The Small Faces: the epitome of '60s mod Johnny Rotten: cool '70s punk

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In the '50s, the ideal hairstyle for boys in the UK was a "short back and sides", i.e., shaved up the back, sides, and behind the ears with a few oiled strands combed into a tight "parting" on top. Crew cuts were for Yanks. Barbers were known to sell condoms, but by the time the boys of the '50s were old enough to be interested in contraceptives, the '60s were in and barbers were out. '60s schools had strict hair codes for boys, inspired by a WWII reverence for military efficiency, hygiene and uniformity. Hair could not touch the shirt collar, encroach upon the ears or hang in the eyes. When the Beatles appeared, school hair codes were enforced even more rigorously. A silent and determined tug-of-hair was waged between parents and children, teachers and pupils. Male hair-length became a matter of principle that split the generations.

After the Beatles introduced the "mop top", The Rolling Stones modeled scruffier hair, but the band that really threw down the gauntlet in the early '60s hair revolution was The Pretty Things. When they first appeared on Ready Steady Go performing, "Don't Bring Me Down", the old guard saw the enemy incarnate. Phil May's poker-straight hair streamed down his face and past his shoulders as he leaned into the microphone, half-closed eyes ignoring the camera, and everyone got the message. It didn't matter what he was singing about, the message was all in the hair.

"The Pretty Things" was also a truly androgynous name. For young men in 1964 to refer to themselves as "pretty" challenged the values of traditional masculinity and raised questions in teenage minds that could not be openly articulated in polite society. Males were not supposed to think about their looks in these girlish terms. To even be overly concerned about the specifics of appearance implied effeminacy in a man. To confuse things further, The Pretty Things, despite their long hair, were far from pretty. They looked dirty and unkempt; the press used words like "Cro-Magnon" to describe them. They could not be dismissed as "queers", but neither could they be accepted as "normal". They were a raw, painful anomaly among the bands who followed the Beatles and the Stones, and they still stand apart as outsiders' outsiders.

Youth cultures in Britain have historically been defined by male hair-length and style. Mods and rockers, skinheads and hippies, punks and dreads, are all variations on the long-hair/short-hair theme. Historically, this opposition probably returns to the Cavaliers and Roundheads and beyond, but it was elaborated with particular ferocity during the '60s and '70s. Extremes of length embodied both inter- and intra-generational conflicts. The mods and rockers were working-class youth cultures, but the mod hairstyle represented a sleek, futuristic, smarter-than-smart brand of youth alienation, while the rockers hearkened back to earlier hair rebels, like the teddy boys, who took their fashion cues from Edwardian dandy-ism.

The rockers' Brylcream-saturated waves and ducks' asses were derived from a variety of marginal subcultures: American bikers, WWII "spivs" (or black marketers), teddy boys, pimps and sailors. The rockers' hairiness implied a sub-working-class barbarianism, reminiscent of H.G. Wells' Morlocks, but also a kind of criminal luxury: an excessive, devil-may-care hirsuteness. Since no respectable employer would hire a man with long, greasy hair, the rocker hairstyle suggested either unemployment, low-end blue collar work or a black-market economy and an outsider contempt for the austerities and values of working class life.

Mod hair (think Steve Marriot, circa 1965) was kept scrupulously clean, neatly clipped and geometrically edged around the ears and at the nape of the neck. The top, however, was grown longer than the traditional working class cut, and was treated to sophisticated styling techniques such as layering, feathering, back-combing and razor cutting, derived from women's salons rather than traditional barbershops. Mod hair suggested independence from the parental working class in its embrace of modernism, and its aura of control. It also demonstrated a new level of working class self esteem and ambition in its stylistic superiority to both the dull haircuts of the male middle class and the grease-monkey look of the rockers. The mod look expressed a new optimism among working class youth that class barriers were eroding, and that the hip, middle class consumer lifestyle that the mods aspired towards, with their Italian suits and expensive hair cuts, was really within their grasp.

At the more flamboyant, middle class end of the mod spectrum, hair mutated into hippie perms and ringlets (Disraeli Gears-era Clapton). Male hippie hair was a chaotic fantasy mix of Native American braves, Hindu ascetics, Arthurian knights and Tolkien wizards, but the definitive mid-'6os male hairstyle was the frizzed-out Afro-perm as worn by everyone from the Jimi Hendrix Experience and Julie ("This Wheel's On Fire") Driscoll to Blonde on Blonde-era Bob Dylan. Socially, the Afro-perm represented a utopian, unisex merging of races, classes and genders in one big frizz-out. Psychically, it symbolized the serpentine maze of the mind on acid. Hendrix said his hair helped him feel the universal vibrations, and Dylan was depicted on the "Blowing In The Mind" poster with his thicket of curls expanding into infinity.

Almost Cut My Hair
In the late '60s, many working class mods called a halt to the slide into hippy decadence. The upward-striving optimism of the early sixties was dwindling, as working class youth realized that, while the Beatles might play for the queen, British class barriers remained as rigid and exclusive as ever. Some mods shaved their heads and took on a pugnacious, macho look that expressed a return to the tough, no frills character of working class life. These original skinheads were not associated with racism. In fact, just as the mods had worshipped Tamla Motown, Soul and Funk, skinhead culture revolved around early Jamaican ska artists like King Tubby and Desmond Dekker. The "agro" for which the British skinheads soon became notorious was at first directed mainly at the hippies, and long hair, rather than race, was the supposed provocation.

Whether they worked or not, the skinheads' value system included a strong work ethic and an exaggeratedly working class style. Skinhead hair expressed a salt-of-the-earth identification with traditional working class culture: Saturday afternoon football, pints of lager, loud, loutish, male behavior, and the poverty and violence of life in tower block flats and red brick council estates. The skinheads increasingly distanced themselves from the middle class end of the mod spectrum as they observed the unyielding distance between their own lifestyle of low-end labor, and that of middle class kids who moved from grammar school to a life of ease at the new universities. To the skins, male hippies were "longhaired layabouts" who wasted taxpayers' money at university. The skinheads also perceived long hair on men as "dirty": a prejudice that probably had its roots in the WWI idea that male hair longer than a military cut might be lice-infested.

For the hippies, long hair was both a fashion statement and a commitment to a lifestyle. Having long hair involved both economic and social sacrifices, since long hair excluded men from most white collar jobs. British university students received grants from the government to attend university, so university was the ideal hippie environment. Four years of college gave men plenty of time to grow their hair and shelter in ivory towers from which they could observe the rat race outside. When they graduated, students would often hang around the fringes of university life and prolong their lifestyle for a few more years by signing on the dole.

Having long hair was also a rite-of-passage into the minority experience for many middle class white youths. Hippies experienced discrimination because of their appearance, and were insulted and sometimes assaulted on the street, often by skinheads and other working class "bovver boys". During the early '70s, skinheads increasingly picked on racial minorities like Pakistanis and Jamaicans as well as hippies, so British hippies felt a sympathetic identification with these groups. Unlike the black and Asian experience, however, the hippie minority experience was voluntary and reversible. As hippie twenty-somethings saw their straight counterparts buying houses and cars, life in a squat could lose its appeal. There were counter-pressures exerted within the hippy community: cutting one's hair meant "selling out". But as hippy idealism faded, long hair lost its radical character and became a cliché. By the end of the '70s, the British hippie archetype was no longer John Lennon at his Bed-In; it was Neil from The Young Ones boiling lentils and moaning about "the pigs".

"One! Two! Cut Your Hair!"
The opening line of Johnny Moped's "Incendiary Device", was as radical a punk challenge to British hippie culture as "Anarchy in the UK" was to mainstream British society. In its revolt against the hippy look, British punk hair went short, jagged and slashed. It also combined its own aesthetic elements — jelled-out, jet-black spikes, and freakish looking vegetable dyes — with elements of rocker, mod, hippy and skinhead styles to create a look that was genuinely a pastiche of all the major British youth hairstyles. The slick-back, rocker look that the Clash wore on the "London Calling" tour, Ian Dury's teddy-boy sideburns, Hugh Cornwell's greaser forelock, The Jam's mod cuts and John Cooper Clarke's obsessive reconstruction of Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited look were among many punk styles which demonstrated that while punk was still an organic, living movement, rather than a media memory, the "punk look" was never reducible to a few static images.

For most people who weren't there, the idea of British punk fashion is based on two or three bands: The Sex Pistols, Siouxsie and the Banshees and The Clash. But although these bands' photogenic images were repeatedly referenced by the media as shorthand images for "punk", in many ways they were atypical of British punk. Most punk bands did not have access to King's Road boutique clothes and hairdressers, fashion designers like Vivien Westwood and conceptualist managers like Malcolm McClaren and Bernie Rhodes. A look at some of The Clash's and The Pistols' less famous contemporaries — The Adverts, The Slits, The Vibrators, Johnny Moped, Wreckless Eric, John Cooper Clark, Jilted John, The Nipple Erectors, Subway Sect, Sham 69 — shows a much less coherent look that is, nevertheless, truer to the diverse, lived reality of the British punk movement in its heyday.

The aggressively slashed, dyed and spiked punk hairstyles were not, at first, a typical expression of punk culture. Rather a few images of punk fashion and hair with maximum shock appeal were repeatedly featured in the press, and as British youth copied these images from newspapers and magazines, the "punk look" was spread across the British landscape. "Punk" was thus reduced from a complex, diverse street aesthetic to a conveniently unified media stereotype that was then copied by subsequent generations of neo-punks. By the time that King's Road punks' wild hairstyles had become a tourist attraction, the punk movement itself had been frozen, packaged and destroyed.

Dreadlocks Dread
Dreadlocks are so familiar now that it's hard to explain how otherworldly they appeared in early '70s Britain. As the punk movement dawned, more and more Rastas turned up at gigs and parties, with their long, thick, rope-like locks hanging in clouds of smoke. Punks and dreads seemed to bloom together, although dread culture was much more alien, with its talk of revelations and prophecies. What was truly strange was the powerful empathy that existed in Britain between these cultures. Although the punks always criticized the hippies for their long hair, they never seemed to have a problem with the dreads on this level. Don Letts explained the punk-dread unity in terms of a shared sense of rebellion: "the reggae thing and the punk thing, it's the same fuckin' thing. Just the black version and the white version. The kids are singing about change, they want to do away with the establishment. Same thing the niggers are talking about, 'Chant down Babylon'; it's the same thing".

But neither punk nor reggae music would be worth listening to if they were always political and serious. What often gets lost in histories of punk and reggae is the sense of pure absurdity and joy that they shared. The British punk writer Billy Childish remembers The Damned and Johnny Moped in these terms: "The Mopeds were absolutely the funniest group to see. They were brilliant, them and the Damned; talk about people who write a load of nonsense! I mean bands like the Clash were really exciting, but after seeing the Damned or the Mopeds, I'd go home with an aching jaw, because they'd just make you laugh with childish delight". Much the same may be said of the best reggae music. To hear Toots and the Maytals' "Funky Kingston" is to experience pure, nonsensical joy distilled into a few jaw-aching minutes. The same is true of dub artists like Big Youth and Lee "Scratch" Perry. Big Youth's freaky, dreaded-out appearance cannot mask the stoned hilarity at the heart of his music, a spirit that leaves listeners with nothing on their minds but gigantic, gold-filled, toothy grins.