Throughout the mid-to-late 60s, I had to fight every literal inch of the way over the matter of long hair. As I practised being Mick Jagger before the bedroom mirror, it was always on the understanding that, within hours, I might be in front of that same mirror after a parentally-dictated trip to the barber.
No amount of backcombing, pulling or applications of a thickening gel called Dippety-Do could disguise the brutal shearing. I’d be left making the best of a bad job, sprucing up for a Saturday night of raging pubescent hormones and perspiration.
At a time when a letter in a tabloid newspaper advocated a law that made short-back-and-sides compulsory for men, it would make my day – actually, my entire month – if some wit bellowed “Get yer ’air cut!” from a passing car. I wasn’t insulted; I was proud.
During my career as a pupil at a boys’ grammar school near Aldershot, a friend was held fast while his nape-length locks were hacked off by one of the keener members of the compulsory Combined Cadet Force, safe in the knowledge that he’d receive little more than an amused scolding from the deputy headmaster. When a civilian youth was subject to a similarly enforced chop by British soldiers garrisoned in Cyprus in 1965, the Daily Express chortled that “Peter’s pride was his shoulder-length hair” in its report.
Such assaults might appear scarcely credible to those born more recently, but to elderly relations – perhaps those with strands at the back plaited into a thin tassel – these were enemy strategies during a protracted war against those who regarded mandatory haircuts as part of the defence against … what was never clear. Homosexuality? Communism? Anarchy? The abolition of National Service? Going to the cinema on the Sabbath? Having fun?
When the Beatles were awarded MBEs, disgusted military men of higher rank returned their medals, while a News of the World reader suggested John, Paul, George and Ringo ought to each capitulate to a “decent” haircut prior to presentation before the Queen. This despite Ringo Starr pointing out: “If you look at early pictures of us, we had nothing”. In fact, the band visited the hairdresser’s more often than their detractors imagined because, as John Lennon was to remember: “We had to shorten our hair to leave Liverpool. We had to wear suits to get on TV. We had to compromise.”
So you can imagine the response when pop outfits and their fans ditched mop-tops and fab-gear winsomeness for ultra-long hair in emulation of the Rolling Stones and the Pretty Things (who, for a period between mid-1964 and early 1965, were on terms of fluctuating equality as belligerently unkempt degenerates). It marked a compounding of an “us and them” divide.
“If you saw someone across the street with long hair he was a person you could nod to and have an understanding,” noted Graham Nash of the Hollies. “You’d know how he thought – that he hated the government and was into good music. It was a threat to them.”
While the Hollies were as neatly coiffed as the Beatles, Phil May – awaiting his destiny as frontman of the Pretty Things – was an 18-year-old with hair splayed halfway down his back. “You can’t understand what a shock the look was back in 1962,” he reflected shortly before his death in 2020. “Nothing ever had the impact of being the first man to wear really long hair. I know. I was that man. Even in free-thinking Soho, Chelsea and Notting Hill, I was stopping traffic and being refused service in pubs.”
Efforts were sometimes made to portray this hostility towards the long-haired as light-hearted fun. A photograph of Manfred Mann featured the most hirsute mann being dragged towards the door of a barbershop, and the Pretty Things were once hauled in to answer good-humoured clerical criticism on a TV discussion. “Our verbal retaliations were hastily restricted when we began capsizing the programme’s intentions by using long words and speaking nicely,” remembered lead guitarist Dick Taylor.
As chief show-off in the group the Manish Boys, 17-year-old David Jones - later, of course, to change his name to David Bowie – represented himself as the president of the Society For the Prevention of Cruelty to Long-Haired Men, when interviewed by comb-overed Cliff Michelmore on BBC television’s Tonight show.
Separately, Bowie’s appearance with a voice speeded up to Pinky-and-Perky pitch on 1967’s The Laughing Gnome – subject of an embarrassing reissue when he was famous – included the line “Didn’t they teach you to get your hair cut at school? You look like a rolling gnome”.
If the pastime of alarming the “establishment” sometimes took on a playful aspect in the centre of bigger cities with accepted traditions of counterculture, it was opposed with uncompromising gravity elsewhere. “What chance had I on the Dartford council estate where I lived?,” asked May. “The beatings-up I had to endure were only to be expected, and I ended up as a regular at the casualty department. They thought I was mad – but I was never going to back down! In retrospect, I was lucky to not be maimed or even killed.”
Over half-a-century of cranial extremities later, one might be puzzled about why there was so much fuss. As the second millennium left the runway, Jagger’s knighthood was on the horizon, while in 1994 he was elected honorary president of the LSE Students Union (with the beatified Mother Teresa of Calcutta among the runners-up).
May, who married aristocrat Electra Nemon, was in with the royal family too, despite once being, as he put it, “one of the country’s foremost social pariahs”. “I’d be invited to the Prince of Wales’s wedding,” he noted in 2014. “My father-in-law had a grace-and-favour studio in the Palace. I’m probably 85th in line for the throne of Scotland.”
Indeed I now have two grandsons, both under 10, with Phil May-length hair. It is much like mine when, in the early 70s, I was messing about on a cheap electric organ in my local Woolworths. Sensing someone behind me, I turned round and met the eyes of a tightly-permed teacher who’d been less than keen on me during my schooldays. For a split second the old dread peeped out, but I carried on vamping the noisy keys. Her mouth twitched, but she changed her mind, shot me a look and strode on.
