The irrational band hatreds thread has been jolly interesting and amusing. I note that “interesting” hair is SO OVER. I must say, it always looked suspect to me, and the more “interesting”, the more suspect it was. A regular spikey top, mullet, or quiff, ok. But once it gets like Fruitbat, George Clinton’s crackpipe stage, Robert Smith’s current pissed gran-do, or weird shavings and colours … I’m not saying I didn’t have any of these, but the way of wisdom after 22 is a sensible barnet. An awful lot of weak music seems to be created when the dodgy rug is kidding you that you are an unrecognised genius with 3 chords and the truth aiming to wow the girls who listen to John Peel.
“Interesting” hair
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Ah, Absolutely – a great comedy series that sadly doesn’t come up enough in conversation or popular culture.
Frank Hovis made me laugh like a fool, and Howard and Donald had some brilliantly surreal wordplay. Morwenna Banks is now doing voices on Peppa Pig and co-writing the adaptation of Slow Horses, so is presumably doing very well indeed.
If you found someone who liked it, it was a bit like a playground Monty Python conversation. I had a good friendship with someone in the 80s that started with a shared love of the Stoneybridge tourist video.
Donald & George had their own spin-off show, Mr Don and Mr George!
Get tae Falkirk!!
Barmy barnets. I give you exhibit A, m’lud.
Classic prannet
Prannet or gannet?
The Flock (Flockers? Seagulls?) will always win any silly haircut contest, but Wishing is a terrific song, and I Ran isn’t too shabby either.
He was making the most of what he had before it all disappeared, which is understandable.
One of the many unfathomable aspects of Trump is why he chooses to sculpt his hair like Mike Score.
In some other universe, there’s a Trump who is passionate about ’80s synth pop and can often be found debating when Depeche Mode’s imperial phase really began and whether the DX7 was the most popular synth.
Depeche Mode’s Speak and Spell album is just terrific, everybody knows that, right? My good friend Nigel tells me he used to hang out with those guys in his hometown, Essex in England. The DX7 was a game-changer, no doubt about it but arguably the piece of synth kit that propelled Depeche into stardom was the Fairlight used on 1983’s Construction Time Again LP and beyond.
Everyone knows this apart from the failing music press and sleepy Joe, who by the way, is still listening to his Jimmy the Hoover records. But those Depeche guys, they became woke and political and I told them back in 1983, guys, you just gotta do more songs like Just Can’t Get Enough! Am I right? And you know what, they told me themselves privately that they should have listened to me. But what can you do?
Make binky-bonk rhythms and gimpy dancing great again!
If I heard the orange hobgoblin ever talk about Jimmy the Hoover, I think my head would actually explode. Bigly.
Sadly, his entire music knowledge seems to begin and end with YMCA.
And can you imagine how his MAGA minions would react to a pic of Martin Gore in his topless-but-with-lace outfits? Or the characters in the Walking in My Shoes video? Their minds would melt.
They’d probably suspect him of being a relative of Al.
Made all the more odd by the fact that Mike Score was a hairdresser before he was a pop star. You’d think he’d know better?
According to Wikipedia, the hairstyle was created when Mike Score was trying to create a Ziggy Stardust look. The bass player was sharing the mirror and when leaning in to use it, put his hand on the top of Mike Score’s head flattening the top and leaving the sides up. I hope this is true.
A Flock of Seagulls were terrific though – much underated. The first album and Wishing are pop gems.
If it wasn’t for daft hair, the world would have missed out on the music of Ned’s Atomic Dustbin.
I’m not really helping, am I?
Quite. How could we have managed?
But…for years I harboured a grudge against Southside Johnny & the Asbury Jukes, mainly as SJ himself, John Lyon, looked so little like a frontman should look, a bit like Mark E. Smith with a greasy haired science teacher vibe. I couldn’t and wouldn’t contemplate him capable of delivering any credible goods, purel on his appearance. (See also irrational and/or secret dislike threads.) In truth I am still a little resistant, altho’ his Tom Waits cover album is in the car, awaiting a listen, perhaps also to bolster my belief that Waits is a good writer, if cursed with a voice that makes Randy Newman seem like Caruso.
It may be a New Jersey thing, as I struggle with Craig Finn as rock star, too.
So, actually, by and large, I reserve the right of performers to have silly hair to show their true calling. I may also snigger at them, but I don’t want them looking like a bank manager or insurance salesman.
“Grapefruit Moon” is a fantastic album, and all the better for not being sung by what my mother-in-law said “sounded like an old tramp”.
Squarecore is difficult; Joe Bonamassa also has that “hip geography teacher”look, and try as they might, the Moody Blues looked like the hippies approved by evangelists. But I quite liked M E Smith in the early days, when his band wore catalogue clothes, rather than expensive Lewis Leathers.
But then there are acts like “Birdland”, three peroxide quiff no-hopers who accused others of being “afraid to rock”, and reciprocally the ex-art student types wittering on about rockism from behind their dole check and parental subsidies – which is where Alana came in.
I now also have considerable reservations about people in weird clothes. Like Sam Smith, the most interesting thing about him (or Leigh Bowery) is the grotesquery. Perhaps I am morphing into Alan Partridge.
Southside just retired actually. He was a brilliant front man and never missed a beat during the many times I saw him.
I can’t believe we’ve got this far without etc…
Check out when it gets ‘ugly’… hair, clothes, graphic design etc. etc.
Nashville Skyline – beautiful / New Morning – ugly.
Paul, Rooftop Concert – beautiful / Paul, Wings – ugly.
Actually, let’s cut to the chase… everything after The Beatles and Jimi, ugly.
This theory (never once proved to have been wrong) saves time, and you will have a spectacular record collection if you stick to it.
Never knew anybody to deliberately and stubbornly miss out on so much great music (and art), and be so proud of it.
In reality I am sure you dress like a new romantic and are grooving to Spandau and Duran every night.
Bowie had some “Interesting” hair phases in his career.
See also Bryan Ferry & Eno in early Roxy Music.
Now, I see Bryan Ferry as a man who had sensible entertainers hair and clothes. I like his tuxedo phase particularly. Eno? Rough as arseholes. Much better once he looked like a grown-up, rather than Riff-Raff (in the “Rocky Horror Show”).
Other than his hippie hair phase – looked unconvincing to me – Bowie’s worst looks were when he was trying to get his mojo back in the dreadful Dame years from 1980 to about 2000. He tried too hard, and the “down with the kids” Tin Machine/ drum n’bass bit was particularly undignified. Not mad about the NIN bit, either. But faultless from ginger mullet to the 1978 tour.
If I was going to be a celeb, Bryan Ferry’s look is one I’d be happy to be compared to. I’m sure if you look up “suave” in The Beginner’s Guide to Dressing Like A Pop Star, the definition is just BF’s picture (with no mention at all of his moustache period, which was a very poor choice – let’s face it, he’s not Tom Selleck when it comes to face furniture).
I’ve never liked acts who come on stage wearing any old tat or look like they’ve been wearing their stage clothes all day. Give me Bryan in a tux with bow tie artfully undone, or Peter Gabriel’s band or Sparks’ extra musicians in similar/identical clobber. C’mon musos, at least look like you’ve made an effort.
Aside – Re: Musicians Making An Effort.
If you’re going to have a grand piano prominent on stage, clean the thing after you’ve moved it into position. Smeary handprints all over a lovely glossy black piano is not a very good look.
At a Max Jaffa show in Scarborough I once saw a pianist tinkle away very impressively at a grand piano. You could clearly see “MCFC”etched out in the lid’s dust.
Which of the rest of us can say we were at a Max Jaffa show in Scarborough, eh?
I never saw Max Jaffa in Scarborough – but I did see Lol Coxhill there (I might have written about it here, years ago…).
Been there but no t-shirt.
Such a fan I’ve visited his house, well walked past it.
I think it was for the benefit of my granny. We also went to see the The Black and White Minstrels. Live.
By the way, the above was a mistype. Having said that, Matt Johnson joining the act and touring as “The The Black & White Minstrels” would be quite a thing to see.
“C’mon musos, at least look like you’ve made an effort.”
But isn’t that edging into…show business? It’s not orfentic, mate.
Orfentism is over-ated.
An orfe recently.
Authenticity – it’s a gas, as the t-shirt and jeans-wearing Pink Floyd nearly sang…
I remember Andrew Collins talking about how men tended to keep the same hairstyle that they settled on in their twenties (assuming they were able to keep the same hair). I remember reading in the 2000s that Japan was full of middle-aged salarymen with the same Techno-pop haircut from the early 80s.
Of course, this can also seen today by the number of men in their mid-50s with the same Indie 90s haircut: Brian Cox, Brett Anderson, Noel Gallagher, Ian Brown etc.
As a bald man, I do wonder how many of these gents have had any assistance maintaining their historic haircuts over the years. I do think Damon Albarn and Jarvis Cocker have had something or other done.
I do think there is a lot of interesting hair in rock, more than there should be given the ratio of bald to non-bold men generally in society. Being a rock star would seem to be the long sought after cure for baldness. Except for Elton.
Nonsense, Elton clearly has a full head of hair. You can see it in every photo of him 😉
Well yes I suppose it is his own hair. He paid good money for it after all.
The most interesting hair, in that hair that really does fascinate me, is the dreadmop of Jeremy Cunningham. Cultivated over many decades, it is often hard to see where it begins and where it ends, as it is extravagantly wrapped around his head, like a massive turban made of thick rope. When it unravels, which is usually does, several times during each show, not only the myriad colours, from red to now grey, become apparent, together with the diminishing points of traction that keep it attached to his head. How the weight of it fails to loosen the grip of those thinning locks that are still attached is a source of some wonder.
As a hirsute man now in my mid-50s, one of the surprises of the first Covid lockdown was my ability to grow a full mop. In my late teens I looked like a ginger Cousin It. I cut that off shortly before graduation and have had variations on short back ‘n’ sides ever since.
I was overdue a haircut in early March 2020 and was able to grow a barnet down towards my shoulders in the months following. I was suprised the foundations could support it – my biological father had a thinning crown by his mid-30s, and the top of my forehead has long since been creeping upwards.
I did cut off the locks as soon as I could, though. All that pulling curtains out of my eyes. Claudia Winkleman must have permanent conjunctivitis.
I do envy you, Fentonsteve. I last had curtains in my eyes at 16. It started vanishing soon after, disguised for a few years by lots of hair spray and backcombing a la Robert Smith).
2016 I finished full time work in the March, previously I’d stopped getting my hair cut in the previous December. By the end of the year I’d a luxurious head of hair, I only got it cut because I had an interview for a part-time job the next year.
I think you may be looking at the wrong side of the family tree, Fents. I heard that when it comes to predicting baldness, it’s your mum’s dad you need to be looking at.
In which case I’m going to turn into my maternal grandfather, which is a rather lovely idea – full head of white hair into his 80s. But I’ll use a lot less Grecian hair oil than he did.
Much better than turning into my biological father, anyhow.
Bald since my twenties I am now eligible for a free NHS wig and I could be tempted by something in a curly perm or afro kinda stylee.
I bought a deluxe Merseybeat wig: but it was a size too big…
On the subject of remarkable hair, I just stumbled across this clip.
Cher’s hair-do is rather impressive.
And the Thin White Duke’s hairdresser has also done him proud.
Bowie is doing an admirable job as an all-round entertainer. In fact they are both in top form.
Which hair came first?
How can we have a thread on “hair bands” without mentioning Finland’s Finest?
I saw the Leningrad Cowboys live in Stockholm with the Red Army Choir back in the 90s.
It was a very hopeful time for the future. The threat picture to Sweden and Finland was non-existent.
Not any more!
Late to the party, but early Split Enz intrigued one with their tonsorial twists – Messrs Finn Snr and Crombie tended to affect barnets that had a young me wonder if they managed to pop down the corner to buy a paper without receiving feedback along the way…
And Bjork was surely a 2000AD reader, with Middenface McNulty being especially influential…