Haircut One Hundred Reunion Interview

The latest Haircut One Hundred reunion is “a gift from the universe”, frontman Nick Heyward and bassist Les Nemes tell Classic Pop – and they’re loving every single second of it…

“I’ve just been arrested!” says Nick Heyward, by way of an opening gambit, as he arrives for his date with Classic Pop in a Soho bar. “I had my rights read to me and everything,” explains the Haircut One Hundred frontman, his trademark full-beam grin undimmed by his brush with the law. “My Senior Railcard had expired. I didn’t know you had to renew it. I didn’t even know you had to apply for one – I thought the government just gave you it. But it turns out Sara [his wife and manager] had got it for me. And it had run out.”

How the powers-that-be could think so dimly of The Nicest Man in Pop™ is a mystery. But even more baffling is the idea of the eternally boyish Nick Heyward qualifying for such a concession in the first place – he’s 63 but looks 20 years younger. Could he ever have imagined, as a fresh-faced teen launching Haircut One Hundred’s idiosyncratic brand of carnival funk-pop on an unsuspecting world, that he might one day be a pop star with a Senior Railcard?

“I hoped it might happen – because it’s something to aim for,” says Nick. “And now that we are this age, we want it to go on longer and longer. Because we’ve got our friendship back.”

This last comment is addressed to the man sitting next to him, bassist Les Nemes, who nods his agreement. “He sent me a WhatsApp just this morning, saying, ‘Isn’t it lovely to be friends again, and doing what we love?’” smiles Les.

“It’s a really intense friendship that the three of us had back in the late 1970s and early 80s, when we were just kids with a dream,” says Heyward, folding the band’s other full-time member, guitarist Graham Jones, into the circle of love.

“If you’d asked me a year ago, ‘Would this ever happen?’ I’d have said, ‘absolutely never’,” admits Nemes. “We hadn’t spoken for 10 years. But we’ve picked it up like it was yesterday.”

“That’s a real friendship thing, though, isn’t it?” says Nick. “Time doesn’t exist when you’re real mates.”

Love Plus Three

For a long time, Nick, Les and Graham were not mates. Struggling with the pressure to follow up their acclaimed debut album, 1982’s Pelican West, Heyward found himself ejected from the band, who themselves called it a day following 1984’s belly-flopping Paint And Paint.

In the decades since, there have been occasional reunions but, as Nick told Classic Pop in 2017, the onstage truce didn’t translate to an offstage relationship. So what changed? “Well, there’s still a couple of members stuck in the past – that’s the reason,” says Heyward, pointedly. Saxophonist Phil Smith and percussionist Marc Fox haven’t rejoined the party, though drummer Blair Cunningham is on board as an affiliate member. “They’ve got issues they didn’t want to talk about. But the rest of us have moved on.”

“I told Nick, ‘I don’t care what happened in the past’,” says Les. “That’s gone, and the future isn’t here. So the only thing that matters is right now.”

“It all evaporated, didn’t it?” says Nick. “All the things we thought we needed to talk about, they evaporated pretty much immediately. And every day since has been a bonus.”

No-one is more surprised than Heyward and Nemes to find Haircut One Hundred back onboard the pop carousel full-time. Initially reuniting for a show at London’s Shepherd’s Bush Empire to mark the 40th anniversary reissue of Pelican West, they’ve since toured the UK and the US, played Glastonbury, released their first single together in 42 years, and are currently working on a new studio album.

“We thought the reunion show would be emotional, but it’s been getting more emotional as we go along,” explains Nick. “It’s like a dynamo, like a bike – it’s picking up speed and energy as it goes on.”

“The mad thing was, we didn’t arrange any of it – it all came to us,” says Les. “It was like the universe said, ‘Alright, I’m going to arrange everything, and all you need to do is turn up’. And that’s what we’ve been doing ever since – turning up.”

“The universe is a great arranger,” nods Heyward. “I’ve asked it to start looking after my funeral…”

The universe got a helping hand, though, from the late music promoter Melvyn Taub, who passed away from pancreatic cancer in September. “If it wasn’t for Melvyn, none of this would have happened,” says Nemes. “He organised everything, pushed for everything.”

“He was a lifelong fan of power pop and pop-funk, who I’d met when I was younger, and it was his dream for us to be back,” says Nick, eyes moistening. “A lovely guy. He is the universe, really.”

American Dreams

Returning to the States as special guests of ABC and Howard Jones, more than four decades after their last US shows, was an emotional experience for the band – and, it turned out, their audience. “Some people had flown hundreds of miles, or done a road trip from Texas to Utah, or wherever,” says Heyward. “And they brought all these memories with them – of finding their partner or losing them, or going through chemo… I remember one night watching a woman standing with her husband, and within the first couple of bars of Love Plus One, she had started crying. And you thought, ‘My god, what does that song mean to her?’ By the end of the tour, we were all losing it.

“The shows also went to another level of authenticity. As young indie aspirants from south London, we could only dream of being so authentically Latin American, but on theseshows we had our Venezuelan drummer, Izzy, and Felipe Fournier, who’s a Grammy-winning percussionist from Costa Rica. These guys were just on fire, aiming for the hips. It was such a powerhouse of energy – we only played six songs, but there were standing ovations every night.”

Was there a natural esprit de corps between the 80s survivors on the bill? “We’ve all been through similar things, but having not done it for 42 years, we were probably processing it at a different level to the other two,” reflects Nick. “The shows were so charged; I think it kind of ignited Martin Fry’s competitive side. But Howard was much more chilled. He was just like, ‘I love this, let’s do more.’”

Back home, Haircut One Hundred crossed off another bucket list item when they made their Glastonbury Festival debut on the Avalon Stage. “It was amazing,” smiles Les. “It was another thing I’d given up on,” admits Heyward. “I thought, ‘That’s never going to happen’. But it did.”

Filtered Funk

Their summer of love now over, the band are now knuckling down to the business of making a new album. Late last August, they shared the first – ahem – fruits of those sessions with effervescent single The Unloving Plum – a jubilant, summery earworm (and Radio 2 Record of the Week, to boot).

“The song is about that first relationship that makes you feel like anyone – and the first that broke my soul into a million pieces,” says Nick. “The unloving plum is a bit like the Lotus flower – where does it come from? It comes from the mud. But there’s that light that comes from tasting it for the first time. So it was just built around wordplay from that.”

The opening line, ‘Cover me in diet pop’ was, adds Nick, originally more brand-specific. “It was, ‘Cover me in Diet Coke’. But Radio 2 and other stations said, ‘Sorry, no product placement’. Though I note that Addison Rae can get away with [recent hit] Diet Pepsi, so it’s obviously different rules for her.”

The single arrived with a playful, Frankenstein-riffing video, directed by Tom Bailey (no, not that one). “Everyone told us videos aren’t a thing anymore,” says Nick. “But it’s part of the creative process. We’re not going to stop making them, just because they’ve gone out of favour.”

So how much else is in the can?

“We’ve got eight songs that are kicking around,” says Nemes. “And then we’ll look for another two or three.”

Speaking to Classic Pop last year, Les favoured a return to the band’s early post-punk, Talking Heads-influenced days. “That is where I’d have liked it to go,” he says today. “I saw it with no brass – just kicking back to the three of us and keeping it very raw. But it hasn’t gone as far that way as I’d envisaged. There’s still brass, there’s still percussion…”

“There are still funky ones,” Nick assures us. “There’s one called Vanishing Point, which sounds a bit like the theme to [70s TV show] The Streets Of San Francisco meets James Brown. It’s like a getaway car song. And Dynamite is a big, funky disco song, kind of like Earth, Wind and Fire.”

Another track that’s currently in contention, Mudlarks, returns to the geographical location of Pelican West. “It’s about the Pelican Stairs [in East London], where they used to hang people,” explains Heyward. “It’s a very significant area for the band. But it’s also a social commentary on how far we are regressing, as a culture. Are we going back to Dickensian times? Are we all going to be mudlarking?”

Mixing New Wave guitars with jazz funk and Brazilian rhythms, Pelican West remains a very singular creation: the missing link between Postcard Records and Nile Rodgers (via 1960s Tropicália and Bruce Lee movie soundtracks), it held a brace of Top 10 singles – Favourite Shirts (Boy Meets Girl), Love Plus One, Fantastic Day and Nobody’s Fool – and sounds box-fresh today. So are they feeling the pressure to bottle lightning all over again and avoid what could (drawing a discreet veil over Paint And Paint) turn out to be the world’s most delayed case of difficult second album syndrome?

“Who wouldn’t feel the pressure?” says Nemes. Nick takes a more phlegmatic view: “You just do what you do. You can’t let that stuff get to you. I’ve got way over that point. You just have to turn up and be as creative as you can. It doesn’t work if you’re consciously trying to be Haircut One Hundred. You’ve got to let one thing lead to another.

“We’ve found a way of working that suits us, which is to play live. We’ll start doing one thing, and it will evolve into something else. Sometimes you have to allow it to come through you. Then Les is my first port of call – if Les doesn’t get a bassline for it, it isn’t a Haircut song. And then Graham has his filter, because Graham’s a Clash fan ’til the end of his days. So that’s the process the songs get filtered through.”

Priceless Friendship

With the days of record company largesse now a distant memory, it’s also a question of logistics. “The trick is to keep turning up and rehearsing and recording, because we’re not minted,” says Heyward. “There’s no budget – we’ve just worked a whole year for hardly anything. We’re doing it out of pure love.”

Nick takes out his phone and scrolls through the scores of song sketches he’s recorded as voice notes. He plays one, in which he sings: “If I haven’t got a friend, I haven’t got anything”. “That’s what it’s been lately,” he says, beaming at Les again. “We love our friendship being back. It’s even better than it used to be. A powerful thing.”

Cards on the table: do they wish they’d done all this sooner?

“A few months ago, Nick said, ‘Why have we not been doing this for 42 years? This is so amazing, why did we stop?’” says Les. “I think regret is too strong a word. But there’ssome disappointment, maybe.”

“There’s nothing you can do about it,” shrugs Heyward. “And part of me wonders whether we’d have this brilliant friendship we have now, if we’d kept going.”

“There’s also the fact that putting it off another 10 years wasn’t really an option,” admits Nemes, who recently turned 64. “You have stages of life – we’re in autumn.”

To add to that, Nick isn’t sure they’d have been greeted as such conquering heroes if they’d done it earlier. “Bands go through life cycles,” he suggests. “And for 10 or maybe 20 years after your first success, you’re not very cool.

“There’ve been times when, if you didn’t get a record contract, then you didn’t exist. Also, if we’d done this 20 years ago, we might have been a bit arsey about it. But when you get older, the egocentric side of you tends to evaporate. As you disappear from public relevance, you actually feel more alive.

“Sometimes, you have to let go of the thing you want, in order to get it. And now we’ve got it, we’re loving it. It hasn’t been easy to get here, but now we’re here, it’s just… Wow.”

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