Haircut 100 Makes Every Day Fantastic

Last year may have been the 40th anniversary of the brilliant Pelican West, but this year is the 40th anniversary of Haircut 100 returning to the United States. The band is currently on tour with Howard Jones and ABC. Talk about ‘80s ecstasy! To incorporate that trifecta on stage together is an amazing concert experience and monument to New Wave splendor.

For a band who had such important earworms, it took one album to make Haircut 100 immortal. Nick Heyward, Les Nemes, Blair Cunningham, and Graham Jones have been to the farthest reaches of their original creation and back again. But in doing so their Brit funk and doeey-eyed pop inspired everyone from Blur to Red Hot Chili Peppers to One Direction to Corey Wong.

In a country (Britain or the United States) that was facing difficult times, Haircut 100 was that glimpse of joy. They were shy yet exciting, mischievous yet proper. Heyword described to the BBC that once the band hit the stage, it was “a burst of adrenaline. You can’t describe that feeling until you are in a band.” Both Heyword and Graham Jones compared it to a circus, but more like a carnival.

Pelican West was the monument to a sound that was magical and exciting. Momentum from Jones’s Clash fandom and Heyword digging into The Beatles 10 years after they broke up, conjoined to form the a tinge of the backbone of what Haircut 100 would become. Add Brit-funk on steroids and you have some of the wildest party antics this side of Bow Wow Wow or Madness.

But in all of their manic antics, the band strived at being fearless, not shying away from adding instrumentation to their pop construction. Xylophone, soprano sax, percussion that could fall into a Fania All Stars jam, jazz solos, it felt like there was nothing this band could not make work.

Listening back at Pelican West, these were songs that could stretch to infinity. They tease us with that on the opener, “Favourite Shirts (Boy Meets Girl)”—Arista’s first single and true introduction of the band —from sax solo to trumpet solo to percussion blitzkrieg. You really just don’t want it to end. However, the brilliance was how this band compressed it all down to a three-minute pop song while retaining its energy of a massive jam session.

It was not just street party funk and hyper ballastic stage antics (their live rendition of “Low Rider” from their 1982 Hammersmith Odean concert is the perfect example), the group had a modest degree of sophistication. The way they swoon through notes on the predominantly original “Lemon Firebrigade” is decadence wrapped in powerful horns and dancing bass lines. When they get to the horn solos, they paint Tropicana nights wrapped in sweaters and pressed trousers. Echoes you hear come from the ghosts of teenage girls swooning over an American Bandstand performance or one of many sold-out gigs throughout Britain.

When I listen to “Fantastic Day” I feel the warmth of a mix tape that blends in songs by Elvis Costello and XTC. It’s a drive with the top down—the magic in its guitar jangle utopia feeling carefree in its escapist lyrical nature, penned by Heyword, who wrote 99% of the album. We feel his quirkiness, British shyness, and mischievous eyebatting in each word, a Paul McCartney for the Decade of Decadence. At the peak of the mountain is “Love Plus One.” Converting all of their power into subtlety, its perfect pop with thoughtful lyrical momentum. The song brings out their main influence. . . teenage melodrama. Listening to this song now is like gathering all of the pleasant scents from an aromatic shop and bottling it up into a glorious sensory experience.

I could talk about the massive 40th anniversary four-disc completist version that features extra songs, outtakes, demos, interviews, and so on and so on. I could talk about every reason this album rightfully deserves its place in the 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.

Haircut 100 was born out of a shedding of a past life’s skin and together morphed into something stronger than any individual could create. The mark they left is something bigger than itself. If you want to know what happiness sounds like, it’s Pelican West.