GET YOUR HAIR CUT

3 June 2005

Bombing down the Thetford bypass in the Land Rover heading for Stanstead, we’ve got a plane to catch and we’re running late.

‘Did you see that, Bill?’
‘What?’
‘A mobile barber’s.’
‘You what?’
‘A mobile barber’s pulled up in the lay-by, we’ve just passed. Open for business, £5 a cut.’

In that oft-mentioned fraction of a second I automatically check all the files I have stored in my brain about barbers and there is nothing in there pertaining to mobile barbers parked up in lay-bys open for business. In fact, there is nothing there about mobile barbers at all.

‘I don’t care how fuckin’ late it is going to make us! I’ve got to get my hair cut in that barber’s.’

We are on a dual carriageway so I can’t spin the wheel and do a handbrake u-turn. It’s going to be down to the next roundabout and back up the other carriageway to the roundabout at the beginning of the bypass, down the carriageway we are on now and then pull into the lay-by we have just passed for the intended haircut.

But first I’ve got some explaining to do. And I’ve got an hour or so to get that done ‘cause we did make our flight and we’ve just taken off and the flight lasts almost a couple of hours.

Back in Scotland when I was a kid my father used to take me to Mr McWilliams to get my hair cut. Mr McWilliams never asked me how I wanted it, he just did it. I’m sure he did the same short back and sides for all the boys that came in and probably for all the dads too. Mr McWilliams was a one-man show. All I can remember about the look of the place was the dark wooden panelling and, although tidy, there was nothing remotely feminine about the establishment. I don’t know if he had any rivals in our small market town in Galloway.

When I was 11 we moved to Corby in the English East Midlands. Then my father took me to a barber’s in the neighbouring town of Kettering. This was not a one-man operation, instead there were four men in white coats. There was always a queue and they always asked you how you wanted it. My father had a stock answer that the barber was meant to laugh at: ‘Any way you want but not a Beatle cut.’ It was 1964 and Beatle mop-top haircuts were the thing but that was no excuse for my dad saying the same thing every time we went and thinking he was a wit.

As for me, I would choose to have what was called a Tony Curtis. All this meant was that it was squared off at the back and not tapered like Mr McWilliams had done it. I also encouraged the barber not to take too much off my fringe. Within a few months I had an approximation of what I thought George Harrison’s haircut looked like. Especially when the hair on the side of my head made it over the tops of my ears, just.

Going to the barber’s was very much a father-and-son thing. Strangely I don’t remember my younger brother ever coming with us. It was always just me and my dad. One particular time when I was maybe 14 or even 15, I was sitting in the car with my dad and he started talking to me. It took me a bit of time to work out what he was going on about. The moment I realised has to rank as one of the most excruciatingly embarrassing moments of my life. He was talking to me about self-abuse and my apparently nightly need to spill my seed. He was saying that my mother was becoming concerned about my stained and crusty bed sheets and that he understood how difficult it was to be my age but I had to refrain from doing what I had been doing. What made this even more difficult was that I was still seriously worried about the rumour that wanking caused blindness and even thought I might catch VD from doing it.

I can’t recall what my response was. What I do know is that this was the last time I ever went to the barber’s with my father until the summer of 1992, but I will get on to that later. I was unable to refrain from my wanking habit but made sure my spilt semen was caught in a Kleenex and was then flushed furtively down the lavatory. (Note the use of the word lavatory rather than toilet. In our house back in the mid to late 1960s, lavatory was the preferred word. The word toilet was only used by people who referred to their sitting or front room as the lounge.)

Not only did I not go back to the barber’s with my dad, I stopped going altogether and my hair started to grow and grow. First it was just over my ears and over my collar. But it kept on growing: full, thick and luxuriant. Down over my shoulders it went. Not even the split ends were attended to. By then, the whole idea of a barber’s shop was something from another era. Something never thought about and at the time I thought it never would be again. When I got to 19 my hair was halfway down my back and I no longer needed to wank so much as other circumstances in my life had changed.

Then something happened in March 1973 which forced a major shift in the direction that my life was heading and it would take up a whole book if I started to go on about it now. For the sake of this text, all that needs to be said is that I asked my then girlfriend to cut all of my hair off, hair that I had thought would never be cut for the rest of my life. I parcelled the hair up and posted it to my mother. She had hated my long hair. And anyway, by the time I was 19 my heroes were no longer long-haired guitarists, but the likes of Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson who all had short hair. Although I didn’t grow my hair again, I didn’t rediscover the barber’s. Instead I let my girlfriend keep cutting it. It wasn’t until late 1978 when was walking along from our rehearsal room at the Open Eye gallery in Liverpool where I lived to the Kardomah for a mug of tea and a hot Eccles cake, that I noticed a barber’s pole proudly erect at the traditional 45 degrees from the wall above an entrance to an old warehouse.

Without thinking, ‘Why the fuck is a barber’s pole stuck outside an old warehouse?’ I went in and climbed a flight of badly lit stairs into a small but bright room. There was no one else there but a man in a white coat. He introduced himself as Victor and beckoned me to sit in the large leather padded chair. I sat down and stared into the mirror in front of me.

‘How would you like it, sir?’

‘As short as you can make it without making me look like I’m in the marines.’

When I came out 20 minutes later I felt better than I had done for years. I couldn’t wait for my hair to grow just long enough to justify the expense of going back for another haircut. And I went back at least once a month for the next four-and-a-half years until 1983 when I left Liverpool for good.

What was so good about going to Victor’s was not that I thought it made me look in some way more handsome or sharp or attractive to the ladies. In fact quite the opposite, most of the time I would come out of Victor’s looking like a bit of a dickhead with my very dated short back and sides. What I got out of it was the physical sensation of getting my hair cut: the sound of the scissors going snip, snip, snip and the clippers up the back of the neck. Then there was the aesthetic of the place itself. Victor’s was a classic barber’s in every detail. But most of all it was the chat with Victor which drew me back there. Victor had led a rich and varied life: he had been a merchant seaman, seen Ali box Henry Cooper, watched Dixie Deen in his glory years, had cut George Harrison’s hair when he was a lad. Victor was worth every penny of the 75 pence he charged.

In 1983 that former girlfriend (who was by then my wife) and I moved south, to just outside Aylesbury. A new barber had to be found. LUIGI became my man. I can’t remember if he was recommended or if I stumbled upon him by accident. He had his shop above a ladies’ hairdresser. There was nothing timeless and traditional about his place. No red and white pole outside. The only items of note in his shop were his collection of shaving mugs and his Foggia football club poster and pendant. Foggia was the nearest city to where he came from in southern Italy. LUIGI spoke with a very heavy Italian accent. He spoke to the other customers at length but as much as I tried to engage him in conversation, he was never bothered about speaking to me.

I hate smoking. LUIGI smoked roll-ups non-stop while he was cutting hair. It was disgusting but I never minded, let alone complained. It was all part of the charisma of this small middle-aged Italian man. He also drank espresso all the time. The other thing I liked about LUIGI’s was the stack of old National Geographics that I could read as I waited to get my hair cut. And LUIGI always knew how I wanted it cut. No discussion was required.

My wife and I had a son, James. He was born in 1987. By the time James was four I was taking him to LUIGI’s with me to get his hair cut. He too fell under the charm of the man. Us going to the barber’s together was a real father–son thing. I haven’t ever read any Nick Hornby or Tony Parsons but it’s the sort of thing I can imagine them writing about.

In the summer of 1992 I flew to the States. Met up with my sister and parents in Washington DC and we drove down to North Carolina to a town where we had lived for a few months in 1963. My dad had been a Church of Scotland minister and he had done an exchange with a Presbyterian minister in this town in North Carolina. Those three months spent there when I was ten had left a lasting impression on me, an impression that would take a whole book to unravel and get down in words.

Anyway, enough of then. In 1992 we were back in Carolina in this small southern town, my parents visiting old friends and me trying to come to terms with the break-up of my marriage. We arrived on a Thursday and checked into the motel. On the Friday morning my dad suggested the two of us go for a haircut. I liked the idea of this – maybe I could finally put the embarrassment of the stained and crusty bed sheets behind me. My father had some memory of a barber’s he had used here back then. We found it in the run-down white-trash part of town. They were still open for business.

There were four silver-haired barbers dressed in matching white coats and matching embroidered insignia on their breast pockets. There were no other clients. My father and I sat in neighbouring chairs and a couple of the barbers got to work. They spoke with that lazy Southern drawl, enquiring where we were from and what we were doing there. They took their time. It was the longest and most drawn-out haircut I have ever had. Every stage of the haircut seemed to be layered with ritual. I stared into the face in the mirror in front of me. It was the first time that I had acknowledged that I had become a middle-aged man. I was almost 40. The same age my dad had been when I was born. I kept staring into my own eyes as if I could see what might lie ahead in whatever was left of my life. The haircut went on and on. Different scissors for this bit, different scissors for that. At least three types of clippers were used and a cut-throat razor for the back of my neck. And then, without asking, he trimmed the hairs that were begining to sprout from ears and nostrils and lastly clipped the wayward eyebrows that had been sprouting up over the past few months. For each of these he used a different implement. Having this done only served to confirm my middle-aged status. It seemed like it was a rite of passage and so maybe it was only fitting that my father was here to see me through.

On the Sunday morning I went to church with my parents. This was the first time I had done this since the stained and crusty incident. It was the same church where my father had been the minister back in the summer of 1963 and he had been asked to preach the sermon that day. Sod knows what he preached about or if it was any good, what bowled me over was his magnetism. My dad had always just been my dad and any memories I have of going to church as a kid and my dad being the preacher were just of counting off the minutes on my wristwatch to noon when the service would be over and I could get out to climb trees and run free.

Whatever he was like back then, on this particular Sunday in 1992 he had this Southern congregation in the palm of his hand. He rolled his Rs, making the most of his Scottish accent, leaving silences in his sentences where no gap was needed, just to keep every last punter in the pews hanging on for whatever word was about to be uttered. How come I never knew my dad could do this? And more importantly, where could I learn how to do it? Not that I have a hankering to be a man of the cloth, but to hold an audience and communicate your ideas with just the power of your words without even a microphone is something to be admired. And yes I know it’s also a power that has been misused by dictators down the ages, but still…

Anyway, four weeks later back in Aylesbury, back in LUIGI’s, and he’s not a happy man.

‘Mr Drummond, what has happened to your hair? Who has done this butchery?’

I tried to explain but I knew I had let him down, in some way been unfaithful. The truth is that I knew the moment that the barber in Carolina had snipped his last snip it was a disaster. But as I explained earlier the aesthetic quality of the haircut is only a small percentage of what you get out of going to the barber. I didn’t try to explain this to LUIGI. Instead I tried to shift the topic of conversation to the trials and tribulations of his beloved Foggia football club.

There were three other times in the 1990s that I was unfaithful to the scissors and clippers of LUIGI. Once was in Kinshasa in the Congo, which I’ve written about in the book The Wild Highway: once was in a backstreet in Bombay; and once was under an olive tree in Turkey. Those three occasions made me realise what I had been missing out on, in staying faithful to LUIGI and his constant smoking. It was also when I started to theorise about the whole barber thing and how it is probably the most central craft in the existence of civilised man on this planet.

The theory goes something like this. Ever since man has considered himself civilised he has had his hair cut. Religions will come and go. Empires decline and fall but the barbers keep snipping. Whatever developments technology might throw up that in turn change our cultures and the way we live our lives, our hair still grows and we still want it cutting. And as long as hair keeps growing, barbers will be in business with their scissors, clippers, razor and comb. OK, clippers have developed into electric ones, but the same fundamental thing is going on.

What Bill Gates requires from his barber is pretty much the same as the poorest peasant in the poorest country in the world. No gigabyte amount of wealth is going to change that. There is also the fact that it is a totally male thing: there is little in life that is as totally male as the barber’s shop.

Year in, year out, my son James and I would go to the barber’s together once a month. We would talk about football and pop music and stay clear of the more difficult topics like why his mum and I split up. Then one Saturday in 1989 my by-then 12-year-old son, James turned up at my house with a newly shorn head. He had been to the barber on his own. The monthly ritual of us going to the barbers together had come to an end.

At some point I became aware that the barber’s was the only place that I ever looked at myself in the mirror other than the accidental glance. Even when I shave I do it by touch and don’t use a mirror, my hair never needs combing, I don’t wear a tie that needs straightening. Maybe it’s this lack of mirrors in my day-to-day life that makes my monthly visit to the barber’s more profound; it is the only time I have to confront my own physical appearance. The only time I look into my own eyes and say to myself ‘So who the fuck do you think you are, Bill Drummond, and what exactly are you doing with your life?’

In the year 2000 I had a new baby boy. His name is Flint, a bundle of joy and the apple of his mothers eye. His mother, Sallie, and I already had two daughters. It was going to be a few years before he was going to be accompanying me to LUIGI’s.

In those years some ideas started developing in my head, like, why not go to different barber every month? This I put into motion and every time I was away from home working or on holiday I would keep my eyes open for a barber’s that looked exciting, different, exotic or had been there for a hundred years.

I became quite promiscuous. There were times when I would have a couple of haircuts in the same week at different barber’s in different cities. And each of these barbers had a different story to tell, each was special in their own way. I started to make notes of what they told me. Then I made plans to record proper interviews with them. What I was going to do with those recordings, I had no idea. Then in January 2004 I put some text together for one of my posters. It read:

NOTICE

Get your haircut once a month for one
Year, visiting a different barber shop
Each time.

Enjoy each and every one. There are
only a finite number of haircuts left
in your life.

While sitting in the chair and the barber
Is busy with his implements, stare into
The mirror at your aging face staring
back at you. Briefly consider your own
mortality.

Evolve a strategy to do one small thing with
the rest of your life
that will change mankind.

I was not only wanting to follow my own instructions but I was hoping others might be inspired to do the same. I managed the first three months of the year and each barber was duly interviewed. Each one was a cracker. I even interviewed LUIGI. I learnt more about him in that short interview than I had in all the years he had been cutting my hair.

Then something happened to put a stop to my promiscuous ways. Flint, my youngest son, had come of age: it was time to start taking him to the barber’s. It had to be LUIGI’s, and Flint soon fell under his charm. He looked forward to these male-bonding outings together, especially as we were always able to tie it in with a visit to the Aylesbury fire station over the road from LUIGI’s. Then, the week before last Christmas, the family moved away from the Vale of Aylesbury to Norwich. Flint and I have been to a number of barber’s around Norwich since then but none fill the gap that LUIGI’s has left in our lives.

I have written this on a Ryanair flight out to the south of France where I am going to be staying with a couple of friends who have a place up in the Pyrenees. Work colleague John Hirst is with me. We both need a break.

So back to the Thetford bypass in the Land Rover. We pull up into the lay-by. Climb out and walk over to the mobile barber’s. He’s open for business. I step inside. It is without doubt the greatest and most singular barber’s shop I have ever stepped inside. The barber is called Carl and he is a star. I won’t get into describing his mobile barber’s shop and how it came about and all the other stuff he told us. I will let him tell you that himself when I come back to record an interview with him.

As I sat in his chair and he busies himself with his scissors, combs and clippers I stare at my face. What I see is a man now well on his way to late middle-age. A man whose partner of the last 16 years has decided she has had enough and is going to leave him, taking with her their three children. I can’t help wondering if I will ever walk into a barber’s shop again with Flint, watch him sitting there, my little man all bold and proud. I don’t mind admitting I’m writing these words with tears welling up in my eyes.

The trolley which has been making its way slowly down the aisle has now arrived at our row. I order a tea and a Mars bar, and I try to take a break from thinking about what I was just writing. Instead I banter with John Hirst about the possibilities that Carl’s mobile barber’s might bring to the whole Get Your Hair Cut thing. Last week I was all for abandoning it as a job not worth developing. Now it seems the most exciting job I’m working on. There is no point in me trying to explain what those ideas are. Carl gave me his card. On my return from France I’ll get in touch with him, tell him our ideas and see if he is up for them.

Maybe Flint and I will drive over to the Thetford bypass together and I can go through things with Carl face to face. Interview him while I’m at it. Then Flint and I can get our haircut. Forever father and son, son and father from generation to generation.