What was the first song to be banned by the BBC?
The British Broadcasting Company has long been respected for its high standards in reporting and production. A British insitution and funded by the state, the BBC has a duty to uphold to the citizens of the country to provide accurate, impartial and entertaining content at all time.
For the most part, the BBC has delivered on this expectation, but perhaps where it has often let itself down is when art seems, to them, to have acrossed some kind of moral line. The company is well known for its constant banning of films and music in its attempt to preserve the integirty or innoncence of the country.
Music has always been subjective, no matter which generation is listening. Even though many artists are considered objectively good by most people, there will always be people who either take offence to what someone is saying or throw their own two cents in about how an artist needs to change their style to something that better suits them. Everyone’s entitled to those viewpoints, but a few radio executives at the BBC will happily ban something if they have a stick up their ass.
Although artists might not have meant any harm when making their classics, a certain word or innuendo here and there was enough for most people overseeing radio to refuse to play it. As far as they were concerned, there was a certain level of class, and no one should have been subject to such filth on their radio stations.
So, which song was the first to be banned by the BBC?
While many claim to see most of the bans starting to run rampant once rock and roll took over, this is not a plague that artists like Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry inflicted on the world. This had been going on for decades, and even Cole Porter wasn’t safe when he came out with ‘Love For Sale’.
Debuting in 1930, Porter became the first person to be banned by the BBC for what they considered to be graphic content on the song. Thinking that the man behind some of the most celebrated standards of all time is a dangerous presence is laughable enough, but it’s easy to see where they were coming from at the time.
Given that most crooners were known for singing heartbreaking ballads, ‘Love for Sale’ ended up going into dangerous territory when Porter sang about a prostitute. Looking at the lyrics, there is at least a little bit of a point here, with the artist singing about looking for love that is “unsoiled”, which probably implies that the prostitute in question might not even be of age yet.
Although the lyrics may have been written by someone a little too forward about his sexual preferences, the tone of the song is completely different. Compared to other tracks that revel in sexual pleasure, this is the kind of piece that feels like it could have been played for one’s grandmother without batting an eye. It may have been a slap on the wrist for Porter, but it would be far from the last time hits would see bans from the BBC.
Why did the BBC ban songs? With the advent of rock and roll right around the corner, the genre quickly became known as everything that the proper radio executives despised. Since many tracks contained lude references to sex, the biggest artists in the world ended up getting banned for something either playfully suggestive like Paul McCartney’s ‘Hi Hi Hi’ to works that may have been a little too on-the-nose like ‘Relax’ by Frankie Goes to Hollywood.
It’s not just sex that got everyone riled up. Songs that openly promoted drug abuse also weren’t off the table, with The Beatles getting banned because of ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’ spelling out LSD. Tracks promoting crime were also highly questionable, with Eric Clapton’s ‘I Shot the Sheriff’ pulled from the airwaves for allegedly promoting the killing of cops.
Although artists rarely go into a recording session looking to make a piece that promotes violence or causes one to become attracted to sins of the flesh, banning them was both the best and worst thing the BBC could have done. Congratulations, you forbade fans from listening to it, and at the same time, you gave every listener an even greater desire to track the song down and hear why it got banned in the first place.
It’s impossible to get someone not to listen to something they like, and starting with Cole Porter, a song being banned could have been considered another form of advertising.
