Though The Beatles were the biggest band in the world in the 1960s, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr still faced censure. Several Beatles songs were banned around the world. One song Lennon wrote did not receive playtime on the radio because some believed it referenced drugs. Lennon rolled his eyes at this interpretation and called the song beautiful.
John Lennon admired a banned Beatles song
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In 1968, The Beatles released “Happiness is a Warm Gun.” Every member of the band was incredibly proud of the song, but some censors were not. The BBC banned the song, believing it referenced heroin use.
“‘Happiness Is A Warm Gun’ was another one which was banned on the radio — they said it was about shooting up drugs. But they were advertising guns and I thought it was so crazy that I made a song out of it,” Lennon said in The Beatles Anthology. “It wasn’t about ‘H’ at all. George Martin showed me the cover of a magazine that said: ‘Happiness is a warm gun.’ I thought it was a fantastic, insane thing to say. A warm gun means you’ve just shot something!”
Though the BBC banned the song, it was one of Lennon’s favorites. He said he loved it.
“I think it’s a beautiful song,” he said, adding, “I like all the different things that are happening in it. I had put together three sections of different songs, it seemed to run through all the different kinds of rock music.”
Paul McCartney admired the work John Lennon did on the Beatles song
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McCartney did not write “Happiness is a Warm Gun,” but it was still one of his favorite songs.
“It’s a favorite of mine … It was an advert in a gun magazine,” McCartney said on Radio Luxembourg (via The White Album Project). “And it was so sick, you know, the idea of ‘Come and buy your killing weapons,’ and ‘Come and get it.’ But it’s just such a great line, ‘Happiness Is A Warm Gun’ that John sort of took that and used that as a chorus. And the rest of the words… I think they’re great words, you know. It’s a poem. And he finishes off, ‘Happiness Is A Warm Gun, yes it is.’”
He believed the lyrics were “good poetry.”
Lennon had several other banned songs
“Happiness is a Warm Gun” was not the only Lennon song to be banned from the airwaves. “A Day in the Life,” which Lennon wrote with McCartney, could not have playtime on the BBC because of the line “I’d love to turn you on.” McCartney wrote the line knowing people could interpret it as being about drugs or sex.
“We have listened to this song over and over again,” a BBC spokesperson said (per Rolling Stone). “And we have decided that it appears to go just a little too far, and could encourage a permissive attitude to drug-taking.”
Other banned Lennon songs included “Cold Turkey,” “Come Together,” “Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds,” and “I Am the Walrus.”
