On 12 November 1964, the would-be pop star advised the BBC that cruelty to hirsute males “simply has to cease”. It was a cheeky stunt, but it surely hinted on the unconventional spirit that Bowie carried right into a profession of fearless reinvention.
We’re used to seeing awkward high-school yearbook photographs of future stars, barely recognisable earlier than fame remodeled them. This 1964 BBC tv clip is completely different. The 17-year-old sitting in a current-affairs studio is unmistakably David Bowie, though on the time he was nonetheless plain previous David Jones. As founding father of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Lengthy-Haired Males, he was there to make a plea for understanding. “I feel we’re all pretty tolerant, however for the final two years we have had feedback like, ‘Darling!’ and ‘Can I carry your purse?’ thrown at us, and I feel it simply has to cease now,” he advised the presenter, Cliff Michelmore.
The Tonight programme’s researchers had picked up on an Night Information interview revealed per week earlier with “David Jones of Plaistow Grove, Bromley”, the founder and president of the Worldwide League for the Preservation of Animal Filament, who “gave up a industrial artwork job to enter the pop enterprise”. Jones advised the newspaper: “Anybody who has the braveness to put on hair right down to his shoulders has to undergo hell. It is time we united and stood up for our curls.” The point out of the “pop enterprise” gives a clue that this may need been a publicity stunt. In any case, he had already appeared on a BBC music programme 4 months earlier as lead singer of Davie Jones and the King Bees.Â
By the point the information story made it to tv, younger Jones and his hirsute buddies had coined a catchy new identify and had been claiming to have the help of 1,000 youngsters throughout Britain. In actuality, his fellow spokesmen had been largely bandmates from his newest pop group, the Manish Boys. Jones insisted that he had begun letting his hair develop out nicely earlier than the Rolling Stones arrived with their unkempt locks. “It takes a very long time to get this size, ,” he claimed. The humorous factor is that by trendy requirements, his hair is not even all that lengthy. Maybe that is why Jones and his buddies did not must go to the hairdressers to have their manes shampooed. “Our mums do it,” he revealed. “They’re superb at it.”
Whereas that tv merchandise was clearly tongue-in-cheek, the Nineteen Sixties had been the battleground for a tradition struggle over males with lengthy hair. 20 years after World Warfare Two, many members of the older “short-back-and-sides” technology couldn’t perceive why younger folks would select to specific themselves on this manner. Some schoolboys discovered themselves expelled for his or her surprising revolt, whereas older youngsters found that the office could possibly be a hostile atmosphere. In 1969, 20-year-old welder Graham Wadsworth’s refusal to chop his shaggy hair so outraged his colleagues at a UK engineering agency that all of them went out on strike. The corporate’s personnel supervisor grumbled, “I perceive civil rights and all that, and the younger do have completely different concepts, however we’ve got to set picture.” The dispute was settled when it was agreed that Wadsworth may return to work, so long as he did not eat within the workers canteen.
