it appears to go just a little too far, and could encourage a permissive attitude to drug-taking,” a BBC spokesman stated.
They weren’t wrong. Having already rubbed the authorities the wrong way, a paid, two-page ad in The Times lambasting the recent ban on marijuana, as well as Paul McCartney’s LSD confession to ITN, garnered an extra scrutiny on the Fab Four’s material that they did little to assuage. While the offending lines were never explicit in praising cannabis, McCartney and John Lennon knew that feathers would be ruffled.
As was semi-expected, the BBC banned The Beatles’ greatest song before lifting the suspension some years later.
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