BRITAIN’S MOST DANGEROUS SONGS | WE’VE BEEN WATCHING
Ben Woolhead has his fill of moral panics and censorious broadcasters with this new BBC Four documentary about the pop songs most notoriously banned on the Beeb and elsewhere…
If there’s an upside to lockdown, it’s finally having the time to dip a little toe into the deep pool of BBC Four music documentaries. Britain’s Most Dangerous Songs: Listen To The Banned follows the tried-and-tested list-and-assortment-of-talking-heads format, and while neither essential viewing nor especially revelatory in its insights does at least constitute a mildly diverting hour of telly.
No prizes for guessing that both the Sex Pistols and Frankie Goes To Hollywood feature prominently – though they do serve to illustrate two of the programme’s three fundamental lessons: that context is critical and that there’s nothing quite like pouring petrol onto a moral panic to guarantee a Beeb ban.
God Save The Queen was all the more impactful for the timing of its release (to coincide with Her Maj’s Silver Jubilee), but other much less likely records have fallen foul of Auntie for the same reason. Bing Crosby’s crooner classic I’ll Be Home For Christmas, for instance, was felt to be too much of a dispiriting downer during wartime due to its lyrical caveat – “if only in my dreams”. More recently, the previously innocuous Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead from The Wizard Of Oz became potentially inflammatory when released to mark Maggie Thatcher’s death in 2013. The BBC’s response to the latter – to play a snippet while setting it in context and acknowledging that not everyone was inclined to mourn the former Prime Minister’s passing – showed that things have moved on since the summer of 1977, when any display of dissent (let alone the Pistols’ sneering punk anthem) was deemed unacceptable.
Meanwhile, Frankie’s unapologetically raunchy 1983 single Relax, with its accompanying video, were deliberately and profoundly provocative in the prevailing climate of discomfort, misunderstanding and fear surrounding gay sex at a time when the AIDS crisis was just beginning to take hold. Similarly, the Shangri-Las’ exceptional “death disc” Leader Of The Pack and D-Mob’s We Call It Acieed were banned due to, respectively, mid-60s concerns about violent youth subcultures and Tory/right-wing media hysteria over ecstasy.
As briefly mentioned in the documentary but explored in greater detail elsewhere (for instance, Jeremy Deller’s excellent film Everybody In The Place), acid house was an attack on the Establishment, a celebration of communality that ran counter to the cult of the individual so central to neoliberal capitalism. In that respect, it had much in common with another of the programme’s featured song, the Beatles’ A Day In The Life, which not only contained what was interpreted as a drug reference (“I’d love to turn you on”) but was also perceived as an unpalatable critique of the humdrum existence of the honest working man.
Making up the numbers are Louis Armstrong’s version of Mack The Knife, George Formby’s With My Little Stick Of Blackpool Rock (firmly in the great British tradition of knowing smut that also gave us saucy seaside postcards, Benny Hill and Carry On), and Mott The Hoople’s 1972 single All The Young Dudes – the latter censored on the grounds of product placement for a passing reference to “Marks & Sparks” until its creator David Bowie consented to changing the lyrics.
So, what was the documentary’s third and final lesson? That bans result in instant notoriety and rapidly rising record sales, of course.
Available on BBC iPlayer until Mon 8 Mar. Info: here
words BEN WOOLHEAD