Bubbling Under: Haircut 100- "Favourite Shirts (Boy Meets Girl)"

Yet another 80's band that deserved better.

Welcome to Bubbling Under. Each edition I cover an artist that charted outside the Hot 100 on Billboard's Bubbling Under chart. This week: Haircut 100

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Regular readers might recall that I purchased a great deal of music from cut-out bins when they were a regular feature in stores.

A lot of these were compilation albums. The compilation tape that included “Melody” by Boys Brigade is where I also initially heard Haircut 100 (or Haircut One Hundred as they were also known).

The six-piece from Beckenham burst onto the pop charts at the tail end of 1981 with “Favourite Shirts (Boy Meets Girl")”, a funky piece of early 1980’s new pop. It was the first in a string of UK hit singles from their debut album Pelican West.

Haircut 100 had its roots in a series of bands that friends Nick Heyward and Les Nemes had been a part of since the late 1970s. The last of these bands, Moving England, released a 1980 single called “Moving Back”. Unfortunately, a quick search for audio just turned up a bunch of stuff about literally moving to England.

Heyward and Nemes teamed up with another friend, guitarist Graham Jones. The three of them brainstormed potential band names before settling on Haircut One Hundred. They were joined by drummer Patrick Hunt (later replaced by American Blair Cunningham), sax player Phil Smith, and percussionist Marc Fox.

Signing to Arista, the band had a Top 5 UK hit at the end of 1981 with “Favourite Shirts (Boy Meets Girl)”. It was their next single, however, that would be their biggest hit.

Released at the start of 1982, “Love Plus One” actually managed to cross over across the pond when it peaked at #37 on the Billboard Hot 100. It’s a memorable song—everything about it is pop perfection. I could go into detail describing the song, or you could just listen to it:

The second British Invasion had just begun. There’s the oft-told story that MTV had nothing to show. They easily could have opened up their playlists to more diverse artists from different genres and had lots to show. Anyway, for whatever reason, the brand-new network showed a ton of UK artists, one of them being Haircut 100. Human League and ABC also scored hits early on and by 1983, the floodgates of the British Invasion had opened.

Some acts like Duran Duran became massive, and others like Human League scored a decent amount of follow-up hits. And then a few, unfortunately, never managed to follow their one hit up.

I don’t think of these guys as one-hit wonders. “Favourite Shirts” pops up just as often as “Love Plus One”. Heyward’s solo career is highly regarded in some circles (I plan on covering that at some point in the future).

But if you believe in logistics, Haircut One Hundred probably falls into the third camp I mentioned. When it came time for follow-up, Arista decided on “Favourite Shirts.” On paper, it probably seemed like a great idea. It had been a huge UK hit, after all.

I’m not going to spend this article going into why I don’t like Clive Davis and why Arista was kind of a horrible label for artists to be on. I will point out that they did, unfortunately, give up on Haircut 100 after “Favourite Shirts” barely missed the charts at #101.

The band did score two more UK hits, one of which was “Fantastic Day”. “Fantastic Day” had a similar sound to “Love Plus One”. It’s my personal favourite of their four big hits.

By the time they’d broken out across the pond, “Fantastic Day” was on the UK charts. “Favourite Shirts” had already been buried as the B-Side to “Love Plus One” in ‘Murica which probably hurt it’s chances when it was issued as a stand-alone followup. I honestly think “Fantastic Day” should have been released as a follow-up instead. I think it easily could have provided the guys with another hit.

That said, even if Haircut had scored another hit, it would have been short lived. Following a fourth hit with “Nobody’s Fool”, the band imploded.

From what I can gather, becoming famous quickly took its toll on Heyward. He was dealing with stress and depression and stopped attending recording sessions. This caused tensions between Heyward and the rest of the band. Haircut One Hundred split up at the start of 1983. Because Arista had decided to side with Heyward, his mental health issues were left out at the time, and it was stated he simply wanted to start a solo career. Arista dropped the other five guy,s who were promptly scooped up by Polydor.

“Whistle Down The Wind” had been intended as the next Haircut 100 single before the band broke up. It was instead re-recorded and dusted off as Heyward’s debut single during 1983. It hit a respectable #13 on the UK charts and was an easy-listening hit on the Billboard charts. Honestly, “Whistle Down The Wind” is a masterpiece. It’s up there among some of the best songs of the 80s and should be regarded better. Perhaps if the band had stayed together, this would have taken them to another level.

Heyward had a respectable solo career and even bubbled under as a solo artist a good decade later, so I will be revisiting his solo career at a later point in this series.

As for Haircut 100, they did re-emerge with a second album on Polydor (1984’s Paint And Paint). Unfortunately, without Heyward’s songs, they just couldn’t carve a niche on their own. Marc Fox took over on lead vocals, and they managed to score two very minor UK hits with “Prime Time” and “So Tired”.

“Prime Time” is full on 80’s sophisti-pop. It’s nowhere as awful as I’d been led to believe going into this piece. I remember seeing that awful Bands Reunited show twenty years ago where some VH-1 host harassed former pop stars trying to go about their business to get their bands to reunite. I recall seeing the Haircut 100 episode and thinking Fox looked uncomfortable on lead vocals when archival footage was shown. He’s a completely different performer than Heyward. Fox was one of the older members of the band, and he has a more mature presence than Heyward’s goofy boy-next-door vibe. His vocal style is more blue-eyed soul than jangly pop. It doesn’t mean he was a bad frontman, though. “Prime Time” is a decent effort, but the band doesn’t look like they’re having as much fun as they did in the earlier videos. I honestly think the guys would have done better to have changed their name. This more serious version of Haircut 100 just wasn’t what audiences wanted.

I’m going to also admit that the way the band was presented may have hurt their chances. Haircut 100 is never listed as a boyband, but visually, they come off that way. They were six cute guys performing pop music presented as such (check out their publicity photos and album cover). They made music videos that present them as six guys with different personality types, the way later boyband videos did. You had the cute lead singer, the sax player, etc—though I’m not sure if any boys and girls of the early ’80s had a favourite with these guys like they did New Kids a few years later.

Unlike a large chunk of boy bands, though, they had a lot of things that would set them apart from such a label. Haircut had a chief songwriter, was not prefabricated, and had serious musical chops. “Nobody’s Fool” sounds much closer to XTC than it does The Backstreet Boys.

I should also mention that Heyward has given a number of interviews in recent years stating that he wasn’t comfortable with the level of fame he was achieving. I feel like one way or another, the band would have imploded under pressure.

Since the 2004 Bands Reunited episode, Haircut 100 has gotten back together twice. Once from 2009-2013 with the full lineup and again starting in 2023 without Smith and Fox.

They’ve started touring regularly again, even releasing a new single during 2024 called “The Unloving Plum”. A lot of bands on par with these guys have fallen into an “I Love The 80s” nostalgia tour trap where they do package tour after package tour with hardly any original members and release awful novelty singles. While Haircut 100 is part of the nostalgia tour circuit, “The Unloving Plum” certainly isn’t the worst thing I’ve heard while writing one of these pieces. They also have a new album in the works. It will be interesting to see how this new act in their career goes.