It's difficult to remember the last time the BBC banned a record. What was once an event to mark the official changing of a generation seems to have vanished along with Top of the Pops. No wonder that the youth of Britain has become depoliticised.

Not so long ago, mysterious men would dictate whether certain records were suitable for Britain's pop diet. At the BBC's Written Archives Centre in Caversham the files of the Dance Music Policy Committee have been preserved for public inspection. This was pop's equivalent of the Bilderberg Group. It was a shadowy unit set up in the Thirties that took the role of Britain's cultural guardian very seriously. When one member said that he felt like “a crazy weather vane in a storm” the controller of sound broadcasting replied: “No one is more alive than I to the need to buttress the forces of virtue against the unprincipled elements of the jungle.”

If Celine Dion had been around during the Second World War, she would have been silenced by the Dance Music Committee. One 1942 directive read: “We have recently adopted a policy of excluding sickly sentimentality which, particularly when sung by certain vocalists, can become nauseating and not at all in keeping with what we feel to be the need of the public in this country in the fourth year of war.” Now a range of discs noted for their “unprincipled elements of the jungle” have been collected by the Radio Merseyside DJ Spencer Leigh on a CD called Not to be Broadcast, released this month. Some of the subject matter deemed unsuitable for broadcast now seems frankly bizarre.

“The head of religious broadcasting was a bit of a tyrant,” Leigh says. “Don Cornell's Hold My Hand, which was a No 1 in 1954, was banned because he didn't think a relationship with a girl could be likened to the ‘Kingdom of Heaven'. So when Cornell came to the UK, and the BBC wanted to record him in concert, the HRB rewrote the offending lines himself. Cornell sang ‘the kingdom of heaven is at hand' anyway, and the committee was mortified.”

Times Archive, 1985: Relax, it's only a rock group

'The BBC believes the lyrics are not suitable for a show with a family audience'

God-bothering was out until the mid-Sixties, which meant that Billy Fury's gorgeous My Christmas Prayer had no airplay. Equally sinful, in the committee's eyes, was having the audacity to reshape a classical tune into something more swinging. One barbarian at the gates was Perry Como: I'm Always Chasing Rainbows was his rendition of Chopin's Fantasie Impromptu in C sharp minor. “This is a bad perversion of a Chopin melody and should be barred,” the BBC snarled, and, even in 1963, they stopped Ken Dodd's cover version from being broadcast.

The reason for this was the place on the committee of the conductor Sir Arthur Bliss. His wrath was incurred by such unlikely revolutionaries as Liberace and Mantovani, and the score of Kismet, borrowed from Borodin, which meant that MOR standards such as Stranger in Paradise and Baubles, Bangles and Beads were rarely heard. Bliss was a particularly stormy weather vane: while he considered Tony Bennett's version of Stranger in Paradise to be sufficiently tasteful (it reached No 1), the Four Aces' sprightlier version was out of bounds. Meanwhile, kids with flick knives were slashing cinema seats at screenings of Blackboard Jungle.

I can sympathise with the Four Aces. In the mid-Nineties I was given the chance to run my own record label, Emidisc, funded by EMI. Our hopes for a No 1 were pinned on a group called Denim. Their single was called Summer Smash and possessed a tune so hook-laden that Björn would have butchered Benny for it. Mark and Lard, Radio 1's breakfast show hosts at the time, made it their Single of the Week; Summer Smash seemed destined for the same route.

An early morning car wreck in Paris led to an airplay ban; EMI then pulled the single from the shops in deference to the Princess of Wales and Dodi, and Chumbawamba's Tubthumping became the million-selling seasonal hit. Nobody was suggesting that Summer Smash had Nostrodamus-like qualities. Simple bad timing, in the modern day, is most likely to lead to a BBC ban.

During the first Gulf War, Massive Attack had to abbreviate their name to Massive, while Bomb the Bass were renamed Tim Simenon in case anyone listening to their new single felt that they were being ordered to blow up RAF Brize Norton. John Lennon's Imagine was also on the BBC's Gulf War blacklist as was Lulu's 1969 Eurovision winner, Boom Bang a Bang.

BBC bans used to be so much simpler. “Death, drugs, sex and swearing” were the four no-nos when Mike Read was a Radio 1 DJ. The Small Faces' Here Come the Nice, a tribute to their dealer, featured the rather unambiguous line “he's always there when I need some speed”, yet somehow evaded the censors. The Smoke's My Friend Jack, Read recalls, wasn't so fortunate. “The chorus was ‘My friend Jack eats sugarlumps' and the band tried to cover it up by pretending it was about a horse. People didn't recognise the terminology on Here Comes the Nice, but there was an awareness of lysergic acid. People knew those sugar lumps were not Tate & Lyle's.” Lou Reed's Walk on the Wild Side was a single of the week on David Hamilton's afternoon show in 1973, in spite of it mentioning “giving head”. Years later, Mike Read played it on Radio 1 once and was told: “We don't play that record any more.” “‘Why not?' I asked. Mr Naive! I had to go and ask somebody. I mean, I knew about the action, but I hadn't heard anyone use that phrase.”

Out, too, was Frankie Goes to Hollywood's Relax, which Read famously declared “disgusting” on air, leading to an unofficial Radio 1 ban. “People might now say: ‘Fancy banning that,' but you're talking 1984. At the time I had a high profile, I was the face of children's TV. There was a picture of a phallus on the back of the sleeve. But the real reason it was banned was because of the video, which featured simulated buggery and urinating into people's mouths - I don't think they'd allow that on children's TV in 2008 either.”

There's a solid argument that banning a record can help its chart chances as well as hinder them. Relax reached No 1 after Read voiced his disapproval. But it wasn't the first record to top the chart after receiving a BBC ban. Johnnie Ray's Such a Night was a marvellous morning-after reverie that left little to the imagination, and rightly reached No 1 in 1954.

The BBC's ban led to heated debate on the NME letters page. “Judging by their censoring, one would think that they got left behind from the Victorian era,” laughed one. “It is a well-known fact that the public rushed to buy Such a Night on hearing of its ban. I know several people who bought it for that reason alone!” The BBC has never been happy to acknowledge its authoritarian side. When the Beverley Sisters poked fun at airplay policy on We Have to be So Careful in the 1950s their pleas that it was a parody were met with silence. Beeb-baiting goes back to Norman Long's 1932 single We Can't Let You Broadcast That (which, of course, they didn't).

Now, swearing before the watershed seems as inoffensive as Don Cornell's Hold My Hand. “In a way you could argue that it's gone too far” Spencer Leigh says. “I quite like it that on local radio you still don't get four-letter words.” In 2008, it seems the only thing left for the BBC to ban is censorship.

This Record Must Not Be Broadcast: Banned By The BBC is out on August 25 on Acrobat Records

The censor's choice

Billie Holiday: Gloomy Sunday (1941)

Judas Priest were up in court in 1990 accused of driving fans to suicide; there's little doubt this song, with lines such as “My heart and I have decided to end it all”, was the real deal. Its composer, Rezso Seres, threw himself from a window.

Frankie Laine: Answer Me (1953)

“Answer me, Lord above,” sobbed Frankie; the BBC's head of religious broadcasting thought it “a sentimental mockery of Christian prayer”. David Whitfield rushed out a cover omitting the offending lines, and both versions got to No 1.

The Byrds: Eight Miles High (1966)

Indeed it was about a trip, but the writer, Gene Clark, had his fear of flying and a miserable few days in London on his mind rather than anything more psychedelic. The BBC, and most American radio stations, refused to believe him.

The Sex Pistols: God Save the Queen (1977) Even the title of the song was airbrushed from the airwaves, while the chart compilers BMRB have long been accused of keeping it at No 2 during Jubilee week to avoid embarrassing the royals.

D Mob: We Call It Acieed (1988)

Acid house was consuming the nation's youth, and this rather silly hit was apparently the culprit. Legislation was eventually introduced to ban “repetitive beats” in the open air.