"We always had the confidence that we were something special"
SHINY ENOUGH TO HAVE THEIR OWN COMIC STRIP AND POTENTIAL TV SITCOM, HAIRCUT 100 WERE ALSO AN ODD MIX OF SIX DIVERSE PERSONALITIES, INCORPORATING POST-PUNK, JAZZ, BRAZILIAN RHYTHMS AND MARTIAL ARTS MOVIE SOUNDTRACKS INTO ONE POP MASTERCLASS. EVEN 40 YEARS AFTER THE ORIGINAL LINEUP’S ONLY ALBUM TOGETHER, THERE’S STILL NOTHING QUITE LIKE PELICAN WEST . AS THE BAND REUNITE FOR A ONE-OFF SHOW TO CELEBRATE A NEW BOXSET, THEY REVEAL: “THERE WAS AN ENERGY IN HAIRCUT 100 THAT WE ALL MANAGED TO HARNESS. WE WERE LIKE A COMET.”
JOHN EARLS
The more that anyone looks at Haircut 100, the less sense they seem to make. The band made brilliant pop music with Love Plus One, Favourite Shirts (Boy Meets Girl) and Fantastic Day, delirious singles that hold up against any other smashes of 1982’s perfect chart year.
Parent album Pelican West was only kept from No.1 by Barbra Streisand’s Love Songs and Haircut 100 had their own devoted fan army, The Scissors. Alongside Adam Ant, they were the sole pop turn colourful enough to receive their own comic strip in kid’s TV magazine, Look-in. Like Madness, they even had a sitcom pilot drawn up.
And yet... just look at them. There are six people in Haircut 100 for a start, a band musically rich enough to require a saxophonist and a percussionist alongside the usual guitar/bass/drums formula. The more you listen to Lemon Firebrigade and the dizzying Kingsize (You’re My Little Steam Whistle), the more layers there are to unpack. Everyone knows “Where does it go from here?/ Is it down to the lake I fear?”, yet Love Plus One’s chorus is just one of Nick Heyward’s mighty lyrics, simultaneously immediate and inexplicable.
They were a cult sensation in North America, predating Ralph Lauren’s reinterpretation of the English gentleman look for a Stateside audience. This was a band as likely to wear cricket jumpers or sou’westers, while also musically inventing Blur’s mix of nostalgia and modernism a decade early.
Haircut 100 were as unfathomable as they were magnificent. And, five decades on, Pelican West still sounds bloody magnificent. “We were a blank canvas for everyone to do their stuff on,” theorises Nick. “I’d come up with songs to inspire everyone else to get colouring them in. Everyone played their role.” Jazz-loving bassist Les Nemes admits: “It’s only recently that I realised we had our own sound. But we never questioned that we were going to succeed. We never said: ‘If we make it,’ it was always: ‘When we make it.’ We always had the confidence that we were something special.”
Guitarist Graham Jones, an experienced punk who
