The BBC has been notorious in the 20th century for banning musicians for pretty tame reasons, but this little slice of rock history is quite funny in retrospect.
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After performing on the show Happening For Lulu, Jimi Hendrix and The Experience were banned by the BBC. Their charge? Hendrix went off-script… and it was just too cool.
While on the show, hosted by singer Lulu, Hendrix and The Experience performed “Voodoo Child (Slight Return)” as agreed to prior. However, the band decided to sidestep the original plan for their set during their second song. The band was supposed to perform the song “Hey Joe” with the intention of Lulu joining them at the end of the song before ending the episode.
The band began playing “Hey Joe” as anticipated. However, halfway through the song, Hendrix stopped the music to make a statement.
“We’d like to stop playing this rubbish and dedicate a song to the Cream, regardless of what kind of group they may be in,” said Hendrix. “We dedicate this to Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker, and Jack Bruce.”
The impromptu dedication came shortly after Cream announced they were splitting up. From there, the band dove into a killer rendition of “Sunshine Of Your Love”. The show’s producer naturally freaked out and cut out of his broadcast.
Later on, bassist Noel Redding would say that the band smoked quite a bit before they performed, so they weren’t really thinking about potential repercussions for going off-script. Those repercussions cumulated with the BBC banning The Jimi Hendrix Experience.
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“This was fun for us, but producer Stanley Dorfman didn’t take it at all well as the minutes ticked by on his live show,” Redding said of the debacle in his memoir. “Short of running onto the set to stop us or pulling the plug, there was nothing he could do. We played past the point where Lulu might have joined us, played through the time for talking at the end, played through Stanley tearing his hair, pointing to his watch and silently screaming at us. We played out the show.”
And with that, The Jimi Hendrix Experience got a ham-fisted ban from the BBC. The 1969 incident has become something of a legend in the history of the BBC as well. And Hendrix’s actions actually inspired a musician or two to go off-script as well.
Elvis Costello, in particular, performed on Saturday Night Live eight years later and paused his approved performance to play a different song instead. Costello went on to say that Hendrix inspired his impromptu decision. He was, similarly, banned from SNL.
Photo by David Redfern/Redferns
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