Hurr
If I was a teenager today, I would try for a Liam Gallagher / Ian Brown hairstyle. My hair is a statement and always will be, even when I no longer have any. I'll probably have my head tattooed.
Upon my mother's mantelpiece there is a photo of me with a haircut which was imposed upon me by my parents. Their idea of the only acceptable haircut for a male was very short at the back, very short at the sides and parted on the left, with the front swept to the side, rather in the manner of people attempting to conceal a bald patch. To this day, my mother will point to the fading evidence and pronounce, "That's how I really liked you", and it genuinely is true to say that she has never really liked me since it went away.
In schools, even today, hair is of tremendous significance to those in power. Although there is no reason to believe that it is true, leaders in schools think that an unconventional hairstyle is a sign of evil. That this is false is plain to see. For example, I myself am a fine upstanding citizen with no criminal or anti-social tendencies, but I have tended towards confrontational hairstyles ever since I have had a choice. Currently, it's the only thing possible, a pony tail. This does mean often being derided for trying to be an ageing trendy, but it still demonstrates the required attitude of rebelling against convention. Daft really, in view of how deeply conventional I am.
Of youngsters I have known, those with the Mohicans and the green gel have turned into the most gentle and responsible family men while many of those with the most "appropriate" haircuts have turned into hardened criminals and wife-beaters. My own children are divided: Annabel would dearly love me to be look "like everyone else's dad" and if I felt that I was causing her genuine embarrassment, I would cut it off. However, it seems that enough of her friends think I'm "cool" for her to be prepared to tolerate it. Lucy, on the other hand, specifically does NOT want me to look "like everyone else's dad". She looks tearful every time I suggest any kind of change. As for my wife Birgit, she doesn't show any sign of not wanting to be seen with me. We all enjoy knocking people's preconceptions and I know that many people have uttered the words, "He's actually quite nice really, despite the mess he looks". Mess! It's not easy to maintain an image, I can tell you.
I can trace the beginning of my personal hairstyle revolution to a front page story in the Gloucester "Citizen". Terry Dene, a Fifties rocker so obscure he doesn't even appear in the index of "Beat Merchants", became involved in a fracas in a Westgate Street coffee bar prior to his show at the Regal. The locals were so outraged that I started to be interested in the image of Dene and contemporaries such as Billy Fury and Marty Wilde. I began to gather the existence of strange and wonderful things known as Square Cuts and Bostons, both of which were ways of arranging the back of your head (which you never actually saw outside of a very uncomfortable procedure involving holding up one mirror behind you whilst squinting into another held up in front of you).
My mother had heard of these dangerous options, so it was impossible to ask for them in her presence. Every few weeks, she would take me into Stroud to the barber's shop. I worked out a method which entailed going ahead to the barbers on my own while Mother chatted to a lady in the wool shop. In this way, I could be ensconced in the seat and have already requested the crucial variation "Boston please, Bob") before she arrived. Obsessed as they were with the parting and its position, my parents would never be aware of my Boston. Invisible to them, to me it was everything.
To Jack Farley it was everything too, but in quite a different way. Jack Farley was my mathematics teacher. He was a small person who had come originally from Cornwall and thus had a strong accent which was ideal for imitating and grossly exaggerating by his pupils. Jack was obsessed with preventing anyone else from having hair with any kind of style, and would relentlessly pursue anyone whose neck or ears were sullied by anything more than millimetre-length bristles. His catch-phrase was: " Yoo, boooy! Git yore hurrrr kott!", which would ring out along the echoey, disinfectant-smelling corridors all break and every lunchtime.
The morning after my first successful duping of my innocent mother into not noticing that my haircut had deviated from the norm, I entered school with the completely justified fear that Jack Farley would not be similarly deceived. I was right: Jack Farley's life was dedicated to spotting such perversions.
"Grayyyy, booooy," I heard from a number of yards behind me . "Uzz thutt a Squayur Kott?!"
"What do you mean, Sir?", I offered, in an attempt to appear innocent.
"Down't playy gaymezz with mee, booooy. That izz oyther a Squayer Kott or a Bozzton."
It needs to be said at this point that Jack Farley very probably didn't really speak like a cross between Hermann Goering and a member of the Wurzels, but that's how he sounded when we imitated him, and that's how he will live forever. And so....
"And what'z moore: You appearrrre to be growin' yore soide whusskerz."
Beneath the terror, I felt a faint stirring of pride. In my just post-pubescent state, there was no conceivable chance of growing genuine Soide Whusskerz; however, many hours of combing small strands of hair (which actually wanted to grow behind my ears) in front of them had obviously had the desired effect, at least upon Jack Farley. He actually thought I was growing my Soide Whusskerz! My defeat (for him) was a triumph (for me)!
That night, the back-of-head mirror sprung into action and Plan B was adopted. It was important that Jack Farley should think I had been back to the hairdressers as he had ordered me to do, so the Squayer Kott had somehow to remain in a form which was acceptable to my peers as being one, but would appear to Jack to have been removed. It was hard, but it was possible. Similarly, the Soide Whusskerz had to be slicked back in such a way that Jack would think they had been shaved off, but so that they would in fact still be available to be retrieved and reinstated on the way to the bus station and in time to impress the girls of St. Peters on the bus. And I managed it!
Over the coming months (the Beatles had arrived) something akin to civil disobedience occurred at school. It became impossible for Jack Farley to size up everyone's Hurr. His head would have had to spin permanently through 360 degrees. He was forced to move on to ensuring that the Hurr didn't actually CUVVURR the EARZZ. Which was, of course, the frontier that we would aim at pushing back next.
The next stage in my permanently ongoing hair fixation was determined by fan-worship of Tony Hicks. Tony Hicks is the lead guitarist of the Hollies. He always did have the world's best hairstyle and he still does. This is a very rare and precious gift.
When I first became interested in the Hollies, Tony had a hairstyle which, for the time, was perfect in its appropriateness for what he was doing (playing inspiredly casual lead guitar and singing harmony backup vocals in a combo which at the time (prior to monstrosities such as "Jennifer Eccles") had considerable credibility. His hair (as displayed on the cover of "Stay With The Hollies", their first album) was coiffed into an exquisitely Brylcreem-sculpted Eddie Cochran quiff which somehow didn't look like a teddy-boy. This contrasted with his colleague Graham Nash, who had a virtually identical style and an even more goofy grin, but merely looked a twat. For me it was crucial to be a Tony Hicks and not a Graham Nash. Whatever the elusive magic was, I had to have it.
Actually acquiring a "Tony Hicks" was quite out of the question, since, unlike a Square Cut or a Boston, it would have been impossible to disguise. But luckily, fate took a hand in the form of Beatlemania and the invention of the Beatle cut.
You can trace on Beatles photos the arrival of the Mop Top style (in early photos they all sport teddy-boy quiffs), and all contemporary bands not destined for obscurity followed with alacrity. My style guru Tony Hicks adopted what to this day I consider to be the quintessential hairstyle by changing to a mop top which genuinely looked like a mop, i.e. it tumbled floppily (Flop Top?) from the apex of his crown to lie in a symmetrical sugar bowl style which needed no cosmetics or attention to keep it in perfect shape. I could almost surmise that he didn't even comb it, such was its casually impeccable state at the end of lengthy energetic live performances; on the other hand, I don't believe that Tony Hicks has sweat glands, actually.
But why am I using the past tense? Tony Hicks is still performing and he still has the same sublime head of hair (plus, no doubt, an ageing portrait in the attic). This desirable crowning glory can be viewed to best effect on the sleeve of the Hollies' 1966 album "For Certain Because", but when the Hollies are next billed to play in your town, have a closer look at the fly posters. There, under the spotlight, stage right, clutching the cherry-red guitar, you'll see the mildly-flattened hamster that is the quintessential "Tony Hicks". And Graham Nash? Wouldn't you know it? He KEPT HIS QUIFF! That is, until he joined Crosby, Stills and Nash, but that's another story.
I worked hard on my Tony Hicks and naively believed that I approximately attained it; photos from this Sixth Form era reveal, however, that I was far, far away. The problem was the lack of texture and substance and a horrifying propensity for irritating little wispy, curly bits spoiling the overall picture. It wasn't until John Yorke came into my life that I learned a bit about how to tackle "butterflies".

Beginning university was quite a culture shock. For a start, I met John Vincent Yorke.
I'm not sure about the concept of retrospective respect, but John is due for some on account of something I didn't find out until recently. I knew that he had attended Eltham Green School and been expelled from it. I now know that these are two things he had in common with Boy George. John, anyway, was a wide boy who had sussed that he could get a year's free dossing at university before being asked to leave, and it seemed a pretty good option to him. So, nominally studying Sociology, he never actually attended any lectures or seminars or wrote any essays. John was free to party all night and spend all day sleeping and "smoothing".
Smoothing was a word invented by John and it meant a complicated but vital procedure necessary for attaining the perfect hairstyle. Its purpose was to eliminate "butterflies", which are those hated little wispy bits referred to earlier. The (correct) premise was that all butterflies must be killed at all costs and that if it took time, it took time. The derivation of the word was connected with the intended smoothness of the hair and the smoothness (= hipness) of its possessor.
So here's how to get rid of butterflies. First wash your hair carefully, rinsing several times. Dry very lightly, using a towel. During this process, take strands of hair between folds of the towel and pull down slowly but firmly from the top of the head to the end of the hair. Then switch on the hair dryer. Using a specially purchased round hairbrush, insert it kind of underneath the hair above the ears and very slowly draw the hair down to the ends with the brush, applying the dryer (set on medium heat) all the while. Just as you reach the bottom, gently twist the brush one more time towards the head, thus ensuring that the ends curl inwards, if at all. On no account may they curl outwards; the optimal result, of course, is complete straightness. Repeat the entire procedure all round for at least forty-five minutes or until hair is completely dry. Do not on any account go out in the rain or the wind, or all your work will be wasted.
Tony Hicks, of course, steps straight out of the shower and achieves all this without any effort. Bastard.
John Yorke taught me how to do this and in our rooms we would spend Saturday afternoons preparing for the evening ahead. Favourites to emulate at the time were various Small Faces, the Action and, distressingly, in retrospect, Tich (out of Dave Dee, Dozy...), because they not only had no butterflies but also sported a little backcombed bit at the crown of the head, like a kind of fluffy skullcap. John was adept at creating one of these, but the shape of my head meant that it just refused to work on me. John was a Mod and I would initially have been interested in going in that direction, I suppose, but I was relieved that we were on the cusp of the transfer into general long-hairedness as a fashion. This meant that butterfly eradication was sufficient and that I didn't need to get into armache-inducing backcombing sessions.
So off we would go to the Saturday night gigs and do the little Mod dance which involved shuffling of feet, clicking of fingers but very little shaking of heads. The music came from the Mike Cotton Sound, Herbie Goins and the Nighttimers or Geno Washington, and we thought the girls would be irresistibly attracted by our butterfly-free zones. Sometimes they were, but I didn't go as far as John, who refused to let girls run their hands through his hair for fear of disturbing it.
John had found his perfect hairstyle and stuck with it, but I was consumed with the desire for flowing locks and therefore continued to apply the anti-butterfly technology whilst growing the hair as fast as I could. I think I felt that the downward-stroking motions would make it grow faster, almost as if you could pull it out from an endless internal source (you can do this with a strimmer, did you know?). I now had new heroes to follow, in the form of Glenn, Trevor and Miles, two incredibly cool sociology students onto whom I latched. Both had perfectly straight, perfectly-smoothed shoulder-length hair and Miles had no surname. This later made me wonder whether he could have turned into Miles, the surnameless rock journalist, but I suppose we shall never know. One of my proudest possessions is a photo of me, Glenn, Trevor and Miles setting off to a Fairport Convention gig in Colchester. There is no wind and no rain and we all look spectacular. Just for that photo, it was worth all the effort. Unfortunately, the album also contains countless crap photos of interest only to lepidopterists.
So what became of John Yorke? He got a job packing records at Virgin Mail Order and was subsumed into the record industry, an ideal place for a lazy, vain, charming wastrel with flair. I only saw him a couple more times, but his anti-butterfly technique has been with me ever since.

No one will be surprised to hear that this interest made any meaningful further relationship with my parents a total impossibility. The shame of being associated with me was to much for them to bear, so they requested that I should come home as little as possible. It was fortunate that I was due for my year "abroad", a device which to the university authorities meant improving my standard of German but to me meant a glorious nine months of total turpitude.
I met Jochen Schmidt in the queue at the University of Kiel accommodation office, which meant that we ended up sharing a flat. Jochen, like all young Germans, had just completed his national service and thus was short-haired. Being similarly obsessed with musicians and their appearance, he aimed to change this as soon as possible, and thus was very keen to take lessons from me on the subject of smoothing. Outrageous as it may seem, in view of the fact that we were so poor that we could pay for no heating, transport and hardly any food, we spent our virtually non-existent cash on a HAIR-DRYER! And we never for a moment questioned the wisdom of such an action.
If I thought I was vain, Jochen Schmidt had me beaten hands down. In his ability to spend entire days in front of a mirror with hair dryer in one hand and brush in the other, he made John Yorke look like an amateur. He did, however, go to extremes. For instance, he refused point blank to set foot outside the flat if it was raining or snowing. This, in the bleak northern European climate of Schleswig-Holstein, was a real problem. There was also the little matter that the flat had no source of hot water, so every smoothing session had to be irrigated by an endless sequence of saucepans of boiling water (since the Germans have an aversion to kettles). Theupshot of this was that the flat was permanently filled with condensation, resulting in freezing, damp beds and windows which were impossible to look out of.
The place to be and the place to be seen in Kiel was the Spektrum Club, now sadly a carpet shop. The DJ there was Paul Raven, later better known as Gary Glitter, although he can't have made much impression on me. All I can remember about Spektrum was many hours spent on the dance floor doing nothing but shake my hair. In contrast to the UEA hops, it was here important to be rooted to one spot on the floor and move nothing but the head, the feel of the flapping of the hair being a reassurance that it was indeed there and that one was indeed as hip as one thought one was. Jochen Schmidt and I would stand there and sway from midnight until three o'clock in the morning.The soundtrack was the then currently fashionable sort of track which lasted the whole side of an album, such as Iron Butterfly's In A Gadda Da Vida, various extended James Brown workouts and, curiously for a band noted for its brevity, an endless version of Suzie Q (Parts 1 & 2), by Creedence Clearwater Revival. Later, we would repair to Club 68, where we would sit cross-legged in corners and hope that girls would think we looked mysterious and intellectual. Jochen must have looked more mysterious and intellectual than me, because he would take far more girls back to the soggy sheets than I managed to. Maybe it was partly because I had an embarrassing tendency to fall asleep in the Club 68 and get thrown out.
The band that we worshipped was Free. Tonsorially speaking, it was hard to justify this, because the band was a hairstyle disaster area, with only one member out of four being really well-smoothed. Andy Fraser, the bassist, had an awful poodle-cut, singer Paul Rodgers' locks, though long and flowing, were coarse and unacceptably wavy, while Paul Kossoff....well, no wonder he got himself a drug habit. Drummer Simon Kirke, however, was the man. His hair was blonde, straight as a dye and fell forward to completely obscure his facial features as he walloped his drums in a wonderful minimalist fashion which has never really been given the acknowledgement it is due. That was what we were trying to look like as we swayed on the dance floor, and do you know, we probably didn't do badly.
One fantastic Tuesday evening, Free played live at the Spektrum club. It was the first time I heard "All Right Now". The entire band looked hopelessly out of it and played like angels. On the way home, I became involved in a bizarre episode which involved getting arrested for fly-posting. It was a genuine mistake, since what I was actually doing was the opposite, i.e. REMOVING a poster of Free from a wall in order to put it up in my bedroom. When all this was explained, I was released amidst much hilarity.
The next weekend, we hitched to Copenhagen and ended up in the Tivoli pleasure gardens. Eager for further pleasure, we tried to impress some young girls by taking them repeatedly on the Big Dipper, but eventually impressed them much more by pretending to be members of Free on a night off from their European tour. Dark-haired Jochen Schmidt, slightly dishevelled from repeated goes on the "Ruschebeen", was Paul Rodgers and I, of course, was Simon Kirke. Just for one night, we got a mild feel for what it must have been like to be in a pop group, because yes, the girls believed it and yes, they were impressed. Once again, smoothing had proved its worth.
Twenty-five years on, Jochen Schmidt still lives in Kiel, still smoothing by day and grooving by night. He also still listens to the same records, which include "Those About To Die" by Colosseum, "A Doughnut In Granny's Greenhouse" by the Bonzo Dog Band, and Bakerloo, by (wait for it) Bakerloo. This little-known epic featured Clem Clempson, an excellently-smoothed guitarist, later to appear in Humble Pie and Colosseum. An original copy of this album is priceless; luckily, Jochen Schmidt won the National Lottery in 1990 and was able to obtain a mint version to replace the scratched one which I left behind in Kiel.
So, one way and another, nothing much has changed for Jochen Schmidt. The only difference is that his hugely impressive mane is totally white.

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