Haircut One Hundred: 'The older you get, there is no time to waste'
Summing up how it feels to have completed Haircut One Hundred’s first album in four decades, Nick Heyward can’t resist a playful reference to one of the band’s biggest hits from the early 1980s.
“I can find that actual moment that Sunday where I went, right, that’s it,” he tells The Yorkshire Post.
“It has been mastered, it’s finished, the work is done. It was a lovely day – fantastic, actually,” he says with a hearty laugh.
Not only has it got a title – Boxing The Compass – but it also has “a narrative right through it, a very nautical feel”. The band – who also include Les Nemes, Graham Jones and American drummer Blair Cunningham – even managed to recapture the breezy pop-funk essence of their early recordings.
“There always is (that vibe) when Les, Graham and I get together,” says Heyward. “And when we drink from Blair’s special brew, his Memphis Stax background – he cut his teeth in Ardent Studios, we hope to go and and see it one day, Blair’s going to show us around, that’s the plan, to go and record there – and the four of us were in Sean Reed’s studio in Hackney...he was at the desk and Blair was in the drum booth and the three of us were in the control room playing and being what we know, just being Haircut One Hundred, what we made when we were in rehearsal studios in the late Seventies.”
Unlike Pelican West, which the band cut for Arista in 1981, the process of writing and recording Boxing The Compass “took a long time because we didn’t have a budget...so it was all made on a shoe string”. Nevertheless, it will finally be released on May 29.
Haircut One Hundred’s reunion – which began with a BBC Radio 2 Piano Room session in 2023 to coincide with a box set reissue of Pelican West, and was followed by tours of the UK and US, and an appearance at Glastonbury Festival – is tinged with a certain amount of regret about lost time after their original break-up in 1983. “It is sad that it hasn’t been together all this time, so this is miraculous,” he says, explaining that his thoughts had turned to reforming the group while watching The Beatles Disney+ documentary series Get Back at the end of the Covid pandemic. “I just observed that this was the band in the studio working their magic and it was really emotional, I was laughing, crying. It was experiencing a whole band life. We experienced in a year what it took The Beatles 10 years (to experience). Also, you’ve got the time before you become known which is the bedrock and the foundation of the band, which is really strong because it was on friendship in a similar way… So it probably played a seed that all bands have to do is turn up to the studios.”
Despite their long separation, Heyward thinks that they all harboured hopes that they might one day reconvene. What made the difference this time, he feels, is having the right team behind them. “This was different, and Les, Graham, Blair and I knew that it was different. It was like...we’re getting help, maybe it’s because we’re older now and time really is more precious, it really is now or never. The older you get there is no time to waste. It’s like Batman and Robin – you’ve just got to do it now.”
In particular he mentions the late Melvyn Taub, of Hall Or Nothing artist management, whose death from cancer in September 2024 had left the band “devastated”. “Melvyn is sadly not with us now, but he was the most lovely man,” Heyward says. “He was the manager we always should’ve had, and he was such power pop fan and so into the band as well. It was a labour of love for him. I’m sure it wasn’t a money spinner, it was just a genuine love. You could tell he loved hanging out with the band as much as we enjoyed hanging out with him.”
The wave of affection that greeted the two singles from the album, The Unloving Plum and Dynamite, was heart-warming for the 65-year-old singer. “And it’s paying for itself now, so that’s why it’s continuing," he says, “but we all need to do other things to keep it going, so it is a labour of love.”
In Heyward’s case that includes a number of solo dates – this year he’ll be performing with the Orchestra of Opera North at their 80s Classics concert in Millennium Square, as well as the retro festival Let’s Rock Huddersfield and a few dates supporting Saint Etienne.
In the meantime, he is looking forward to Haircut One Hundred’s UK tour this month. “It’s good, we’ve got new songs to do, which is like a real band, it’s like a continuation,” he says. “It’s weird being this old and it’s not weird because it seems very right.”
Boxing The Compass is out on June 19. Haircut One Hundred play at York Barbican on Friday May 8. https://haircut100.com/