My "Ashes to Ashes" Hair Struggle

Much as looking like Keeley Hawes might be very very jolly for some chaps, it is not of her that I speak, rather David Bowie in his all-time classic "Ashes to Ashes" video, complete with black skies, exploding kitchens and Steve Strange.

I remembered it, vaguely, as a child in 1980, but not clearly, and it took the "History of Rock Video" all nighter on the BBC in 1986 to put it back in my consciousness. There was a half hour Bowie segment, and I was absolutely enthralled when "Ashes to Ashes" appeared and seemed a thousand times better than I remembered.

And then, there was his hair.

 

 

Not the best shot there has ever been, but the best one I could find. It was long at the front, parted, but sort of quiffed over so it was hanging over his (strange) right eye. It was immense to me, the birth of a new Mister Mulberry, the gonk with the terrible curls and waves into the semi-hip teen.

 

 

The hair would be the vanguard of this transformation. That was the plan anyway. But even after the hair was cropped short and the back and left longer at the front, the crucial change away from early 80s mullets, it was still far too wavy to make it look like the suavily weird Mr Bowie.

 

This didn't stop me from standing in front of a mirror for hours with this bizarre round hard toothed brush with a sort of boingy end. I'd dig it in at the front like a gardening fork, pull the hair out straight as I could, then sort of curl it round the brush to straighten it out against the wave.

 

The strands could then be draped across my eye in the appropriate fashion, and so I would look the Bowie part.

 

For all of about five minutes. Ten, if I used industrial amounts of mousse and hairspray (the brand with the sort of Mondrian painting on the cans) and gave my hair the texture of a mummified jellyfish. After that, the curls would spring it back to where it sodding well was, only with the addition of a weighty coating of utter gunk.

 

 

This ritual would persist for months, with the same result. I never learned from this, when David Byrne appeared  in my life, I would go for it again, with more "product" and even worse results.

 

People just don't remember what a trial it was to be a teen with wavy hair in the 80s, they really don't. "Ooooh, perm!" I would have yelled at me, by pocket Bryan Ferries with a girl on each finger.

 

Worse was folk saying "Girls would kill to have hair like yours!"

 

Thanks Granny, for saying my hair looked like a woman's. Thank you very much.

 

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 17.11.14