So “Penny Lane” is playing on the office muzak, and Paul mentions “fish and finger pie”- there is literally no other meaning to ‘finger pie’, other than ‘fingerbang’, (even according to the Wikipedia page of the song) and they throw in a mention of fish, just in case you had any doubts to the meaning. That this was played on radio, and a top ten hit, in the mid-1960’s to me is quite astonishing.
I also distinctly recall my AM station playing an unedited version of Walk on the Wild Side, with the line ‘and she never lost her head, even when she was giving head’- in 1973! (or thereabout). How did they miss this?
Current radio is a lot more liberal but up through the 80’s at least, examples like this had to be rare I would think?
It is not “fish and finger pie”. It is “a four of fish”(four referring to four quid for the cost of an order of fried fish" and “finger pie”( a crude schoolboy euphemism for touching a girl’s private parts).
Have you ever listened to the lyrics of “Shake, Rattle, and Roll” by Joe Turner and by Bill Haley and the Comets? There’s only a few ways to interpret “a one-eyed cat peepin’ in a seafood store.” Sexual double entendres in rock and roll have been there since the beginning, literally.
So because it could mean touching the outside of the genitals instead of insertion, that was enough not to censor it? No other radio song of this era comes close to mentioning anything close to heavy petting.
And in the UK at least, radio censors (until not that long ago, that meant the BBC) were perhaps not the most worldly of types. “Lola” by the Kinks famously ran into trouble because it mentioned Coca Cola - an unacceptable reference to a brand name. The fact that it was about a transvestite encounter was (presumably) missed completely. Once Coca was changed to Cherry, everything was good.
You could start a thread on things the censor missed. In fact, you have.
yes, there is a place somewhere online in the vast internet that says it means external petting. There are also places that say it means insertion. Both would be highly inappropriate for AM radio.
Censors deal primarily with actual profanity, not adult themes and situations. If you don’t say (according to one well-known list) shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, or tits, you can describe pretty much anything you wish.
When I heard the song, growing up, I just figured “finger pie” meant it was “finger food”, that you ate without plates or utensils*. Possibly a lot of censors thought the same thing, or figured it was a double entendre that could be rationalized as “clean”…
*Yeah, yeah, I know. Fill in your own dirty joke here.
my error then on the fish part then, but we all three agree that finger pie is single entendre slang for stimulation of the female genitalia, yes? And that that is not a subject usually referenced on 1960’s AM radio?
Well, I’m an American Midwestern boy of a certain age, and I never heard that. I’m aware of ‘fingering’, but never knew ‘finger pie’ was the same thing.
i. A slight correction: “four of fish” meant “fourpennyworth”, not “four quid”. My misremembrance, not Paul’s.
2. While “finger pie” was a euphemism for genital touching, it wasn’t a widely known euphemism and the censors probably though it just another nonsense phrase from a couple of blokes known for making up nonsense phrases.
I strongly suspect that this is the explanation. Yes, you can look up any potentially naughty term online NOW, and see what it means, but censors back then didn’t have that sort of resource. I suspect that they were looking for the overt use of particular words, and many euphamisms slipped past them, for these very reasons.
It was the 1960s. Rock and roll got away with a lot of stuff they probably wouldn’t get away with before or after them.
It was the Beatles, who could get away with a lot more stuff than, say, the Buckinghams.
I certainly didn’t know what “finger pie” was supposed to mean. I thought it was one of those meat pies the British are supposed to be so fond of.
3A) I suspect a lot of Americans, including a lot of radio station owners, shared my ignorance. The ones who knew either didn’t play the record, or didn’t care.
Even back then, the government didn’t “censor” radio stations over content, unless a bunch of people sent angry letters. We had two rock and roll stations here that lost their FCC licenses during that ear. One of them was to to have run a fraudulent promotion, the owner of the other one was convicted of child molestation. We have an AM station here that is currently under investigation because the “owner” is allegedly a shell corporation hiding the identity of the real owner, who’s a convicted felon.
By the time McCartney got around to explaining the lyrics, the song was already a part of the oldies collection of every radio station in America. It would be no more scandalous than today’s news that your grandmother was three months pregnant when she married your grandfather.
I agree with that- if the specific censor had never heard of finger pie, its use in the context of other foods would make it seem it was a British delicacy- very clever of Paul (or Paul 2, whoever wrote it:))
Kind of like how Snoop Dogg or someone similar invented the word indo to mean pot, and it wasn’t bleeped until word got of what meaning they gave to it, which is silly- if someone starts referring to meth as “pencil”, then we may have songs bleeping pencil.