Bad vibraciones! The pop songs Franco didn’t want Spain to hear

From Bob Dylan’s Just Like a Woman to John Lennon’s Imagine and the Beach Boys’ Good Vibrations, the fascist regime’s censors found the strangest reasons to prohibit certain records

For visitors to easy-going, freewheeling Spain, where same-sex marriage is legal and a third of children are born out of wedlock, it’s hard to believe that only 40 years ago it was a fascist dictatorship in the grip of a moral code laid down by the Catholic church.

Immediately after General Franco came to power in 1939, books, newspapers, radio broadcasts, theatre and all other cultural activity was censored. The explosion of pop music in the 1960s and the growing permissiveness reflected in song lyrics and album covers meant the censors had their work cut out.

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