Hairspiration

I’m more than a little bit in love with Nina Persson. My 15 year long dream of meeting her was realised after an A Camp gig in the summer of 2009. Unfortunately the encounter was immortalised by the above awful photo and there is one person and one person only to blame, Caleb Followill. You see, Caleb was my hairspiration. When Kings of Leon first sauntered onto the scene with their manly yet lustrous locks I knew I had to grow my hair. Their video for The Bucket was like a burning bush, and that was that, I’d found my identity as a long haired man.

Yes the occasional waitress referred to me and a girl friend as ‘ladies’ when greeting me from behind, there was the obligatory ‘your bloody hair needs cutting’ every time I saw the ‘rents and even got the odd lemon thrown at me from drunkards in clubs. Confident that my mane was my crowning glory it was all totally worth it. Then this happened…

I was blindsided. My hairspiration had had the chop and was now sporting a short back and sides. Fashion was moving on and I suddenly felt less than fashionable with my shoulder length hair. All of East London seemed to follow suit and mop tops and shaggy cuts were rapidly replaced with slick fins and Morrissey dos. Ugh. It took some soul searching but after being made redundant and spending another Christmas with the hair-phobic family, New Year 2009 seemed like a good time to change hair and change fortune.

On a cold January morning I rocked up to the hairdresser without an appointment, secretly hoping that they wouldn’t be able to fit me in, but alas they did. I explained what I wanted to her and considering half the town was walking round with the hairstyle I was talking about I didn’t think it needed much explaining. She seemed to get it and quickly got to work hacking of my hair with a razor. At first it was liberating. I could feel a breeze on my neck and my head was much lighter.

There was one problem though, the hairdresser was an American who’s frame of reference for the haircut she’d envisioned for me was at best Goo Goo Dolls and at worst Ellen DeGeneres. It was not what I was going for. What I failed to realise was that Caleb, my hairspiration, was a lot more handsome than me. The short hair only served to highlight all my flaws; a skinny neck, sticky out ears and the inability to grow sideburns. The poor cow wrestled some product into my hair while I looked on, in what felt like an outer body experience, and moulded the monstrosity into what could only be described as ‘the Dot Cotton.’ Needless to say she didn’t get a tip. I walked back to the train with a cold head and a resolve to grow my hair back. With that came the awkward in between period of growing out my hair which led to my hairstyle being compared to amongst others Justin Bieber, Lisa Rinna and Mark Hamill.

 

When A Camp rolled into town the following summer I was somewhere between Bieber and Rinna. They put on an amazing show and Nina and the band were super nice, signed stuff and took photos. The whole experience definitely lived up to my expectations but I’ll always be reminded of that terrible haircut. They say you should never meet your heroes and now I know that whoever came up with that saying must’ve been to that bloody hairdresser.