LETTER FROM BRITAIN
Martin Fry has one long piece of hair, like a badly cut fringe, that lies across his nose, almost blocking his vision in one eye. 'Fry is 23, over six feet tall and has a fair bit of acne," observes the NME reporter. He also Passes comment on ABC’s popularity with the fresh-faced and open-minded Human League and Ant fans...”
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LETTER FROM BRITAIN
TEENAGE KICKS
Penny Valentine
Martin Fry has one long piece of hair, like a badly cut fringe, that lies across his nose, almost blocking his vision in one eye.
'Fry is 23, over six feet tall and has a fair bit of acne," observes the NME reporter. He also Passes comment on ABC’s popularity with the fresh-faced and open-minded Human League and Ant fans...”
ABC make compact, melodic electronic pop records, real singles like “Poison Arrow with memorable choruses like the sound of colored sweets in a.tall jar. It is no surprise that their first album will be produced by Dollar’s Trevor Horn. Well, not much of one...
Dollar are both blond and look like hairdressers. A girl and a boy with a string of hits - (unmemorable), they have always been photographed to look like those shots of Rod and Britt. Very pretty, very clean limbed, very Aryan. When they do their songs live they look like they’re committing incest.
Bardot are both dark-haired and look like hairdressers. A girl and a boy with their first single, “One Step Further,” to sing in Eurovision. Choreography plays a big part in their act, choreography of the pantomime kind. They look like Jack & Jill. So far there is no hint of sexuality. Their hair and eyes and teeth all shine a lot.
The girls in both groups have long legs and wear little skirts and little ribbons and the boys look like David Cassidy when he first appeared on The Partridge Family, where U.S. color did little to enhance the orange pancake make-up that attempted to hide his spots.
Could skipping become the new rage? In the supermarket the other day were two Claire of Altered Images clones and their mother (a semi-clone). None of them were under 18. They were all bright and bubbly and giggled over the cheese counter and had terrifically Upper Class voices and said things were “jolly super” just like Lady Di probably does. Their hair shone, their eyes shone, their teeth shone. The two girls skipped around the aisles to the check-out counter. Their mother stayed buoyantly jolly.
When Haircut 100 play you can hardly hear them for the screaming. Hundreds and thousands of pubescent girls...The “fresh-faced and open-minded” are all around. At their recent concerts reporters were stunned to discover that Haircut were the recipients of so much under-16 approval. Outside the concert halls traffic snarl-ups were the result, not of their audience driving themselves away, but of little girls being collected by their parents. They searched their descriptive prowess in vain...finally...Haircut 100 are the new Beatles. Nick Heyward—wide eyed, freshly scrubbed, bow-tied, virginal and “yellow,” as the NME reporter calls him, in an attempt to be clever and summon up a sunny disposition (it almost works)—is the Paul McCartney of the operation. The difference is that Haircut are' even more shrewd, more calculatingly naive, more innocent and write much much more advanced material than the Beatles (or the Monkees or the Osmonds) did at the start.
Pure pop. Their album Pelican West has shot to the top of the chart in two weeks. Heyward’s grin gets toothier by the moment. The most cynical of critics has to suspend their acidity when faced with so many well-crafted, deliciously inventive songs. They succumb. Nicholas Heyward appears in shorts. His face looks like it ought to be covered in freckles, just William. Perhaps it is.
Haircut 100 are the new age Teen Dream.
This weekend Alexander Haig is here to talk about the Falklands and whether we should risk starting a mini-version of World War III. Singing “A View From Her Room,” Weekend’s Alison Stratton sambas across the floor with her ponytail hairdo.
On Music Of Quality & Distinction producers Martin Ware and Ian Marsh have re-vamped a dozen songs, most from the late 60’s. The result is not nostalgia but a shining up electronically of a batch of not very notable songs in the first place sung by a variety of people who obviously were keen to have a go at something they hadn’t tried before. A shame that Ware and Marsh put forward the idea that what they are doing here is radical: it took one critic an entire page to point out that they weren’t when he got his hands on the album.
In fact, what has emerged is exactly right for its time. A new pop re-constructed from the ruins of rock, replacing the sharp heritage of punk. A new innocence' for preppy babysitters clothed in a style-concious maks. James Dean and Brandon de Wilde haircuts on college boy smiles. Even Steve Strange, entrepreneur of style, looks askew on his new adventure “Visage,” seriously offering the post-Ultravox leather bound neo-Nazi pose for consideration. He has been caught napping as the gleaming children have galloped in from behind the scenery. ^
