Not Ian

Not Ian Gets A Haircut

Yes, it's that time of the year again, when I trudge off to my local barbers to have my once-beautiful hair mangled whilst I sit there in those uncomfortable chairs, in stony silence, flicking through a two-year old copy of Top Gear magazine. Waiting, just waiting my day away. We're living in the worst time in history for being a young male, going down the barbers. The rise of the metrosexual and the influence of celebrities (and their lovely hair) have made it impossible to have a shoddy attitude towards your bonce. Hair products must be applied often and the days of just waking up, looking in the mirror and declaring "yeah, that'll fucking do" are over. Fahion, style, image, bollocks.

It wasn't always this way, in the time of my father and grandfather a haircut was a minor irrelevence. Looking through photos of my Dad it seems that in those days, you picked a haircut (sometime around the age of twelve) and stuck with it doggedly throughout the coming decades. The length of your sideboards may increase or decrease as fashion dictated but basically you were in it for life. My Dad followed his Dad in picking the classic 'side-parting' - which in time turned into the combover, it was a simple business allowing you to focus on the more important matters of life. And if you did have a crap haircut, so what? Just stick a bowler hat over it.
Then the sixties arrived and barbers across the land started dropping like fly's as the new 'let it all hang out' credos swept through the nation. Where The Beatles & The Stones led, the population followed and save for the odd bit of backcombing maintaining your hair was a simple process of looking in the mirror every now and then and checking you still had some. The widespend use of LSD made looking at another man and judging his haircut a pointless exercise anyway, who cares about his shoddy sideburn maintainence when his face has turned into that of a Lion?

The seventies were more of the same, only better. Most men didn't see the inside of a barbers all decade and even if they went down there, the barber was probably on strike. Throw in the widespead wearing of donkey-jackets, denim flares, and the smoking of a fag at all times and you have the true golden-age of not-giving-a-fuck. The Likely Lads had won out and the fashion elite had no answer to the tide of hair sweeping the nation. Punk rock arrived and haircuts got even more careless. Buy a electric-shaver, shave head, spike what's left up in the air. Simple. Classic.

The eighties saw a different attitude emerge, hair reflected your status, how much money and power you had. Gordon Gekko rose at five in the morning and had completed ten takeover deals before the barbers even opened. A sad time for many males as the Yuppies made grooming important again, hair was big and ego's were even bigger. The Me (and my hair) decade was in full flow, but in the indie-ghetto a young whippersnapper called Morrissey found a easier way. The Quiff. Just let your hairgrow as normal, keep the back 'n' sides quite tidy and sweep the rest up above your forehead. The students had spoken, and the bog-brush was king.

After the miseries of the eighties, the nineties arrived in style. Well, actually they arrived without any style at all - Kurt Cobain and Grunge must have put a million barbers out of business. 'The Age Of Grease' they called it, halcyon days for sure. In Britain, Britpop rose and fell and the Gallagher brothers made hair just a minor issue compared to lager, birds, footie and being mad for it. But while the county came down from this mass-party the sneaky metrosexuals moved in on our turf. Image had become all.

Which is where we find ourselves today. So-called men, not even able to play the most manly game of all - not giving a fuck. Meh.