Sidney's Place: HAIR

Friday, April 24, 2015

HAIR

When I saw the American rock musical Hair in London in 1968, I was entranced by its energy, its songs and its casual dingle-dangle nudity – it was so much a reflection of its time, of far-out hippy flower-power culture and of youthful defiance of authority. Its title song set the scene:

Let it fly in the breeze and get caught in the trees.
Give a home for the fleas in my Hair.
A home for the fleas. Yeah.
A hive for the bees. Oh yeah.
A nest for the birds.
There ain't no words for the beauty, the splendour, the wonder of my Hair.

Hair, Hair, Hair, Hair, Hair, Hair, Hair.
Flow it.
Show it.
Long as God can grow it my Hair

A hairy rock-icon

But the moment for Hair passed. The show was revived in London in the 1980s but flopped – it was said that “Thatcher’s children” unsurprisingly just did not get it.

I personally have turned against the hairy. I have always been conservative in this regard – I have mop-headed and bearded friends, but I tend to link beards with subversion á la Karl Marx. I believe, probably mistakenly, that most beardies wear sandals, eat nut cutlets and read the Guardian. From 1967-74 the far-right Greek military junta went to the extreme of insisting on baths and short-back-and-sides haircuts for arriving hippies – no doubt offending their loudly proclaimed basic human right to be hairy and smelly. Good Queen Bess revived her father’s 1535 levy on beards – it became an aristocratic cachet to have one – while Peter the Great of Russia, surrounded by hirsute Orthodox priests and hairy boyars, decided in 1705 to tax beards in the vain hope his country could appear more “European”. Somehow the various royal razors were blunted and beards sprouted in Europe like asparagus in May while hair was worn long.

Queen Victoria liked her men well thatched, as Prince Albert could testify, and her successors Edward VII and George V had the full Monty of beard and whiskers. Her stolid final Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury had a beard like a spade (if not much on top), rather putting Victoria’s grandson, the elaborately moustachioed Kaiser, in the hairy shade.

Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany

Lord Salisbury

My plea is for moderation in facial hair. I prefer a neatly trimmed and clean top and, if you insist, a strictly controlled set of whiskers. “Designer stubble” is just a lazy man’s excuse for not shaving. I am not a fanatic, but simply my own rare periods sporting a beard make me look like an aged Moses returning from Mount Sinai, a vision I do not much care to perpetuate.

Yet I am no fan of baldness either. Most men lose hair on top but for centuries cultivated a little residual hair over their ears. Now we see goggle-eyed men looking like inhuman billiard balls with not a hair to be seen – no, Bruce Willis, we do not wish to revive the Skinheads. I think bare scalps are ugly and the shaved-head fashion is hideous.

Shaven-headed fashionistas, not for me

Of course when it comes to hair the laurels go to the ladies. Nothing is more fussed over, primped, debated, regretted or triumphantly displayed than the hairdo, and nothing empties the family coffers so constantly. But I must not carp – the ladies hugely merit their personal pleasures and God bless ‘em. I certainly will not voice a preference, the range is very wide from blue-rinsed Mrs Slocombe in Are you being served? to mega-glamourous Jennifer Lopez passim.