Moving on from my first national pop hit, ‘Hooked’ (as the 99th Floor Elevators) we struggled to come up with a follow up that PWL were happy with, then we finally finished ‘I’ll Be There’ which actually crawled onto the BBC Radio 1 playlist.
Anyway, recently I was browsing through some news archives and stumbled across a piece from the mid 90s in the Independent about how the Beatles had been ‘banned’ from the BBC Radio 1 playlist.
Radio 1 refuses to play `boring’ Beatles
Their John Lennon penned single, ‘Real Love’ , only the second Fab Four single since their split in 1970, despite entering the mid week charts in the top ten, had been left off the playlist to make way for “less established chart names” such as Goldie, Gat Decor and the 99th Floor Elevators.
Paul McCartney went on to say “The Beatles don’t need our new single to be a hit. Its not as if our careers depended on it” Too true of course but still a grin of self satisfaction that something you wrote had a hand in ‘banishing’ the Beatles from the national radio playlist!
The story even made it into the Keith Badman book ‘The Beatles Off The Record Volume 2: The Dream Is Over (Beatles Off the Record)’
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