Britain's Most Dangerous Songs: Listen to the Banned

This programme contains some strong language.

Throughout the history of popular music, there've been fears

it could turn gullible young groovers into anarchic,

drug crazed sexual deviants.

The BBC has always taken this threat extremely seriously

and attempted to protect the nation's youth by preventing

the worst musical misdemeanours from infecting the airwaves.

# I'll always remember... #

The story of banned records is the story of the rise of the teenager

and the controversies surrounding youth culture

-over the last 75 years.

-# No future... #

This pop group are going to, you know, cause anarchy, they're going to bring down the Government.

It's also the story of the BBC's difficult struggle

with the thin line between moral responsibility and censorship.

The BBC Committee in those days is fascinating,

I would love to have been a fly on the wall of the BBC Committee.

And, ultimately, what it reveals is that there's

nothing quite like being banned to guarantee chart success.

Thank you, BBC, for banning that record and making it No.1.

# Huh!

# Ow! Ow! #

NEEDLE SCRATCHES

# Je t'aime... #

If there's one subject guaranteed to get Auntie's knickers in a twist,

it's a bit of "how's your father".

Any hint of suspicious moaning and groaning on a record

has generally given rise

to an immediate ban from the BBC Radio playlist.

This bout of musical foreplay

between Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin

was even denounced by the Vatican!

Back in 1956, this debut record by a 19-year-old Shirley Bassey

was banned for daring to actually mention the S-word.

# There's S for Scotch that's so direct

# And for straight and simple sex. #

And 30 years later,

George Michael still paid the price of a ban for daring to want our...

# Sex! #

But when it comes to songs and sex,

there is one repeat offender whose lewd lyrics

led to an entire file of transgressions.

Whether he was cleaning windows or playing his little ukulele,

this cheeky chappy from the North

fell foul of the BBC's Dance Music Policy Committee

on countless occasions.

In at No.1 on our list of Britain's Most Dangerous Songs

is George Formby with...

# Me little stick of Blackpool rock. #

-WOMAN:

-'Are you sitting comfortably?

'Then I'll begin.'

When the BBC began with Lord Reith

and the setting up of the organisation,

they very much took the moral high ground that it wasn't just there to entertain,

it was there to educate, it also had a moral purpose

in sort of shaping the nation.

The BBC realised that it had to have some sort of censorship

and so the Dance Music Policy Committee would consider songs

that were going to be heard over the air waves,

either live or on gramophone record,

and decide whether they were suitable for broadcast or not.

George Formby was one of the biggest performers of the 1930s

and his whole act was based on saucy innuendo.

He was doing it over and over and over again.

So he was certainly a repeat offender,

and a repeat offender...several times in one song.

# I'm leaning on the lamp post at the corner of the street

# In case a certain little lady comes by

# Oh, me

# Oh, my

# I hope the little lady comes by. #

There's a case for saying that George Formby

was Britain's first pop star, really,

he was...the Robbie Williams, maybe, of his day.

It became quintessentially English in its attitude to sex,

which is both fascinated and embarrassed by it, you know.

Growing up in Blackpool,

we were always fascinated by George Formby.

He was treated as a joke figure when I was growing up in the '70s,

but as years have gone by, people have respected him a lot more.

He's actually a brilliant musician,

when he plays, he's a really good player,

and the songs are really funny as well and clever.

# With my little ukulele in my hand

# Of course the people do not understand

# Some say, "Why don't you be a Scout?" #

Formby's clever double entendres proved a little too risque

for the BBC and his song With My Little Ukulele In My Hand

was the first to be withdrawn from the BBC playlist,

until he changed the title to My Ukulele.

APPLAUSE

Thank you. And now I'm going to sing a song

and they're going to make a film of it at the same time,

so if you see any flashing, don't take any notice, you see.

But he was soon at it again with My Little Stick of Blackpool Rock.

# One afternoon, the band conductor up on his stand

# Somehow lost his baton, it flew out of his hand

# So I jumped in his place and then conducted the band

# With me little stick of Blackpool rock. #

This time it wasn't just the title, but whole verses

that deeply offended the committee.

Blackpool Rock, we're being led inevitably to one phallic conclusion, aren't we?

Extraordinary to think... Perhaps he just thought after Ukulele, "Oh, sod it.

"I'll make the most explicit thing..." And, of course,

there's Blackpool in there and the seaside and the postcards.

And I guess at that point he's playing to his public as well.

# A girl while bathing come to me and shouted out, "Oh!"

# She said, "I think I'm drowning and you'll save me, I know"

# I said, "Well, if you're drowning do you mind letting go

# "Of me little stick of Blackpool rock?" #

George Formby always has a giggle in the voice

and, in a way, that's why he gets away with it,

because it's very tongue-in-cheek,

he's not being graphically pervy,

he's actually just, "Come on, it's a giggle."

Lord Reith of the BBC was brought in to this, the Director General,

and his view was, OK, George Formby does this sort of thing in the cinema

and people can pay and go and see him do these songs and that's fine,

but radio, as it was then, is for everyone

and is coming into everybody's homes

and therefore, you don't know who's going to listen to it

and so we can't have these songs on air.

# I had my photo taken once, it cost one and three

# I said when it was done, "Is that supposed to me?"

# "You probably mucked it up, the only thing I can see

# "Is me little stick of Blackpool rock." #

-MAN:

-'This is the National Programme from London.'

The BBC at that time was...

certainly saw itself as a moral guardian,

against what they called the "rhythms of the jungle"

or more unedifying aspects of culture.

I think what was going on there was almost censorship

of working class expression and popular music.

The two most popular film stars in England overall in the '30s

were George Formby and Gracie Fields.

But they came from North of the line, it was a Northern humour,

it was a music hall humour, it wasn't Southern variety.

It wasn't a comfortable night out in the West End,

which is where the BBC positioned itself.

Well, I guess, they thought if George Formby was singing the Latin names of plants, that'd be OK,

but he must be up to something, you know what these Northerner are like, always trying to get one over you.

It's a particularly interesting example of censorship in a way,

it's class, it's a form of entertainment

that was thought to be beyond the pale, from the point of view of middle class audiences,

and it's not in the consensus, it's too kind of subversive, the music hall.

They're as conflicted, I think, the establishment, about this issue, as they are about sex.

They're a very well-meaning group of people, I think,

who want to be liberal and progressive,

but at the same ,time something in them kind of baulks a bit

at Formby and his little stick of Blackpool rock.

# It may be sticky, but I never complain

# It's nice to have a nibble at it now and again. #

NEEDLE SCRATCHES

What to play and not to play when Britain's at war

has always been one of the toughest decisions for the BBC.

During the Gulf War of 1991

the BBC released an extraordinary list of songs

they feared could upset listeners.

These included anything which suggested bombs...

# My heart goes boom-bang-a-bang... #

-..nuclear weapons...

-# Atomic! #

-..Middle Eastern countries...

-# Walk like an Egyptian. #

..and in fact, any British battle in the last 150 years.

# Waterloo

# I was defeated, you won the war. #

There'll be something to get offended about in every pop record probably,

that's why it's good!

On the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939,

the Dance Music Policy Committee

felt the biggest threat to the nation's morale was.....crooners.

# Light a candle in the chapel... #

PHONE RINGS

This song by Ol' Blue Eyes, Frank Sinatra,

was banned for being "nauseatingly sentimental".

But the song that makes it onto our Most Dangerous list

is Bing Crosby with...

# I'll be home for Christmas. #

Bing Crosby was the first star of the microphone age.

I mean, it's said with Bing that...

he developed the art of intimate singing.

People were using megaphones before then,

you couldn't be really romantic with a megaphone.

The singers got a little bit more light and shade into their singing,

they were able to tell the story,

they didn't just have to hit the back wall,

and the crooner was born,

the singers that just had the suave, sophisticated, rich voices.

They could use airy tones, they could use the voice like a paint palette.

So there is Bing Crosby with the most beautiful voice.

# Christmas Eve... #

In I'll Be Home For Christmas,

Bing's dulcet tones tell the story of a soldier

writing to tell his family he'll be home for the holidays.

So, jingle those bells and nog those eggs.

# I'll be home... #

And then, just as he's nearing the end of the chorus,

Bing hits us where it hurts.

# If only in my dreams. #

With this song, I'll Be Home For Christmas,

he just over-eggs the melancholy.

Cos his voice does have that slight sadness to it,

but it just wasn't right. This is not the song that Britain's wants,

we want "We'll meet again, I don't know where, don't know when,

"but I know we'll meet again." We want positive songs.

You wouldn't think Bing Crosby was in any way subversive,

but at that moment, in that particular context,

he was thought to be subversive.

It's partly...England/Hollywood,

but I think particularly it was, you know, against the Americanisation of emotion.

I don't think the BBC liked that at all.

There's a very good example on the file here

that shows you exactly what the BBC

thought about slushy songs during wartime.

"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 the war."

# Would you like to swing on a star? #

I think it's interesting that the BBC took such a negative view of crooners,

because actually, there was - # You got me swinging on a star. #

We don't what sentimentality, we don't want sadness.

So I think it was partly that they were uncertain about these men crooning songs,

but I think it was also just contextualising it

to what was happening at that point in our country.

Over in the States, however, it was a very different story.

In 1943, I'll Be Home For Christmas

peaked at No.3 in the US Billboard charts.

And by the end of the war, Crosby topped a list of people

who'd actually done more for GI morale than anyone else,

ahead of President Roosevelt and General Eisenhower.

Our next song was originally written in pre-war Berlin by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht

for their dark musical play The Threepenny Opera,

but it went on to become part of the Great American Songbook.

Carving out a place in our dangerous chart

is Louis Armstrong's 1956 version of Mack The Knife.

# Oh, the shark has pretty teeth, dear... #

It's a fantastic piece of really evocative theatrical writing.

It was written to introduce the character of Macheath,

who is himself based on a highwayman from The Beggar's Opera of 1728.

So, huge amounts of culture in this

and was sung by a character on the left of the stage with a barrel organ

who introduces the idea of the catalogue of violent crimes that this individual is capable of.

What Brecht did was he brought together John Gay's Beggar's Opera and Jack the Ripper,

the Whitechapel Murders, and so, Macheath, Mack, Jack,

and so there's all this talk of knives and the backstreets of Whitechapel,

Jenny Towler getting hers and all the rest of it.

It was first translated, I think, in 1933, went to America and was a flop,

there was another translation in '54 which was a hit on Broadway.

And sitting in the audience for this off-Broadway show

was music producer George Avakian.

I tried to persuade musician after musician

to do an instrumental version of Mack The Knife,

all of whom rejected. "It's too simple.

"It's only eight bars over and over again with key changes."

I said, "Yeah, that's why you can do so much with it."

It never occurred to me to do it vocally,

because I thought, "Who's going to listen to words about blood flowing all over the place,

"people getting killed?"

But it was Turk Murphy who said to me, when I told him about this

and played him the original cast recording of the show,

"I'll do it if you want me to, but somebody else should do it,

"somebody who can do it better than me." And I said, "Who's that?"

That somebody was none other

than American jazz trumpeter and singer, Louis Armstrong.

# Start to spread...

Well, Armstrong came from a fantastically complicated

and difficult background himself. Very, very... I think his mother was a prostitute,

his grandmother was a prostitute, he came from a very violent background in New Orleans

and worked his way out of that through show business.

So the background of it wouldn't have been completely unfamiliar to him,

but I think the thing that would have really attracted him

was not just the fact that it was a hit, it's a really theatrical piece

and he was a very, very theatrical singer, brilliantly expressive,

could appear to play several parts,

great voices, great ways

of expressing different characters within songs.

It's just a drama, a fantastic drama.

# Oh, the shark has pretty teeth, dear... #

I can see how the melody and the feel of the song,

I think it's that that probably would have attracted him as a musician.

# Just a jack-knife has Macheath, dear

# And he keeps it out of sight. #

There's so many opportunities to scat all over that song,

the timings of it, the way it pulls and gives and...

So I think for him, just the jazz feel of it sat with him completely.

Armstrong's version entered the British charts in March, 1956,

but the pop transformation of Macheath, the cut-throat killer,

into the convivial sounding Old Mackie still proved perilous for the BBC.

They quickly banned all vocal versions of the song

unless the context of the original opera was made clear.

I can understand why it was banned,

because the lyric, lest we forget,

talks about the pearly white teeth of a shark

and compares these to our character, lurking suspiciously on street corners

and with a jack-knife in his pocket.

And fairly soon, whenever Mack The Knife is out,

"Scarlet billows start to flow," a fantastic line,

and then later on in a very spooky verse,

it says, "On a sidewalk..."

# Oh, on the sidewalk, sunny morning... #

..sunny morning, it's a brilliant line, what can go wrong?

"There's a body, oozing life."

And later on, there are cement bags that have been dropped off a boat.

# And the cement is for the weight, dear... #

You're told that that's not the content of the bags,

but the cement is to weight them down, so there's no possible misunderstanding

that this is about a very, very sinister, serial criminal.

The lyric of Mack The Knife is very much to do with knives.

There was certainly a moral panic in the mid-'50s about knife crime

and spivs and razor blades.

# ..you Macheath, back in town, yeah! #

But despite its violent overtones,

Armstrong's Mackie climbed up the charts.

Then the BBC did a U-turn and the song was reprieved.

The BBC can be a moral guardian, but if everyone out there buys the record,

suddenly they're seen as against the trend of democracy,

against the trend of populism.

And they don't want to be seen as too sniffy - "It's all right then,

"it's a hit, we'll allow it on the radio." So that's what happened.

# Sweet Lucy Brown. #

So despite it being banned as a stand-alone song,

it's...it's re-emerged.

I mean, it's been covered so many times and is part of the Great American Songbook.

# ..back in town! #

The BBC may have eventually surrendered to the popularity of Armstrong's toe-tapping Mackie,

but with the emergence of rock 'n' roll and highly hormonal teenagers,

they had other things to worry about.

Next up, it's The Shangri-La's with Leader of the Pack.

# Is she really going out with him?

# Well, there she is, let's ask her.

# Betty, is that Jimmy's ring you're wearing?

Uh-huh.

There was a culture in the late '50s and early '60s

for these teen tragedy songs or death discs or splatter platters,

I'm afraid they were called, rather horrendously, by some of the people who wrote them.

# Gee, it must be great riding with him

# Is he picking you up after school today?

Uh-uh.

Probably the reason that death discs started was down to the death of Buddy Holly.

Because it is said that... a lot of the songwriters were in the Brill Building in New York,

they would go and have their breakfast

at Jack Dempsey's restaurant in New York

and the news came in that Buddy Holly had been killed in a plane crash

and the restaurant just...emptied immediately

as all these songwriters went back to their cubicles

to write songs about Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper and Richie Valens.

# Teen angel, can you hear me? #

# The girl I loved and lost a year ago. #

They're driven by a very commercial cocktail of love, death,

fate and most crucially, guilt.

So the stories are broadly the same, boy and girl fall in love,

boy and girl have an argument or they are forced to split up,

and this ends in the tragic and violent death of the boy.

And it's the girl's fault.

And often it was girls who were singing about it.

# He said to me he wanted to be near to... #

There was a lot of anxiety about these teen death songs,

it was girl talk,

it was the first time that young women sang about their lives, the truth of their lives.

Women had a lot more freedom

and a lot more sexual freedom than their parents' generation.

# That's when I fell for the leader of the pack. #

The Shangri-Las, they were seen as a bit more edgy,

a bit more gritty than a lot of the girl groups,

they had a slightly more aggressive image,

they sang with this real New York twang, they were seen as really hip,

they were the girl gang that you wanted to hang out with.

Leader of the Pack is a fantastic song,

it's the sound of it, the vocal sound on that song is so identifiable

that you can only hear the Shangri-La's version.

It is brilliant. And it's gone on to be, I think it's Rolling Stone's Top 500.

It's in the top 500 songs of all time, it's that strong a song.

It was written by Shadow Morton, he always said, very quickly.

He wrote it in several minutes on a piece of cardboard with his children's crayons while drunk.

But it's a brilliant and really cynical piece of writing,

cos it starts off with this scene of unimaginable innocence.

Where do they meet?

# I met him at the candy store

# He turned around and smiled at me You get the picture? #

And two a half minutes later,

this guy's dead in a motorcycle accident on a wet road.

And he's dead because her parents have intervened

and said she cannot possibly go out with this boy

because he's from the wrong side of the town, another important dimension to these songs,

it's all about good girls going out with bad boys.

And there is nothing more emblematic of a bad boy than a motorbike.

# They said he came from the wrong side of town... #

So Leader of the Pack was a big hit

and this coincided with a lot of conflict between mods and rockers.

That was when there was the big fight on Brighton sea front

and there was a lot of anxiety amongst parents

about their kids getting involved in violent subcultures,

parents worried about their daughters travelling on the back of motorbikes, getting into danger.

There was a kind of thing about the biker culture,

so the cult of death within bikes was, I think, yeah, something that the BBC got quite worried about.

Trying to define the borders of youth culture on behalf of youth.

The BBC described Leader of the Pack as a "horror"

and banned it from both radio and television,

but it still reached No.11 in the UK charts

as lovesick girls across Britain rushed out to buy the single

and listen to the alluring roar of a bad boy on a bike.

# That's why I fell for the leader of the pack. #

By the mid-'60s, the BBC's Dance Music Policy Committee was disbanded

and it was left to the discretion of individual producers to

monitor this new pop culture.

# Lucy in the sky with diamonds. #

It wasn't just hemlines that were getting higher -

the nation's favourite boy band was a major cause for concern.

Next up, it's The Beatles and A Day In The Life.

# I read the news today, oh, boy. #

By '67, all kinds of things were coming together,

there's a growing political unease,

young working class, non-metropolitan, non-London people

have started to get their records played on the radio.

MUSIC: "Eight Miles High" by The Byrds

There is a real sense of generational change.

This is the first generation in Britain who've not had conscription.

Basically, in the '60s, young people finally had enough money to buy records, to buy clothes.

They couldn't buy a house or a car or anything,

but the austerity of the post-war period had now gone,

there was mass employment.

Instead of it all being run by old people, now it was the young people who were taking over.

MUSIC: "Purple Haze" by Jimi Hendrix

The counter culture...it's more common now,

but then, it really was just a few people really experimenting

and experimenting with different ways to live your life,

sexual liberation and gay liberation,

and that was all there, simmering under the surface.

So I think the BBC, in its status as moral guardian, probably felt,

"We mustn't... We've got to be really careful with this,"

and felt very nervous about its power.

I think '67 was when music moved from being just part of the entertainment business, variety,

and moved into an area where it began to be taken seriously as an art form,

in other words, it carried messages.

# Everyone smiles as you drift past the flowers... #

I think psychedelic, as far as the establishment was concerned,

was something a bit threatening,

it was something which would change the normal perceptions of the world,

something that would threaten the status quo.

And particularly the BBC as the ultimate example of the status quo,

really didn't like the sound of that at all.

In the summer of '67, The Beatles released

their own psychedelically inspired album, Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band,

which went straight in at No.1 in the album charts.

# Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band! #

I knew The Beatles back then

and I did go to quite a lot of Sergeant Pepper sessions.

It was really an attempt to get away from the old image of the Fab Four and the mop tops and all of that

and consequently they invented a new persona, they were Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Heart Clubs Band.

That was the real peak of their psychedelic era

where they were exploring through drugs the real transformation of consciousness.

It's kaleidoscopic, it's lovely, it's full of great tunes.

The whole idea is the concept of a vaudevillian band,

but it's all infused with the heady smell of illegal substances

and, you know, the slightly bright colours of LSD.

# Woke up, got out of bed... #

Strangely, on an entire album influenced by the band's mind-expanding experimentation,

it was just the final track, A Day In The Life, that came under the BBC's moral microscope.

Just running upstairs on a bus and lighting up a cigarette.

That's exactly what my generation did, you could still smoke upstairs in buses.

They're kind of parodying the straight life,

the life that they saw their parents have, that they don't want to have.

After lengthy correspondence with Joseph Lockwood at EMI,

the BBC banned the song for what they believed to be a drug reference in just one line...

# I'd love to turn you on. #

The banning of this song, it wasn't just about the drugs reference,

it was also an underlying fear about an attack on the establishment, essentially.

And I think the fact that it ends on that massive, cacophonous E major chord right at the end

with all the orchestra just going completely bonkers, I think it really was subversive.

Younger people at the time were saying, "We don't understand this and we love it."

I think some of the establishment were thinking, "We don't understand this and we fear it."

It's like that Dylan line. There's something going on here, but you don't know what it is, Mr Jones."

The BBC were being deeply paranoid, I think,

also, they missed half the other songs that had drug references, there were sex references,

so those crept through OK and no-one seemed to go mad and have orgies in the streets.

In fact, another song on Sergeant Pepper did slip under the BBC's radar.

# Lucy in the sky with diamonds

# Lucy in the sky with diamonds. #

It genuinely did come from a childhood drawing by Julian Lennon.

He was then about four, I think, just going to a nursery school

and one of his classmates was a girl called Lucy.

And he did this drawing and his teacher asked him what it was called

and he said, "It's Lucy in the sky with diamonds."

And the teacher then wrote it across the top, he was too young to write, of course.

And Lennon had this wonderful drawing on his wall and it said, "Lucy in the sky with diamonds."

And it was only later after they had actually recorded it,

according to McCartney, that they suddenly realised, "Oh, no, LSD! They're bound to read that into it!"

I've never believed that...for a moment.

And I don't think Lennon is the sort of guy

who would have resisted the rather obvious joke either, you know what I mean?

So I think it's a record about drugs

written by a man who's been taking a lot of drugs.

# Lucy in the sky with diamonds... #

NEEDLE SCRATCHES

Drugs, sex, death discs - ultimately, minor misdemeanours.

When it comes to the censorship of popular music,

there's one murky backwater that the BBC simply refuses to tolerate -

product placement.

Among the many offenders... The Kinks.

# Just like cherry cola. #

Pink Floyd.

# The Daily Standard... #

-And Cliff Richard.

-# ..in a Cadillac. #

But for their blatant attempt to get free underwear for a lifetime,

our next rock'n'roll delinquents are Mott the Hoople with All the Young Dudes.

The BBC wouldn't want to advertise a particular product.

And over the years there have been a lot of problems with that.

About 1932-3, Henry Hall made a record called The Wonderful Radio Times

and that was actually banned by the BBC.

And, in more recent times, you've had Dr Hook with The Cover of Rolling Stone

and that was banned.

You had Paul Simon, who had an American No.1 with Kodachrome, and the BBC banned that.

There is the rise of commercial television, the rise of commercial radio,

Radio Caroline, pirate radio and so on.

There's a particular sensitivity going on at that moment in the late '60s about advertising.

That if the BBC allows any kind of advertising in at any level,

then people will say, "What price the BBC?"

And, it's very...it's very late '60s but it spreads over into the '70s,

so there is this kind of... The moment they mention a product of any kind in whatever context,

we're absolutely terrified of being accused of advertising, of actually promoting that product.

In 1972, Mott the Hoople were failing to find success

and were on the verge of splitting.

Luckily, they had a famous fan who came to their rescue by donating one of his songs.

It was a song Bowie, I think, wanted for Ziggy Stardust,

part of the concept of Ziggy Stardust,

which is a post-apocalyptic world nearing its end -

the idea is that the kids are the last people left who know what's going on.

It's a bleak song, it's got melancholy, it's got...

It's an anthem, its anthemic.

They recorded it with the original lyric which was, you know,

"Stealing clothes from Marks & Sparks"

# And Wendy's stealing clothes from Marks & Sparks. #

He's not even saying Marks & Spencer's, he's saying Marks & Sparks,

there's this bleak song about an apocalyptic world on its last legs

and they think a line about stealing clothes from Marks & Sparks...

"Oh, that reminds me, I must get some new pyjamas."

The BBC refused to play the record unless the band substituted the offending lyrics.

Fortunately, they'd kept their receipt and went back to the writer to exchange the goods.

# And Wendy's stealing clothes from unlocked cars... #

The ad-free version went on to give them a top three hit.

# Yeah, I'm a dude, Dad. #

Sort of odd that you can steal clothes,

but you just can't steal 'em... You can steal 'em from parked cars but not from Marks & Sparks.

I think products actually overrides the moral issue from the early '70s onwards.

Whereas Reith would have seen the moral issue as the key one,

by the '60s, the moral issue is beginning to recede and the BBC is beginning to see it

as a bit naff to be the moral guardian of the nation.

# Carry the news... #

NEEDLE SCRATCHES

In the dark and dingy '70s, one band more than any other

was about to challenge the BBC's status as moral guardian.

As Royal fever hit a peak in 1977, along came the Sex Pistols

with anything but a tribute to the reigning monarch.

-It's God Save The Queen.

-This is the great kind of fissure

that runs down the middle of the 1970s,

which is probably creatively in some ways, politically, creatively, culturally,

one of the most exciting, violent, turbulent, brilliant decades there's ever been.

We wanted peace and love and now we've got war, we've got Northern Ireland,

we've got problems all over the place.

It was a bit of a dump, basically.

I mean, I was...16, 17,

there was a whole bunch of stuff going on,

it was like the people who were supposed to be in charge of us

just didn't seem to know what they was doing,

there was strikes everywhere, there was power cuts,

there was just a bit of an air of despondency.

And then out of that comes punk rock,

because musically, nothing's reflecting that.

This was the necessary purgative force that was going to sort things out.

# I am a antichrist

# I am an anarchist. #

When we started out with the Sex Pistols,

we...didn't really know what we wanted to do,

we just knew what we didn't want to do.

I was the Head of the EMI Label Press Office.

In 1976, we signed them.

EMI, first and foremost, when they heard about this new band,

would have thought, "Kids will buy these records."

What matters most to EMI is money.

That's always been the deal with pop music.

The Sex Pistols released their debut single, Anarchy in the UK, in November, 1976.

It just sounded absolutely incredible,

we were just completely sold, hook, line and sinker.

It was exactly what we felt about everything.

Less than a week after its release,

he band made a last minute appearance on The Today Show with Bill Grundy

after fellow EMI signing Queen unexpectedly cancelled.

Go on, you've got another five seconds, say something outrageous.

You dirty bastard.

Keep going. Keep going. Go on, again.

-You dirty fucker.

-What a clever boy.

-What a fucking rotter.

I'll be seeing you soon. I hope I'm not seeing you again.

From me though, good night.

Their appearance on The Today Show resulted in Grundy himself being banned for two weeks

while the Sex Pistols were sworn into television folklore.

It was...kind of funny, it was a laugh,

it was a bit troubling.

There was no preparation for it whatsoever.

I mean, it is interesting that you look at the Sex Pistols now, arriving on television in '76-'77,

and it would still look provocative to this day, you know.

If you suddenly turned on the television and there was something looking like that,

with that look in the eyes, that sort of combination

of indifference and attention to some kind of detail

that nobody in their right mind could really consider what that was,

that was a tremendously futuristic moment, almost,

it completely carved open everything.

It was no wonder that it was quickly sat down upon,

cos it was...that was genuinely dangerous.

At that time to have a band on front of The Daily Mirror was incredible.

You know, this bloke kicks his telly in

because the Pistols swore on telly, how could any teenager refuse that?

The front of national newspapers saying this pop group are going to cause anarchy,

they're going to bring down the Government. Is your child a punk rocker?

And...they were terrified.

Anarchy In The UK got banned

and it got banned not because of the record. You know, it had already been played,

they were playing Anarchy In The UK quite happily.

It got banned simply because of the behaviour of the band on television.

# It's the only way to be! #

Leslie Hill, the manager, was instructed to fire them,

then off they went to A&M, where they lasted about a fortnight

before they got fired from there as well.

But one budding entrepreneur

realised there was money to be made in being banned.

Newly signed to Virgin and back in the studio,

Glen and John began writing a song initially called No Future.

I had...some ideas for some riffs and it wouldn't go away

and in fact, I drove everybody mad, cos I kept doing this...

And then...I went home

and picked up my guitar and just started working it out on the guitar

and it kind of turned into the guitar chords.

John always had, like, a plastic bag full of lyrics.

He never said, "Oh, I've got a song, can we get some music for it?"

He would wait for us to play something

and then dig something out.

# God save the Queen

# We mean it, man! #

It was after I left that it came out and it occurred to somebody at the record company

that it coincided with the Queen's Silver Jubilee.

Erm...God Save The Queen.

I mean, nothing was changed, it's just what it was called.

But that whole bit at the end of the song, no future,

that's originally what it was all about, you know.

God Save The Queen was released on May the 27th, 1977,

just 11 days prior to the Silver Jubilee holiday.

The BBC described it as being in bad taste and chose not to broadcast it.

This was a great, great pop song with a great chorus, unbelievable lyrics,

that was, basically, you know, throwing bombs into the face of the establishment

And to me, that's the definitive way that a banned and therefore apparently dangerous record

should be, that it was truly dangerous.

The lyrics to God Save The Queen could be written by Philip Larkin, I think,

they've got that deadpan...hopeless English melancholy of something like that...

"We're the flowers in the dustbin."

And, "There's no future in England's dreaming," positively, like... It's Shakespearean, almost.

It's a brilliant, brilliant lyric

and it's a sort of a lament for a lost England

that I don't think he utterly hates, but he hates what it's become.

It helped when the BBC banned it, cos it made everybody at school go out and buy the record,

because it was the naughtiest record you could possibly own.

So having that must have tripled its sales.

It would have been a top ten hit, but thank you, BBC, for banning that record and making it No.1.

In the official UK charts, God Save The Queen only reached No.2,

kept off the top spot by a raspy-voiced crooner.

But there were persistent rumours of chart fiddling

and that God Save The Queen was actually the biggest selling single in the UK at the time.

Getting into the middle of the system and the establishment

to such an extent they were having to fiddle their own chart,

they're having to be corrupt and crooked, in a way,

to try and stop it happening, and that was, you know,

irresistible, that the heart of why there should be pop and rock, really.

In the 1980s, it seemed the dark days of the previous decade were

finally over - the charts were filled with frills,

flounces and decadent sexuality, but one band took things a little

too far for the BBC's liking.

The year was 1984 and the song was Relax by Frankie Goes To Hollywood.

# Relax, don't do it

# When you wanna go to it

# Relax, don't do it...#

It came out in November 1983, and there was all

that palaver about getting on the playlist

and it didn't really get on the playlist,

but it was getting a few plays in the evening,

not enough to really make it a big hit, you know.

Then it got the first Top Of The Pops of 1984

and that was a big moment for the record.

And the record shot up to like, you know, I think, No.2.

On a Wednesday morning, we repeated the chart and I got up

to about No.4 and, as always, there was never enough time.

I had four songs left. I thought, I'm not going to fit them all in.

With Relax, it was a 12-inch, and on the back was some ghastly

comment about something. I didn't have time to play it, so I said, "I'll drop it."

Somebody told me that Mike Read had had some kind of nervous breakdown on the radio,

and I wonder, because on the sleeve, it mentioned the word "come".

I think in the lyrics, "If you wanna come to it," or something,

and I remember very specifically I'd put,

as part of the design of the sleeve, I'd put little

swimming sperm on the outside of the 7-inch sleeve.

Paul Morley, their manager, whipped in and said, "It's banned,

"it's banned," because I mentioned on air about the visual on the back.

And I got the blame for banning it of course, but it was the BBC

that banned it, not me.

After Mike Read chose to omit Relax from the chart rundown,

the BBC erred on the side of caution and removed it from their playlists,

and for manager Paul Morley, it was a marketing dream come true.

With Relax, it's so well stage managed,

the whole thing is run by Paul Morley, he's a music journalist.

He knows the little levers to pull and cause trouble.

They're singing about gay sex,

at the time, not that comfortable in mainstream-media terms.

In the '80s there was intense anxiety about the impact of AIDS,

and Frankie Goes To Hollywood and Relax runs counter to that.

I think that was seen as incredibly threatening.

The producers have a responsibility to their listening audience

and that's what some of them initially played it

and are now not playing it.

It came to a point where any company, any corporate body,

has to decide whether something like this is played or not.

The controller of Radio One decided it shouldn't be played.

I've almost been slandered for writing disgusting lyrics,

which only someone with the mind of a sewer could see them as obscene.

But with Relax, it wasn't just the lyrics that were

a cause of concern for the Beeb.

This was the MTV age and bands and their managers had cottoned on

to the potential of a promotional video.

I wanted it to look like the greatest party

you, you could never get into, if you like.

These great parties that you would hear about behind closed doors

in New York especially, in the underground gay scene.

That's playing with censorship,

it's just an orgy, look, people having sex, outrageous!

We'd all die out if we didn't have sex, or maybe not in the way Frankie has it.

It wasn't that offensive to 90% of the population.

They were almost bending over backwards to get banned, weren't they?

The BBC issued an outright ban on the video for Relax

and then a fortnight after Mike Read's initial outburst

the song peaked at No.1.

Frankie Goes To Hollywood goes to No.1 with Relax.

Because it's forbidden, of course everybody wants it,

so with Relax... I mean, it sold two million in the UK, which is a huge amount for a single.

Paradoxically, the BBC and Mike Read, by banning it,

certified it as what we wanted it to be all along -

a genuinely dangerous record.

# Take me dancing naked in the rain

# Feel it washing over me... #

Just a few years later, 1988 was dubbed Britain's

Second Summer of Love as teenagers across the country

took up dancing ecstatically all night long.

Despite the smiley faces, the BBC joined the British Government

in attempting to put a halt to this new musical mayhem.

The next track on our banned list is We Call It Acieed by D Mob.

The origins of acid house are from Chicago and Detroit.

The music was very uplifting, the lyrics were very optimistic,

there was a real message of hope and optimism,

which was perfect timing. The Berlin Wall was falling, apartheid was crumbling,

so everyone felt this massive change that was under way.

There was a huge shift that was going on at the time

and then all of a sudden, music boomed with this high energy sound.

It was based on techno, which was a very stripped down, electronic version of disco music,

but it had kind of big, happy synthesisers on it to reflect

the rush of ecstasy and the sheer joy of a bony Cockney embracing you.

# I wanna give you devotion... #

Acid house burst out of the nightclubs and onto the street,

but finding the party was half the fun.

If you wanted to go to a rave, you had to famously phone a number

that was on a flyer someone had given you in a club and then

drive out - it was very mysterious, it was genuinely illegal.

It all involved new technology, car phones and things like that.

So you didn't know where you were going,

sometimes it involved breaking the law.

It involved outwitting the police.

It seemed a very new form of entertainment at the time.

What are you doing then?

Waiting for someone to tell us where it is.

Isn't that an old story?

Yeah. Apparently, only one person knows where it is.

That Second Summer of Love was again about transformation

of consciousness - it was mass rave parties.

There was a real political subtext to that, there was anti-Thatcherism,

anti that yuppie individualism.

It was about... dancing together as a collective.

The interesting thing about press around acid house is that

initially it's very positive.

"Wow! There's a new sound, learn the crazy lingo!"

You could send off to The Sun for a "Where's the acid party?" shirt with a smiley face on it.

Some weeks later, they realised acid is a drug and it could be construed as a drug reference.

And the illegality of the big raves

became more apparent and it does this massive 180 degree turn.

All of a sudden, the newspapers, the tabloids got onto it

and started splashing it across the headlines,

"Evil acid house, lock up your children, and where are your kids at the weekend?"

Inevitably, all the press, good and bad,

helped take the acid party straight into the charts.

It's D Mob featuring Gary Haisman and We Call It Acieed!

Acieed! Acieed! But that came out of a chant in a club in Charing Cross,

in Future - a club run by Paul Oakenfold at the time in 1988.

And this guy Gary Haisman, who became the face of that record,

used to run around the club

shouting, "Acid!" so it caught on, it was a catchy hook for a track.

They Call It Acieed is a lovely record,

it's in the sort of childish tradition of acid house,

records like Charly by The Prodigy - it's a silly, cash-in record.

Although the video for We Call It Acieed had already featured on Top Of The Pops,

the BBC restricted the song on Radio One, citing that, "It wasn't right

"for the mood of some programmes, such as The Breakfast Show."

On the one hand, it's banned because of the references to drugs,

but I also think there is a whole debate there about the road protests,

and the protests about land and who owns the land in this country.

And to celebrate our right to party!

And the right for people to gather on public land,

and this led to the Public Order Act

which forbade gatherings of young people listening to repetitive beats.

So there was a real anxiety about the anti-establishment

nature of the song.

It wasn't saying, "Take drugs,"

and most of the people who bought it were too little to take drugs

and most of the people who were taking drugs

were too busy banging their faces against sheep to buy this record.

It was the worst-directed moral panic of all time.

And, of course, despite limited airplay

We Call It Acieed danced all the way to No.3.

It just made the track more popular and it sold more copies of it.

I think on its first press, it had sold out instantly

after the publicity that it received,

and they couldn't get enough out into the record stores

and out there in the shops.

As with the first Summer of Love, while the BBC picked up on Acieed,

other drug references completely passed them by.

# 'Eezer Goode, 'Eezer Goode... #

You just imagine the BBC going, "It's a nice record.

"'Eezer Goode, 'Eezer Goode. Doesn't refer to drugs.

"'Eezer Goode.

"Nobody at any point is saying that ecstasy is good.

"'Eezer Goode, 'Eezer Goode.

"Oh, let's ban They Call It Acieed instead.

"That's clearly a call to drugs."

RECORD SCRAPES TO A HALT

And so we come to the final track in our top ten,

described by the Official UK Charts Company

as "one of the most controversial chart contenders of all time".

Now, we have some news to bring you

about the former Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher.

We have heard from her spokesman, Lord Bell,

that she has died this morning following a stroke.

On April 8th 2013, Baroness Thatcher died

and it caused a right ding-dong.

In the media, you had heads of state falling over themselves

to say what an amazing woman she was.

Today, we lost a great leader, a great Prime Minister,

and a great Briton.

Margaret Thatcher didn't just lead our country.

She saved our country.

There were huge communities in the UK,

mining communities, disadvantaged communities,

people who felt, "No, this wasn't our experience of Margaret Thatcher."

There's a whole other story to this.

On the day she died, I was contacted, because I had done

some previous stuff with music campaigns on Facebook.

Let the joyous news be spread -

the wicked old witch at last is dead.

Mark Biddiss was called on to action a longstanding online campaign

to get Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead

into the UK charts on the event of Margaret Thatcher's death.

I wanted to stand up for people,

for those who felt they didn't have a voice and see if we can give one

in a more peaceful manner than people going out and rioting,

which would never solve anything.

When I first found out about the death of Margaret Thatcher,

I was in a meeting with the controllers

of the other radio stations

and I must admit, I kind of sat back,

because I thought, "Right, this is probably going to be

"a discussion amongst Radio Four and Five Live controllers

"about how the news coverage will unfold."

MUNCHKINS SING

By Wednesday in the mid-week chart,

we had an entry of Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead

and suddenly it became my issue.

It came out in 1936. We had the Munchkins singing joyfully

when Dorothy's house goes splat onto the Wicked Witch of the East

and there was that real mischievousness

about using that song.

It's what we call a migration of meaning,

so something that means something in one context

means something completely different when you put it in another context.

And it's just beautifully subversive.

I think it was something like 170 in the chart

and then it just shot straight up.

And then, yes, it started becoming a bit of an anthem so, you know,

there was, you know, football crowds, I think,

chanting, "Ding Dong!"

Once Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead

became this wonderful underground hit via iTunes,

suddenly there was much more media coverage of the opposite view.

-Maggie! Maggie! Maggie!

-CROWD:

-Dead! Dead! Dead!

The BBC was fantastically caught

like a rabbit in the headlights with this one,

because the establishment is on their case all the time

and they're terrified what The Daily Mail think.

You had a new Director General of the BBC

and someone had said this is the first editorial decision

they are going to make, and you also had the fact that the papers

wanted to keep the story going between her death and the burial,

so this was a really, really quite toxic situation

to be in the middle of.

With pressure mounting from the press and Tory campaigners,

the BBC chose not to ban the song, but to play just five seconds.

I'll actually never forget the moment I was told.

I think it was ITN and they rung me up and said,

"We've got a statement that the BBC

"are literally going to play five seconds,"

and first thought was, "That really is censorship."

'We've got a brand-new entry at No.2.

'To explain more, here's Newsbeat's music reporter, Sinead Garvan.'

'This is Newsbeat.'

'Tributes poured in across the world for Margaret Thatcher

'when she died on Monday,

'but there were also people throwing street parties around the UK.

'An online campaign began in 2007 to try to get this song,

'Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead to No.1 in the charts

'the week Lady Thatcher died.'

# Ding, dong! The witch is dead

# Which old which? The wicked witch!

# Ding, dong! The wicked witch is dead... #

They should have just played the record and explained it.

I thought explaining what it was was a great idea.

What I needed to do was reflect it, because it is historic fact

and we need to reflect that historic fact,

but we also need to be mindful of the fact

that there is a grieving family

and it could be seen by many as disrespectful.

So I absolutely stand by that decision.

The pressures that we were under all led to that very simple decision of,

"It's got to be a compromise."

MUSIC: "I Knew You Were Trouble" by Taylor Swift

I don't regret it in the sense that,

especially when you get letters from miners to say,

"Who'd have thought someone down south,

"a young guy, would have stood up for us?"

It caused a ripple but it's also to make people feel a bit more,

you can get listened to.

It wasn't the most politest way,

but it made a point and it got out there

and I think it serves to say that people will speak

if they do feel strongly. Rightly or wrongly, you can get a message out.

Over the last 75 years, the reasons why the BBC have banned songs

has changed radically with the times.

It's unthinkable now that Formby's cheeky double entendres

or Frankie's celebration of gay sex would be censored.

And as long as there's the potential to offend,

the BBC will continue to wrestle

with the difficult question of what and what not to broadcast.

I think the BBC's job is to be a moral guide in society,

especially when it comes to music and young people.

I think the BBC always has to take a responsible role.

And actually, that's its strong point, too.

But it always raises this question - "Is it right to censor?"

# We have to be so careful... #

It's not going to ban anything any more. They just don't play it.

That's what happens now.

It's not like they sit in smoking rooms and go,

"We can't possibly play that.

"The proles will start having sex or taking drugs."

They still act like they've got to somehow protect people

from this ridiculous danger.

The culture that I think grips us now, the compliance culture,

we're frightened that someone somewhere will be offended

or will say, "The BBC has offended us."

In these days of finger pointing,

there is always somebody that will say,

"Oh, look what so-and-so said.

"Why did they do that? They shouldn't have done this."

It really is damned if you do and damned if you don't.

# But we have to be so careful all the time... #

People tend to think that morality doesn't change,

there are fixed values,

there's good things and there's bad things,

a kind of biblical, fundamentalist approach to morality.

It's changed hugely.

Unmentionable things from the '60s are now mentioned every night.

However, other things are still unmentionable

and it'll be interesting to see whether today's unmentionables

are tomorrow's unmentionables as well.

How fixed are they?

# Oh, we had to be so careful

# So very, very careful

# We had to be so careful all the doggone time

# We had to be so careful

# All of the time. #