Obscure Prog Facts

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   I might be wrong with this one as I'm not an english language native but here's my guess. 
This is another one about Spain's Prog in the dark years of Franco's dictatorship in the early 70's (and again about the band Iceberg by the way).
There was a lot of censorship in those times, anything too "modern" or libertarian would be censored. Swearing words were also censored from any public writing or play.
Some artists looked for escape in writing or singing or playing in english or other languages. At that time there were not many people in Spain who could speak english (or other languages for what matters), let alone the censors.

So when writing in english, artists could be a bit more free. For sure the texts would go under the scrutiny of censors, but frequently the censors did not really master the language and they would only notice obvious expressions or words.

The great fusion band Iceberg in their 1975 debut album Tutankhamon (their only one with lyrics) wanted to include the f*ng word in the lyrics of Lying On The Sand, but to avoid it being censored they spelled it as fakin' so that censors would not get it, and apparently it worked because it went to print in the original LP sleeve, which I have and show below.

Now, I know that "Fakin" has some slang meanings nowadays but as far as I can tell they would not apply to this case, and remember that this was 1975's Spain. So I guess that my interpretation of why Fakin' appears here is the right one.

Edited by Gerinski - January 29 2012 at 15:26