Not For Broadcast: The story of New Zealand’s censored songs

It began with a book.

An old-fashioned ledger, like an accountant might have used in the 19th century: hardback with a leather spine, cloth cover of deep crimson, and a faint marbled pattern making it look regal and official. And there’s a faded sticker attached to the front that bears the inscription: ‘Banned Recordings’ – as in officially or legally prohibited.

Not for broadcast.

Open it up and you’ll see, down the right hand side, alphabetised tabs from A to Z, and on each page – handwritten in somebody’s neatest script – the names of songs deemed unfit for listeners’ ears, the date at which the decision to ban each song was made, and occasionally the special circumstances under which airplay just might be allowed. The earliest date is 1952; the most recent, 1989.

That’s 37 years of censored songs, and hundreds and hundreds of titles.

The book is a record of the decisions made by an RNZ panel, officially known as the Purchasing Committee but popularly known as the Dirty Records Committee.

Back when The Book began, New Zealand didn’t have a government appointed Chief Censor as we do today. Responsibility for restricting indecent material fell largely to the Minister of Customs and mostly revolved around printed matter. For example, in 1928 a ban was placed on Lady Chatterley’s Lover, D.H. Lawrence’s racy tale of the tryst between a baronet’s wife and her gamekeeper, which remained in place until around the time of the first Beatles album 35 years later.

Public broadcasting in New Zealand began in the mid-1920s. By the time the radio industry had been nationalised by the first Labour government a decade later, the New Zealand Broadcasting Service consisted of twelve non-commercial and four commercial stations, all government-owned and operated.

Over the next few years, any remaining privately operated stations were gradually absorbed into the National Broadcasting Service, which was meanwhile launching new provincial stations.

Being effectively responsible for all radio meant the NBS was catering to the entire population.

That’s a very wide sweep of ages – and musical tastes.

As music historian Chris Bourke says, to middle-aged listeners in the 1930s Bing Crosby would have sounded as strange and intrusive as Eminem did seventy years later.

No wonder, then, that when rock’n’roll arrived in the 1950s airplay was limited to a few songs on hit parade programmes.

Even so, there were rock’n’roll songs that never made it to air at all, on account of the influence it was believed such music might have on young listeners.

In 1954, courts in Wellington had heard a series of stories revolving around immoral sexual conduct among young people in the Hutt Valley. This prompted a government enquiry resulting in a morals report, popularly referred to as the Mazengarb Report after its chair Oswald Mazengarb QC.

A copy was sent to every family in New Zealand. Among the areas targeted in the report were pop songs. The report stated:

"While many of the suggestive love songs, if considered dispassionately by adults, are merely trashy, in times like the present the words of a song may more readily give offence, and the Broadcasting Service should critically re-examine its programmes in order to remove any wrongful impression that might be created, either by a too frequent repetition of items where sex and crime are prominent, or by the possibility of a meaning being taken out of them which was not intended."

As a direct result, the next few years would see records by the likes of Elvis Presley and Little Richard kept off New Zealand’s airwaves.

But the idea that pop songs might inspire antisocial behaviour didn’t end there. More than twenty years later a record such as ‘Dead End Justice’ by all women proto-punk band the Runaways was banned for the same reasons, as The Book reveals.

There are other reasons records were withheld from airplay. Some appeared to satirise public figures – sometimes unintentionally, as in the case of ‘Spotty Muldoon’ by British comedians Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, the protagonist of which coincidentally shared a name with a certain local politician.

Other political songs were allowed to air, such as ‘Don’t Go’ the 1985 song protesting a South African rugby tour, so long as the presenters refrained from passing any editorial comment.

The Dirty Records Committee was disestablished in 1988 when the fourth Labour government undertook its deregulation of the radio market.

The following year the government set up the Broadcasting Standards Authority, which to this day provides the guidelines for what is considered acceptable or not on the RNZ stations.

Among other things, the BSA conducts a public survey every few years to assess which words listeners find most offensive, including those found in song lyrics.

Even so, there is the occasional surprise as current Nights host Emile Donovan discovered in 2024 when he played a song requested by a listener purporting to be an ‘Aussie trucker’.

A routine word-search of 'Good Lookin’’ by Dixon Dallas didn’t turn up anything on the BSA blacklist and it sounded like a pretty conventional country love song – though, unusually for this most conservative of genres, it is about two gay men. But when Dallas gets to the chorus, the mutual attraction expressed in the verses becomes explicit:

He's bouncing off my booty cheeks, I love the way he rides

I can hardly breathe when he's pumping deep inside…

Donovan remembers receiving a few quizzical texts on the night and that might have been where it ended had Madeleine Chapman, editor of news site The Spinoff, not happened to be listening. The next day she wrote:

"What was happening? Had the national broadcaster been hacked? Was Emile Donovan being held hostage, unable to turn the volume down or press pause on the track after the first “bouncing off my booty cheeks” was crooned? It was 8.27pm, not even late enough for the AO programmes to start on the telly. Kids were probably tucked up in bed, listening to RNZ Nights as they drifted into slumber.

"As the guitar strumming faded out to end the song, Donovan revealed himself as being both alive and free. “RNZ National,” he said, then let out a breathy, nervous laugh. A laugh that can only be described as an audible tremble. “That was a song called ‘Good Lookin” by Dixon Dallas. And um, perhaps a good lesson for us to, uh, lyric-check songs.”