Has the UK ever completely banned an album?
There’s no shortage of records that have been deemed controversial throughout the history of music, and the measures that governing bodies or those in a position of power have taken to quash their popularity or availability have ranged from lenient and justified to extreme.
While there may be concerns that someone’s art can cause harm to or corrupt the public, perhaps most prominently with punk rock, there have been plenty of times when the prohibition of art has gotten out of hand and led to ridiculous courses of action.
Whether it’s the subject matter of the songs, the artwork, or the actions committed by the performers off record, there’s always something that authorities will lean into as grounds for their consideration to ban something, but have the powers that be ever succeeded in banning an entire album from being available here in Blighty?
For an example of an attempt made by the British authorities to ban records, those signed to Crass Records had their albums seized by authorities in the 1980s under the Obscene Publications Act. Retailers such as HMV stopped stocking Crass’ anarcho-punk masterpiece Penis Envy, along with the similarly anti-authoritarian and wonderfully titled The Fucking Cunts Treat Us Like Pricks by Flux of Pink Indians, which not only had a sweary name but three crudely drawn phalluses on the cover. Thanks to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s crackdown on material likely to offend, it became difficult to find copies of these albums, but there was never any law prohibiting ownership of them in the UK.
Surprisingly, Scorpions’ controversial Virgin Killer, which depicts a nude ten-year-old girl on the album cover, was also never “banned”. While there have been issues with it since, with its Wikipedia article briefly being blocked by some internet service providers in the UK, it was never actually banned outright, and there was simply just an alternative cover issued for physical sales of the album.
So, has there ever been an album banned outright by the UK in any capacity? The short answer is no, but there are many mitigating factors as to why this has never happened, and why it likely never will.
Why has the UK never banned an entire album?
As much as one might hear a piece of music and pray that nobody else suffers the misfortune of having to hear it for themselves, it’s simply not feasible to prohibit the sale, broadcast and ownership of an entire album, essentially wiping its existence from history. Censorship is far easier to apply than a blanket ban, and although in all of the above cases, there were calls to erase these records from existence and make owning a copy a criminal offence, there was virtually no way in which that would be possible.
Yes, some record stores have previously succeeded in barring specific albums from sale, but that doesn’t mean the artists couldn’t sell them through other means, such as at shows. What’s more, there were never any impending legal implications that would land you in trouble for owning a copy of any of these offending albums, and nothing that was ever banned from sale has ever received a permanent ban from being sold.
The BBC have banned many songs from receiving airplay on any of their radio stations or television channels, but very rarely do they ban any of the contents of an entire album from being played. There have been a couple of occasions where the entire catalogue of an artist has been banned from being played on the BBC, such as a muzzle on the music of folk singer Ewan MacColl during World War II, on the grounds that he was a communist.
Similarly, Welsh rock act Lostprophets are never to be heard again on BBC outlets due to singer Ian Watkins’ conviction for child sex offences, but while this ban has remained in place since 2013, the contents of the band’s music aren’t considered to be obscene. So, while the sale of their records might be frowned upon by some, it’s entirely down to one’s own moral judgement as to whether they want to be seen distributing the works of one of the worst criminals in British history or indeed own it.
There are a lot of obstacles that get in the way of applying a blanket ban on records, and even if other countries have managed to do it, it’s because of tighter legal restrictions in those countries. However, if the British Board of Film Classification are able to prohibit the release of a motion picture, then surely it wouldn’t take much more to apply the same rules to a body of music.
