Revealed: The songs banned by Radio NZ over the years to be broadcast ... on RNZ
Broadcaster and writer Nick Bollinger has made a career of telling people about the songs they should hear. His latest series is about the songs they weren’t allowed to.
Well, on state radio anyway, where – perhaps ironically – it’s being broadcast. Behold the volume of silence: for nearly four decades, RNZ and its predecessors the NZ Broadcasting Service and NZ Broadcast Corporation kept a record of the songs it refused to play in a big crimson leather-bound book with a creaky binding. On its cover a sticker: “Banned songs”.
Inside was a handwritten record of the songs it refused to buy copies of for distribution to its commercial stations. Starting with fountain-pen inscriptions, its entries neatly recorded the decisions of the Purchasing Committee, a body nicknamed “the Dirty Records Committee”. It drew its members from various departments in Wellington’s old Broadcasting House.
They were there, says Bollinger, who also uncovered sheafs of committee memos and many of the original singles, not necessarily to act as defenders to decent society but to make sure the broadcaster didn’t upset anyone.
“I don’t want to sort of paint the people working in broadcasting then as a bunch of prudes. Some of them were actually quite progressive.” It wasn’t about appealing to the widest audience; it was about not offending the widest possible audience.”
The committee was wound up in 1987, but the book rattled around RNZ’s Wellington offices. Morning Report host Geoff Robinson did a half-hour show on it, Listen to the Banned, in 1997 for RNZ’s 75th anniversary.
Another RNZ staffer suggested the book to Bollinger as programme inspiration. So, in his five-part show songs that have never sullied RNZ frequencies before will get their first airing. There is, though, some history missing. Bollinger thinks during most of the 1960s the committee may have used another book before returning to the original. He laughs when the Listener suggests some Beatles nut possibly purloined it.
And the songs Bollinger thought would have been banned but weren’t?
Too many to count. He went looking for Dragon’s 1978 hit Are You Old Enough? and couldn’t find it.
“I guess you could argue that just by asking the question, he was demonstrating a certain degree of responsibility,” he laughs. “But most programmers would think twice about playing that now.”