Interesting reading…
The BBC loved to ban the Mary Chain.
In 1986, the BBC bans their song “Some Candy Talking” after the network decides it glamorizes heroin use. Speaking to Time Out in 2015, Jim Reid says, “The BBC banned ‘Some Candy Talking’ because it thought the song was about drugs, which funnily enough is our only song not about drugs. Well, they were gonna ban it, but instead they just didn’t play it. We were really hoping they did because then it woulda sold shitloads of copies. Ironically, the original was recorded as a Peel Session, so you could even say that the BBC commissioned it in the first place.”
The next year, their single “April Skies” reaches number eight in the UK singles chart, which means the band get to live out their dream of appearing on Top of the Pops. They appear on the show drunk and obstinate, and as a result receive a lifetime ban from the show. Jim later tells Thrasher, “Well, you kind of sit around all day waiting and the Mary Chain were never really good at sitting around so yeah — we got quite drunk. We didn’t do anything. Nothing got destroyed and nobody got insulted, but the fact that we got drunk on the BBC premises was enough to cause an upset anyway.”
Months later, the U.S. version of the show refuses to play their music video after objecting to the band’s “sacrilegious moniker.” Top of the Pops and the BBC also refuse to play their 1992 single “Reverence,” which features the lines, “I wanna die just like JFK, I wanna die in the U.S.A.…I wanna die just like Jesus Christ, I wanna die on a bed of spikes.” Jim later explains to Thrasher, “The thing about that is it’s a bit of a joke; the idea of Mary Chain being banned from the BBC. The BBC never played our records anyway. So basically they banned ‘Reverence’ and didn’t play our records. It was business as usual, really.”
