In the history of the Hottest 100, 1997 was a memorable year.

Australian band The Whitlams took out the top spot with No Aphrodisiac, a slinky piano ballad.

The deeply divisive Tubthumping by Chumbawamba ("I get knocked down, but I get up again …") came in at number three, while Radiohead had two tracks from their career-defining OK Computer in the top 10.

This weekend, the day after the world's biggest music poll, Double J is replaying that Hottest 100 from 20 years ago.

But there's one song on that list that won't be broadcast. Two decades on, radio stations still can't play it for you — and that's what makes it so memorable.

The history of a banned song

"Back Door Man was a track essentially made for a party," Simon Hunt, a lecturer at UNSW School of Art and Design, told Double J.

You might know Mr Hunt better by his stage name: Pauline Pantsdown.

"We brought the track into triple j and by that night it was the number one request on air and it stayed that way for nine days."

The song was a mash-up of bits of recorded speech by Pauline Hanson, who at the time was the fairly newly installed federal member for Oxley and a politician developing quite a profile for her conservative views.

"I took a lot of her speeches [and] rearranged her voice so that she was like a proud gay activist intolerant of anybody who wasn't gay," Hunt said.

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The song was played on triple j for about a week, at which point Senator Hanson took the ABC to court, demanding they stop broadcasting it.

Hanson's lawyers claimed the song, "gave rise to imputations that she is a homosexual, a prostitute, involved in unnatural sexual practices, associated with the Ku Klux Klan, a man and/or a transvestite and involved in or party to sexual activities with children".

"The court documents, they basically took it literally — they said people will believe this is actually Pauline Hanson," Hunt said.

"The court document says: 'The song imputes that the plaintiff is a potato, which is understood to be a word associated with a male engaged in sexual acts with another male'. That was a brand new definition of potato."

The courts eventually sided with the politician, granting Senator Hanson an injunction, but by that point the song had become very popular. It was voted into the Hottest 100 for 1997 at fifth place.

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But triple j couldn't play it during the countdown.

The ABC appealed against the injunction. It had said the whole thing wasn't so bad because when triple j's announcers introduced the song they made it clear it was satirical and not meant to be taken seriously.

The appeal was dismissed in 1998.

In the words of the Chief Justice of the Queensland Court of Appeal: "These were grossly offensive imputations relating to the sexual orientation and preference of a member of parliament and her performance which [Senator Hanson] in no degree supports as accurate and which were paraded as part of an apparently fairly mindless effort at cheap denigration."

The song has not been broadcast since — and it won't be broadcast when the Hottest 100 of 1997 is replayed this weekend.

The long tale of the Hanson-Pantsdown case

In fact, it might have put a bit of a dampener on political satire more generally in Australia, which has some of the toughest defamation laws in the world.

"A lot of lawyers were surprised that Pauline Hanson won that case," Peter Bartlett, a partner at the law firm Minter Ellison, recalls.

"Since that decision you have not seen the same level of satire appearing in the mainstream media."

Or, at least, much of it has moved online, to places like The Betoota Advocate and the (now defunct) Backburner, both of which were modelled on The Onion.

In response to the controversy in 1997, Hunt released another mash-up, I Don't Like It, and it also ended up becoming a hit, getting nominated for an ARIA and appearing at number 58 in the Hottest 100 of 1998.

It employed the same cut-and-paste tactics — though, notably, avoided the kinds of phrases that would attract the attention of defamation lawyers.