Popuiar Music (1995) Volume 14/3, Copyright © 1995 Cambridge University Press ‘I fought the law’: popular music and British obscenity law MARTIN CLOONAN Introduction In Britain the term ‘obscenity’ has enjoyed a chequered career, Obscene libel first became an offence in 1727 when an erotic book called Venus in the Cloister was found to contravene common law by tending to ‘weaken the bonds of civil society, virtue and morality’ (Robertson 1991, p. 180), Despite this, erotic literature remained freely available throughout the eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century Britain got its first Obscene Publications Act. This came in 1857 and gave the police power to take books before local Justices who could order their forfeiture and destruction. In the R. v Hicklin case of 1868 Chief Justice Cockburn came up with the formula which has influenced the legal definition of obscenity in Britain ever since, when he declared that the test of an obscene article was if it had a tendency to ‘deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall’ (ibid.). This remained the legal test of obscenity until a new Act in 1959 (see below). Whether Cockburn thought music could fall into such a category is unrecorded, but British obscenity law has been used against pop and instances of such actions will be outlined here. The main causes célbres in Britain concerning obscenity in the twentieth century have tended to centre around literary works. For example, D.H. Lawr- ence's The Rainbow was destroyed in 1915 and Radelyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness suffered the same fate in 1928. In 1961 came the Lady Chatterley's Lover case where the acquittal seemed to herald a new wave of liberalism. The Oz trial of 1971 saw initial convictions for obscenity overturned on appeal and the 1976 acquittal of Inside Linda Lovelace seemed to have brought an end to prosecutions of books for which any literary merit could be shown. Ironically it was just after this that attempts to prosecute pop for being obscene began in Britain, Obscenity and pop In more recent times attempts to silence pop via obscenity legislation in America have received a great deal of coverage (see, for example: Denselow 1989, pp. 262- 73; Savage 1990; Wells 1990; Toop 1991), but similar attempts in Britain have received scant attention. It is this lack of attention I aim to rectify here (for more rectification see Cloonan 1993). I shall do this by concentrating on two areas: first, 349