Paul Fitzpatrick: London

As tough starts in life go, I doubt having curly/wavy/wiry hair in the 70s is going to garner much sympathy, but don’t be too quick to judge!

For some it may have been George Best for others Farrah Fawcett, but at a certain point in our adolescence I think we all had role-models when it came to our appearance.
Combine this with the ‘bandwagon effect’, a cognitive bias that compels us to be ‘part of the crowd’ and you have the perfect explanation as to why there were flocks of Gloverall coated teenagers wandering around sporting tartan scarves and identical haircuts in 1973.

Because, let’s face it, back then you had to be some kind of unique spider from Mars to zig when everyone else zagged.

A big part of 70s teen culture of course was hairstyles, particularly for boys who up until 1972 had two choices when it came to hair – short or long.

Apart from a brief Skinhead fad, short meant ‘short back and sides’.
This was favoured by the majority of parents, particularly those who had invested in a Comet 4 in 1 Safety Haircutter... Ouch!

Safety?….Really!

Long hair back in the day, was basically abstaining from going to the barbers for a year, applying a centre parting and hoping the end result would turn out to look like Ian Gillan or Paul Rogers.

Then in 72 Rod Stewart, Bowie and Suzy Quattro came along with their layered, spiky, feather cuts and the landscape changed – hordes of straight haired youths, (male and female), dashed off to their nearest Salon, (a dark day for barbers – Fusco’s RIP) to get their hair washed, cut and blow-dried, before heading back to the suburbs with a tartan scarf wrapped around their neck, whistling Maggie May.

At the time, our little crew of reprobates numbered seven, six of whom had poker straight hair and one who didn’t, guess who?

My hairstyle options weren’t even short or long, they were short or wide.
You see my hair grew out the way, like an afro, and neither Vidal Sassoon or nightly sellotape applications were going to transform this unruly mop.
If I had left my hair uncut for a year I wouldn’t have been able to get through the front door – for a couple of reasons, firstly my dad who was a short back & sides man, would have chased me down the street and secondly it would’ve been physically impossible to fit my hair through a traditional 80×28 inch Scottish door frame.

Once when I was 14 and going on a family holiday to Majorca I thought I was being fly and skipped a pre-holiday haircut. My dad didn’t say a word but one day we were passing a hairdressers in Palma and he suggested I get a wee trim, Spanish style. A special caballero haircut reserved for gauchos, gigolos and matadors.

Of course like a sucker I fell for it and surprise, surprise, my caballero haircut was nothing more than a short back sides with a dollop of Tabac splashed on my napper.

So, whilst everyone was zigging, I was still a reluctant zagger.

I obviously wasn’t the only person on the planet to be cursed with curly hair and to be fair there were some role models out there – Daltrey and Plant to name two, but they were no mere mortals, they were Norse Gods, believe me no one was going to the hairdressers and asking for a ‘Leo Sayer’!

By the mid 70s, hairstyles had moved on from the feather cut.
Bowie’s floppy haired soul-boy look and Bryan Ferry’s Country Life guise were now de-rigueur, variations of wedge cuts that once again discriminated against the curly haired community.

By the way, despite my whinging I know it was far worse for the girls.
The feather cut had given way to the page-boy or the Farrah Fawcett flick, styles disfavouring the mighty curl and well before John Frieda’s Frizz Ease came onto the scene.

Then one fateful evening in the mid 70s something happened.
I turned on the TV to watch The Old Grey Whistle Test and Hall & Oates came on.
Daryl Hall was the charismatic frontman, another Norse god blessed with an implausible vocal range but it was his partner John Oates an Italian looking dude with curly hair that caught my attention.

As I watched John Oates go about his business holding his own in the shadow of the alluring Daryl, it struck me….. out of all my pals I was the only one that could feasibly carry off a John Oates look (although I’m not sure any of them would have wanted to!).

It was a eureka moment, that had nothing yet everything to do with John Oates.
  
It was the realisation that ‘you can only play the hand you’re dealt’.

At last I had an image to present to the hair stylist…. the fact that said stylist had no idea who John Oates was, was neither here nor there.

I was a happier zagger now, and it got even better.

In 1978 something truly amazing happened which to this day I still find hard to comprehend. Inexplicably, every man and his dog decided that curly hair was the way to go.

Perms became all the rage with half the 1978 Scottish World Cup squad embracing the curl, although when they played it seemed like most of them had curly toes as well as curly hair.

The curly-haired community had taken over at last and my straight-haired chums were spending fortunes on emulating the look that had tormented me for years… fools!

Aah, life was good, at last the gods of hair were smiling on me, I was finally zigging with the pack, and then I heard it for the first time…..

“Nice perm Paul, it looks really natural”

Now if I had a pound for every time, I heard that…!!