Throughout the mid-to-late 60s, I needed to battle each literal inch of the best way over the matter of lengthy hair. As I practised being Mick Jagger earlier than the bed room mirror, it was all the time on the understanding that, inside hours, I could be in entrance of that very same mirror after a parentally-dictated journey to the barber.
No quantity of backcombing, pulling or purposes of a thickening gel referred to as Dippety-Do may disguise the brutal shearing. I’d be left making the perfect of a foul job, sprucing up for a Saturday night time of raging pubescent hormones and perspiration.
At a time when a letter in a tabloid newspaper advocated a regulation that made short-back-and-sides obligatory for males, it will make my day – truly, my whole month – if some wit bellowed “Get yer ’air reduce!” from a passing automobile. I wasn’t insulted; I used to be proud.
Throughout my profession as a pupil at a boys’ grammar college close to Aldershot, a pal was held quick whereas his nape-length locks had been hacked off by one of many keener members of the obligatory Mixed Cadet Drive, protected within the data that he’d obtain little greater than an amused scolding from the deputy headmaster. When a civilian youth was topic to a equally enforced chop by British troopers garrisoned in Cyprus in 1965, the Each day Categorical chortled that “Peter’s satisfaction was his shoulder-length hair” in its report.
Such assaults may seem scarcely credible to these born extra not too long ago, however to aged relations – maybe these with strands on the again plaited into a skinny tassel – these had been enemy methods throughout a protracted warfare in opposition to those that regarded obligatory haircuts as a part of the defence in opposition to … what was by no means clear. Homosexuality? Communism? Anarchy? The abolition of Nationwide Service? Going to the cinema on the Sabbath? Having enjoyable?
When the Beatles had been awarded MBEs, disgusted army males of upper rank returned their medals, whereas a Information of the World reader steered John, Paul, George and Ringo ought to every capitulate to a “first rate” haircut previous to presentation earlier than the Queen. This regardless of Ringo Starr stating: “If you happen to take a look at early photos of us, we had nothing”. The truth is, the band visited the hairdresser’s extra usually than their detractors imagined as a result of, as John Lennon was to recollect: “We needed to shorten our hair to go away Liverpool. We needed to put on fits to get on TV. We needed to compromise.”
So you possibly can think about the response when pop outfits and their followers ditched mop-tops and fab-gear winsomeness for ultra-long hair in emulation of the Rolling Stones and the Fairly Issues (who, for a interval between mid-1964 and early 1965, had been on phrases of fluctuating equality as belligerently unkempt degenerates). It marked a compounding of an “us and them” divide.
“If you happen to noticed somebody throughout the road with lengthy hair he was an individual you could possibly nod to and have an understanding,” famous Graham Nash of the Hollies. “You’d understand how he thought – that he hated the federal government and was into good music. It was a menace to them.”
Whereas the Hollies had been as neatly coiffed because the Beatles, Phil Could – awaiting his future as frontman of the Fairly Issues – was an 18-year-old with hair splayed midway down his again. “You possibly can’t perceive what a shock the look was again in 1962,” he mirrored shortly earlier than his dying in 2020. “Nothing ever had the affect of being the primary man to put on actually lengthy hair. I do know. I was that man. Even in free-thinking Soho, Chelsea and Notting Hill, I used to be stopping site visitors and being refused service in pubs.”
Efforts had been typically made to painting this hostility in direction of the long-haired as light-hearted enjoyable. {A photograph} of Manfred Mann featured essentially the most hirsute mann being dragged in direction of the door of a barbershop, and the Fairly Issues had been as soon as hauled in to reply good-humoured clerical criticism on a TV dialogue. “Our verbal retaliations had been swiftly restricted once we started capsizing the programme’s intentions by utilizing lengthy phrases and talking properly,” remembered lead guitarist Dick Taylor.
As chief show-off within the group the Manish Boys, 17-year-old David Jones – later, after all, to vary his identify to David Bowie – represented himself because the president of the Society For the Prevention of Cruelty to Lengthy-Haired Males, when interviewed by comb-overed Cliff Michelmore on BBC tv’s Tonight present.
Individually, Bowie’s look with a voice speeded as much as Pinky-and-Perky pitch on 1967’s The Laughing Gnome – topic of an embarrassing reissue when he was well-known – included the road “Didn’t they educate you to get your hair reduce in school? You appear to be a rolling gnome”.
If the pastime of alarming the “institution” typically took on a playful side within the centre of larger cities with accepted traditions of counterculture, it was opposed with uncompromising gravity elsewhere. “What probability had I on the Dartford council property the place I lived?,” requested Could. “The beatings-up I needed to endure had been solely to be anticipated, and I ended up as a daily on the casualty division. They thought I used to be mad – however I used to be by no means going to again down! On reflection, I used to be fortunate to not be maimed and even killed.”
Over half-a-century of cranial extremities later, one could be puzzled about why there was a lot fuss. Because the second millennium left the runway, Jagger’s knighthood was on the horizon, whereas in 1994 he was elected honorary president of the LSE College students Union (with the beatified Mom Teresa of Calcutta among the many runners-up).
Could, who married aristocrat Electra Nemon, was in with the royal household too, regardless of as soon as being, as he put it, “one of many nation’s foremost social pariahs”. “I’d be invited to the Prince of Wales’s marriage ceremony,” he famous in 2014. “My father-in-law had a grace-and-favour studio within the Palace. I’m most likely eighty fifth in line for the throne of Scotland.”
Certainly I now have two grandsons, each beneath 10, with Phil Could-length hair. It’s very similar to mine when, within the early 70s, I used to be messing about on an affordable electrical organ in my native Woolworths. Sensing somebody behind me, I turned spherical and met the eyes of a tightly-permed trainer who’d been lower than eager on me throughout my schooldays. For a break up second the outdated dread peeped out, however I carried on vamping the noisy keys. Her mouth twitched, however she modified her thoughts, shot me a glance and strode on.
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