WANTED: 1 NEW IMAGE (WHOLESOME POPSTARS NEED NOT APPLY)

Once upon a time there were three English lads who thought it would be a lark to form a pop band. They recruited three other eager chaps who shared a fondness for music and a good sense of humor, chose a silly name, and went off to find Fame and Fortune. The unlikely occurred, and Fame and Fortune were home when the six came by, and granted the boys’ wish. As everyone from the Grimm Brothers to the Rolling Stones knows, you can’t always get what you want, and if a genje offers you three wishes, best use one of them to put the genie solidly back in the bottle. But our stalwart band needed to find this out for themselves.

Soon this lark got out of hand. The lads became tired of living inside a private joke that no one else got. Everyone was taking them soooo seriously. The party was over.

Thus was the career of Haircut One Hundred. Like the proverbial shooting star these appealing fellows burst onto the music scene with a refreshing hybrid of rock, pop, jazz and latino stylings. Their one album, Pelican West, went top five in the U.K. and Top 50 here, with about a quarter of a million copies sold. They had several top five hits in the U.K., among them “Favourite Shirt (Boy Meets Girl),” “Love Plus One” and “Fantastic Day.” The first two were also Top 50 in the States. Not bad for a new band out of England. And all this within a lifespan of about two years.

In addition to being a breath of musical fresh air, Haircut did for the teen set what Brideshead Revisited did for the aging preppies of the world-made clean-cut, wholesome and argyle the things to be. Little Nicky Heyward, everyone’s kid brother. Catch those dimples.

“It’s funny,” Nick Heyward says now, chain-smoking cigarettes in a closet of an unused office in Arista’s New York branch. “I used to laugh; I still find it hilarious when someone calls somebody else, another human, wholesome. I mean, aren’t they embarrassed when they say that? How can anybody stand there and say, ‘You’re wholesome and clean-cut’?” He laughs, dimples flashing. “I mean, fuckin’ hell, you know? Bleedin’ hell!” and laughs again. Little Nicky has grown up.

“Like Bowie when he was 19,” Heyward continues, “only nobody brings up ‘The Laughing Gnome.’ But people , bring up when I was 19 and singing about ‘boy meets girl,’ which I wrote when I was 15. I was 19 when I started in this business. When you’re 19 you’re not exactly a man of the worlds— you’re not at 22, either,” he adds quickly (the advanced age he’s reached now), “but I’ve got a few more experiences. I mean, I never dreamt that I’d ever be going to New York. Third time ’round I love it—I love America, but I was overwhelmed by it when I first came here. I had thought to myself, ‘Holiday in Devon and one in Greece once a year and that’s my lot.’ I never thought I’d be coming to places like this.” And what is a nice boy like that doing in a place like this? Promoting an album, of

Course. North Of A Miracle, Heyward’s first venture without a Haircut. He is also trying harder to be taken seriously, as Haircut’s boyishly mischievous image keeps fugging at his pants leg.

“I remember toward the end when some of the band were asked questions about their socks or something, which was just a joke, and they’d answer it seriously,” Heyward laughs. “I mean, how can you? It’s like they’d go into the inter-relationship between political reason for youth in England or something.

“The band did want to make a career out of it. A lot of people wanted to make a career out of it. They wanted us to make Pelican West Part Two. But 1 felt that Pelican West was so complete you couldn’t do another one. And anyway, what’s the point in doing another one? But there were a lot of people saying ‘Another “Love Plus One”!’ But I never wanted to do Pelican West Part Two — and I’m not going to do North Of A Miracle Part Two, either.

“Haircut was becoming a caricature,” he continues. “It was an explosion in the beginJ ning. The songs were...” He pauses, then ® continues, a bit amused, “I mean, I was sing§ ing about advertising slogans, for God’s sake! Just from my commercial art background, you know; so I can’t sing them with conviction now, they’re just slogans.” He sighs. “It was an in joke at the beginning. I used a lot of humor to actually get it where it was, and then it was getting to be taken seriously. Everyone wanted to make a career out of it, but you can’t really make a career out of humor.” Heyward is probably referring to the constant niggling comparisons that Haircut was getting to that other zany pop group, the Monkees. “A lot of people said, ‘Well, just stick to it, stay in there and earn a bit of money and then you can disappear in two years.’ But that’s not why I got into it at the beginning.”

In addition to being a little older and wiser, having had a fairy tale go pop in front of him—and losing, likely, a couple of friends along the way—Heyward has become less nebulous, or, in the vernacular, flaky. Talking to him with Haircut was like talking to a cloud at times. He would try to talk in the same images that flashed through his songs, all non sequiturs and artsy-pop metaphors without real substance. Nowadays, Heyward, without the security of a band’s matey-ness to fall back on, is more personal and specific, not just in interviews but in his lyrics. .

North Of A Miracle continues Haircut’s melodically diffuse stylings of jazz and funk while keeping a firm foundation in pop. Heyward has a knack for arranging and a good ear for melodies. His lyrics are more specific, more grounded, but still a bit treacly at times (“Let’s hear it for my cute little wife,” he sings in “When It Started To Begin”). Creeping McCartneyism, I call it. Still, he’s only 22 and experimenting. He’s also trying to wrestle with those shadows from the past, images of a feckless youth with wool socks and yellow slickers.

“Nowadays if bands want to change they have to split up,” Heyward says. “They’re not allowed the freedom, like the Beatles had. People don’t listen now.” Heyward feels that Haircut had to break up in order to change. “I couldn’t expect six people to be thinking the same thing as me. It’s a shame. And there was that pressure to make another Pelican West... I had to leave that to do what I wanted to do. It’s good now, but if I want to do something differently, I can’t leave myself,” he says with a wry smile.

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“With millions of bands it’s 95 percent image, and hiding behind it, say, in British music now. They get in top producers and they can hide behind them. Their lyrics are about snakes and sex and stuff, and it’s all surface. They don’t let too much of their personality go onto the vinyl, you know, they might actually get in touch with their audience.

“I wish I did have an image, really, so I could hide behind it. But I never switch off from what I’m doing, the personal experiences are written about on the album. I wanted to get me over on the whole album; a personality, a warmth. The trouble is, I can’t switch off from it. It’s almost like cleaning the system,” he says, then laughs, “or like going to see your analyst.

“People probably won’t remember me because they won’t have any image to grab a hold of. They will remember somebody like Prince because of the outrageous lyrics and the outrageous dress; they’ll remember Culture Club because of the hats and the dreadlocks. They can’t remember me because of my open-neck shirt,” Heyward says, then laughs again. W

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