Just A Little Off The Top, Please

Just A Little Off The Top, Please

THE BEAT GOSE ON

NEW YORK-YO! Arise from your slimy loaflife pits, collect your wits, and prepare to meet six young men who go under the name Haircut One Hundred. Founding Barbers Nick Heyward (lead vocals, guitar, songs), Graham Jones (guitar), and Les Nemes (bass) had little contact with the music business or the "rock lifestyle" when they began practicing in Nick's room. Graham was a photo printer, Nick and Les were commercial artists. The clan later grew to include Mark Fox, who taught German to teens but also happened to be quite a percussionist, Phil Smith (sax), and Blair Cunningham (drums), who were the only two with any track record in the biz having played with everyone from Pauline Black to Isaac Hayes between them. Nick dubbed the band Haircut One Hundred because it was silly and therefore didn't sound like your basic rock band. Escaping rock cliches has become the latest thing in England, but in the Haircut's case it seems logical rather than contrived.

Mark: "In England if you haven't got any talent, but you have a big mouth and you're very, very pushy and you don't want to work in a market selling stolen property, you get involved in the music business...that whole seedy side of it."

The nucleus of three magically multiplied into six as the boys went straight from their debut performance to recording demos that attracted several major labels. Arista won, and with the help of English Beat producer Bob Sargent they released "Favourite Shirts (Boy Meets Girl)" followed by "Love Plus One." Both went Top 5 in England and their debut album, Pelican West, entered the charts at No. 6.

Mark: "We've been big from the very beginning. We didn't pay our dues but we're having to work extra hard now because we're playing in front of 5,000 in England and if we do a bad gig we've disappointed 5,000 people's evenings. "

Pelican West is digital, not like a digital watch that plays "Yellow Rose Of Texas," but very clean and bright (sort of like a tea kettle in tune) which, suits the content nicely. Nick says he washes up with it. Mark says he puts it under his arms. Some things are too big for the DYI-broadcast-through-asubway-PA format, like squeezing a size 10 foot into a size five shoe. Take the Talking Heads, the Average White Band, the Feelies, K.C. and the'Sunshine Band, the Doobie Bros., Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass, and Brasil 66, borrow a bit here and there and you've got part of it. Add a sometimes breathless boy vocal ringing and waxing enthusiastic, a brass section that zips and weaves (never the kind that arrives like a dead bird plopped into the lap of one of your party guests), serve it up in a crisp, jazz inflected package and you've got it all.

Mark: "It's the acceptable face of raucous music."

The words that go along with it are another matter. Nick Heyward takes subjects such as boy meets girl and personalizes them to escape as many verbal bromides as possible, while still exploring a matter that anyone can feel sympatico with.

Nick: "If I explain Love Plus One it just sounds boring. The actual lyric standing by itself before you explain it is much more interesting. When someone listens to it, it could mean anything to them."

The fact that the words Nick sings tend to. run off down the sunnier avenue of life have occasionally worked against the band, at least with the English press.

Mark: "The press know we're not stupid and yet they've labeled Nick this kind of happy boy-next-door, and no matter what he says now, they tend to see him as this smiling picture of youth...the Lady Diana Syndrome."

The band look like what they predominately are—with the exception of Memphis-born Blair, they're all middle-class Brits in their early twenties. They are classically well-dressed but comfortable, each indulging in his own personal quirks and innovations, as people will with their wardrobes.

Nick: "We were plunked on Top Of The Pops,so what we were wearing was what we were wearing and that was supposed to be our image, so everybody said 'HEY! Your image is young boy! It's, ah, young boy, normal clothes!' and how can you get an image that's nprmal clothes? There's some bands that get it all wrong. They say 'Alright, we've gotta have an image, say like Haircut One Hundred' so they go out and buy 100 jumpers (sweaters, not dresses). There's bands that are all wearing the same gear and that's when it gets pappy."

GONNA FLY NOW!

Robert Zimmerman, aka Bob Dylan, is seen here in a still from his forthcoming co-starring role in Sylvester Stallone's Rocky IV. Dylan plays a role close to his own life— a down-and-out 60's protest singer who wants to prove he "can still go the distance" by challenging Rocky Balboa, heavyweight champion of the world, to a match. Also featured in the film is Dylan's old friend, Joan Baez, who plays his trainer, "Toots" Stillman. Said director /co-star Stallone: "We had Mr. T in the last film to represent the new 'punk' ethic, so we thought we'd put something in this film to appease the aging hippies." Asked to comment, Dylan would only mumble: "I coulda been a contender, instead of a bum, which is wnat I am." COMING SOON: Meat Loaf recreates the role of Haystack Calhoun in Rocky VII

Mark: "You are the New Normals...' We've been told that this is the fashion band, but we don't have any designers working for us and we have to go to Oxford Street to buy our clothes. There's been no master plan—six different people, six completely different sorts of music and ideas of what style is, but all having the same idea of what the chemistry of Haircut One Hundred is. We may have contributed to the decline of posing.

"We seem to have tapped a source of fan. In England we've been labeled as a teenybopper band for some reason and primarily play to audiences of 11 to 20. This is probably the first concert they've gone to, the first record they've ever bought. Kids were really sick of putting face paint on. The ones who actually had the nerve to get beaten up on the street for looking like Adam Ant were getting fed up with it. But there were thousands and thousands of young people in England who didn't want to relate to that image—they thought it was stupid and embarrassing. And they don't have to get beat up looking like Haircut One Hundred."

As we all know, great studio bands don't always make the 20,000-leagues-under-the-sea translation into a great live band. The Haircuts sure did. Assisted by two ex-National Jazz Youth Orchestra members they made a Friday-night-andhere-weareattheRitz-again crowd seem almost human... doing things people are supposed to to at shows, i.e., dancing, singing, and screaming. Excited as they were exciting, the band seemed to be having as good a time as the audience. It was the party band you knew in high school, all grown up tight and professional musically, but still having a grand time. The big sound was looser, spicier, sassier, and still all there. Jhe members themselves were also all there, being of the teetotaling persuasion ('cept for beer and that doesn't count in Blighty) .

Nick: "I commuted in to London on an 8:30 train and I came in with all the commuters and I had a suit on and I looked like I was going to work and people looked at me like, what the bloody hell is he doing here? If you do get into this business, if you get totally engrossed in it, then what's the use of being in it? Before when you were sitting on the bus you were thinking, if I ever make it, all these people will recognize me. But when you get on in this business, you never see a bus for the rest of your life."

Annene Kaye

NEW YORK-When the Specials broke up, the group split into two camps. Jerry Pammers, the gap-toothed keyboardist who was usually considered the mastermind behind the group, has carried on under the name Special AKA, releasing a daring song about rape called "The Boiler." The old Specials front line, singers Terry Hall and Neville Staples and guitarist Lynval Goulding, regrouped as the Fun Boy Three.

The Fun Boy Three's music, as captured on their first album, is a lighter, more playful contination of the directions in which the Specials were always heading. The album has a loose, improvised feel, reflecting the fact that in the studio the members of the FB3 played whatever instruments they fancied at the moment. There are contributions from a female vocal trio called Bananarama, and songs covering a range of moods from whimsy (a cover of an old 40's hit "It Ain't What You Do") to darkly cautionary ("The Lunatics Have Taken Over The Asylum").

Fun Boy Three: Inside The Asylum

LITTLE TRIGGERS

"Oh, God 11 can't stand it anymore I" sobbed Ony Osbourne, pictured here contemplating suicide. "I don't know who the hell I am anymore I I mean, first everyone sees me in Black Sabbath, singing songs about devils and demons, as I constantly flashed the 'peace sign* like some bleedin* love child hippie-talk about a schizophrenic case. And If that wasn't bad enough, now I'm making millions of dollars with Alice Cooper's old shows, and the kids absolutely love It I I compensate for a lack of ideas by killing fine feathered friends in public, and I can't stand It anymore 11 I've decided to end it all." Fortunately, Ozzv's shrink showed up in the nick of time, and coaxed the gun out of his nand vyith the promise of a broiled rodent's head dinner. That zany Ozzy 11

Over a lunch of fancy hamburgers in a Manhattan rest-' aurant ("That's an Australiaburger? It looks like Australia") the FB3 answer questions. Terry Hall has one of the world's best haircuts, a floppy mop-top with trim sides, and a winning grin. A lot of people have recently been walking around humming a Terry Hall song to themselves without relizing it—he co-wrote the GoGo's' "Our Lips Are Sealed." Neville Staples wears modified Rasta-style dreadlocks, a big guy who takes obvious care to stay in shape. Lynval Goulding is soft-spoken, relaxed, perhaps a bit more subdued than usual as he's recovering from a knife attack that was part of a racist incident in their home town of Coventry.

The breakup of the Specials, it seems, came down to the issues of leadership and money, with the FB3 members lining up against Jerry Dammers.

"We felt cheated" Neville says. "We were preaching democracy, but the things that we were preaching weren't practiced in the group."

Terry: "It was hard to find out, but we found out when money became involved."

Lynval: "Then all men weren't equal. It was equal when everybody was just getting a bed to sleep in and having breakfast in the van. But when it came to making money, one person was getting so much more that it wasn't fair."

Terry: "With this band it's an even split. Sharing money, sharing work load, sharing recognition, everything. So if we lose out on anything we all take the blame."

Another point of contention was touring in America, which Jerry opposed and the rest of the band wanted.

Lynval: "We wanted to come here, and Jerry didn't want to come here the last time, so we forced him. We had a keyboard player standing ready. We wanted to see if we could carry on with Jerry as a working unit. And it failed."

Terry: "It was a political thing with Jerry. He'd rather be in Russia. When we drove through Berlin to play inside the Iron Curtain he thought he was in heaven. I didn't see any sigh of niceness there. You know what I mean about that attitude. That country is as bad as this one. To be proor antione or the other is a lot of crap. We should worry about our family and our home, nothing more."

There is a lot of continuity between the Specials and Fun Boy Three. A lot of the FB3 album has a haunting, atmospheric quality that echoes "Ghost Town," the Specials' last and biggest hit.

Lynval: "What we are is an extension. We've just changed the name, but it's still the Specials. Only we don't find it necessary to talk about things in the way that we did in the Specials, in a blatant way. Because that didn't solve anything.

"All right, they were good statements or whatever but that's as far as they went. They were as disposable as a newspaper. We write the same things now that we did in the Specials but in a different way. We don't want to tell kids they haven't got a future, because they have. Everybody's got a future."

Terry: "Specials songs were too blatant. I was embarrassed singing them sometimes."

The Specials at least did confront the social issues in England head on, singing about racism on the first album, and having a timely hit about economic distinction with "Ghost Town," which appeared just after the riots that struck England last summer. I wondered if they thought that things between blacks and whites in England were getting better or worse?

Lynval: "It's a lot better. Despite the fact that I've been attacked twice. The first time it was skinhead aggression. This time it was just..they weren't looking for me. They were looking for somebody else and I look like somebody else from the back. But then, what right has anybody got to go out for a night with knives?

"But in England now you've got more togetherness since the riots. Together everybody has to show the government that they mean business."

Terry: "The racial violence is far outweighed by football violence. Every Saturday there are 46 games and each one has gang fights. And it happens every Saturday year in and year out."

The FB3 continue the Specials tradition of combining social comment and sharp observation with musical inventiveness, but their lyrics are never preachy. Fun is really the operative word in their music. In seems to apply to their choice of Bananarama as singing partners as well.

Lynval: "They're three really pretty girls. Nice personalities. Sing great as well."

Terry: "We just wanted some girls to sing our songs. And we saw them and we liked the way they looked. We asked them and it was as simple as that."

No one who saw the Specials live will forget Neville's manic performance, jumping around the stage in comic abandon, and Terry and Lynval are no slouches either. But since they play a rotating variety of instruments on record, they'll need to come up with something different for a Fun Boy Three live show.

Lynval: "That's gonna be kept as a secret."

Terry: "We've got some plans but we don't want to spit them out because they're very original."

Personally, 1 can't wait.

Richard Grabel