It’s easy to assume that music censorship was all in the province of the baddies on the other side of the iron curtain, but it turns out we were at it too (banning music for all sorts of spurious reasons). As I wrote HERE, The Beatles were the target of censorship in the West more than once - and even quite late on in the cold war years.
On May 23rd 1967, Frank Gilliard, Director of Broadcasting at the BBC wrote an embarrassed letter to Sir Joseph Lockwood, the Chairman of EMI explaining why ‘Day in the Life’ would not be played - a ban that wasn’t lifted until March 13, 1972.
Click on the image below to read the full details.
(Thanks to Adam Berry for passing this on)
ARTEMYI TROITSKY told me a funny story in this regard when I interviewed him on the subject of Soviet Youth Culture. When he was running his ‘discos’ at the university Moscow in the early 70s, he was forced to provide the authorities with a translation and explanation of the lyrics of each western song he played. He gave up when it came to ‘Day in the Life’ - for probably obvious reasons.. Listen HERE
THE BEATLES. ENCYCLOPEDIC REFERENCE by Nikolay Kozlov1996.
A Soviet Beatles flexi disc (courtesy of Andrey Lukanin)