The Paul McCartney and Wings song banned by the BBC
The material put out by Paul McCartney and The Beatles doesn’t come close to the level of explicit and controversial content we’ve now become accustomed to on the airwaves. The Beatles’ contemporaries, The Velvet Underground, were streets ahead in terms of blushing the faces of parents. All the same, The Beatles were subject to particularly stringent censorship through the 1960s and in the ensuing solo careers because of their towering influence on so many young plastic minds.
Indeed, next to The Stooges or Eminem, McCartney’s oeuvre is tantamount to child’s play. However, behind the legendary songwriter’s innocent cherub visage is a cheeky mind capable of questionable lyrics — at least in the eyes of the BBC.
Famously, The Beatles were no stranger to red tape during the hippie explosion, especially after McCartney admitted on national television that he had dabbled with LSD and the band’s LPs were also banned for lewd imagery. Naturally, cautious parents of Beatlemaniacs became worried their offspring would run amok, dropping acid and losing virginities to unsavoury characters.
In total, The Beatles had six of their latter career songs banned by the BBC, mainly for assumed references to drugs and sex, including ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’, ‘A Day In The Life’ and ‘I Am The Walrus’. When the band split up in 1970, the bawdiness didn’t stop there, much to the BBC’s irritation.
After embarking on his solo career, McCartney formed a new band with his beloved wife, Linda, Denny Seiwell and Denny Laine. The band’s third single, ‘Hi, Hi, Hi’, released in 1972, was written by the smitten McCartney couple. The popular hit was a jubilant ode to happiness; the shrewd executives in charge of the BBC’s restless red tape reel quickly caught on that the song alluded to drug use and sex – a double no!
“A lot of people were getting high, so to me, it was just like a fantasy song, sort of saying, ‘Hey girl, come on, let’s get high,'” McCartney said of the song in a 2018 interview with GQ. “It was just about the times. It’s very much a period piece, but it goes down well.”
In an interview with Mojo magazine in 2010, McCartney revealed he was slightly surprised that the song had encountered the wrath of the red tape reel. “Look at Bob Dylan, ‘everybody must get stoned.’ [lyric from ‘Rainy Day Women #12 & 35’] It was like, ‘Ooh, does he mean you get high? Or does he mean getting drunk? So there was that ambiguity, and I assumed the same would apply to me.”
According to McCartney, the BBC misheard some of the lyrics, which would have made the song seem even more perverse. Namely, “get you ready for my polygon” was apparently misheard as “get you ready for my body gun”.
“The BBC got some of the words wrong,” McCartney once added via Keith Badman’s The Beatles: Off the Record. “But I suppose it is a bit of a dirty song if sex is dirty and naughty. I was in a sensuous mood in Spain when I wrote it.”
After the backlash, McCartney dropped ‘Hi, Hi, Hi’ from his live setlists from 1976 but brought it back as a regular feature in 2013. Although, he tweaks the lyrics a little these days, singing, “Let’s get hi… on life!”
Watch Paul McCartney and Wings perform ‘Hi, Hi, Hi’ below.
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