‘Too Drunk’: The Dead Kennedys single that derailed ‘Top of the Pops’
A staple of the mainstream music industry in Britain, and a beloved institution beamed into virtually every living room in the country, it is no surprise that Top of the Pops quickly earned the ire of the punk generation when the scene exploded in London during the mid-1970s.
Almost immediately, Top of the Pops began to represent the rift between this bold new generation of musical misfits and the levers of the musical establishment. Punk acts were shunned from the weekly music show, with the Sex Pistols and their anti-jubilee number-two hit ‘God Save The Queen’ not allowed to be performed or even shown on the programme. What’s more, groups like The Clash outright refused to engage with the show in any way, viewing any participation as akin to ‘selling out’.
That being said, Top of the Pops did provide every self-respecting punk rock outfit with a golden opportunity. After all, punk has always been a relatively underground, niche scene, whereas TOTP was one of the most-watched programmes in the British Isles; it provided groups with a certain opportunity to make their mark and exercise the prevailing weapon in the scene’s arsenal: shock.
Few groups were as well equipped in that shock factor as the San Francisco outfit Dead Kennedys – even their band name itself was enough to outrage the conservative population of their native US.
Over the course of their tenure, the Jello Biafra-fronted outfit attracted a wealth of controversy, using each and every opportunity to draw widespread attention to the political activism of their music. Perhaps one of their greatest stunts, though, involved the band shaking things up at the Top of the Pops studio.
Despite their cult popularity, Dead Kennedys rarely troubled the mainstream pop charts. Back in 1981, though, the band managed to top the newly established indie chart with their blistering single ‘Too Drunk To Fuck’. Either by some punk miracle or a particularly weak week in the pop charts, that single also managed to break into the top 40, settling at 36, which caused the BBC no end of worry.
At that time, only the top 30 was shown on TOTP – it was only in 1984 that it expanded to the top 40 – but the rising nature of ‘Too Drunk To Fuck’ was enough to cause a considerable degree of panic that a BBC presenter would have to reference a band called Dead Kennedys and a song with ‘Fuck’ in the title. In fact, the song earned the punk outfit the honour of having the first-ever top 40 hit with that particular expletive in its title.
Unsurprisingly, the BBC quickly banned the song, both in an effort to prevent it from rising up the charts any further and to avoid the nightmarish scenario of having the song mentioned on Top of the Pops. During his Radio One chart run-downs, veteran radio presenter Tony Blackburn refused to engage with the song, merely calling it “Too Drunk” and calling the band “The Dead Kennedys”.
In the end, the single didn’t rise into the top 30, but – potentially without even knowing it – Dead Kennedys did enough to cause a moral panic within the BBC back in 1981, showing just how powerful the shock tactics of the punk age still were at that time.
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