No Rock And Roll Fun

PRINT THE MYTH: BBC News Online is celebrating the 20th anniversary of the BBC's ban on Relax. They recall how Mike Reid suddenly realised what the song was about, and announced he would play it no further. " The rest of the BBC followed suit, banning the song, with its veiled reference to gay sex, from all TV and radio airplay, with the curious exception of the top 40 show." It's impossible to understand how such a sentence can be so wrong in so many ways and still appear on the internet (well, the respectable part). In order: the BBC didn't ban the song, the references aren't in any way veiled, it's bisexual sex rather than specifically gay sex, Janice Long was still playing the sex mix on her Saturday nights Radio One show weeks later and the Top 40 did follow the "advice" (rather than outright ban) not to play the music.

The tone is a past-is-a-different-place amused suggestion that this sort of thing couldn't happen today (oh no?). Martin Cloonan, who's apparently written a book about this sort of thing, suggests that the Relax episode was where Radio One "realised this couldn't go on anymore because they ended up looking so ridiculous", although as he must know, in 1991 a list of records it might be better not to play during the Gulf War cropped up and, erm, made Radio One look a bit silly (the presenters weren't allowed to call Massive Attack by their full name, for example.)

And then there's the Ballad of a Spycatcher affair, when Leon Rosselson put the story of Peter Wright to music, creating worries that playing the track would break the injunction the Thatcher government had taken out on the book. Radio Sussex's Turn It Up tried playing a bit of it, hoping if they faded it out after a verse and a half they'd be safe; it was Simon Bates who went ahead and played the whole thing one morning shortly after.

Even more odd was the Light That Suddenly Went Out. In the week when we weren't allowed to smile, following on from Prince Charles murdering Princess Diana with a crowbar in the grounds of Clarence House and then engineering a curious charade with a double, a drunk Frenchman, some photographers and an ambulance to try and cover it up and make it look like an accident, Jo Wylie slipped There Is A Light That Never Goes Out onto her Radio One show. (All that about crashing in darkened underpasses, of course). She then disappeared from the airwaves for about a week, as a result of "seafood poisoning."

So, clearly, the BBC's Pop Music network managed to make itself seem a bit silly way after the 1984 Relax episode. In fact, John Walters explained to listeners to the Night Time show in 1987 that there was another Morrissey related incident, when production staff had a top-level meeting to listen to The Smiths new single, Shoplifters of The World. Was it encouraging shoplifting, worried the management. "In the end, we managed to get it through because we pointed out the line was 'shoplifters of the world, hand it over', so we said they were telling shoplifters to give things back", explained Walters.

Back to the present day, and there's some debate raging on the Peel mailing list over the announcement John has been reading out at the start of his show warning about rudeness ahead. Is he being made to do it?