Roxy Music and Art-Rock Glamour (eBook)

With the release of Roxy Music in 1972, Antony Price and Keith from Smile would be noted by a generation of music fans for whom the glossy cardboard album sleeve was both a glamorous agent of the group whose music it packaged, and a treasure trove of insights (at its best) into the creative outlook, interests and message of the musicians involved.

Never before within the pop and rock mainstream had a group so self-consciously, and for obvious stylistic effect – building their ‘new imaginary world’ – listed credits for not just their hair and clothes, but also those of the model who graced the cover to such memorable and epochdefining effect. To some extent, the success (and for some, notoriety) of Roxy Music’s sleeve was due to the games with sexuality and gender that ran deep within the image and sensibility of the group.

In the early 1970s, ‘serious’ rock albums were entrenched as a male form – even when recorded by female artists. Roxy Music, with its (Hamiltonesque) credits for a named model (a high fashion, Antony Price and Ossie Clark catwalk model, moreover), hair, clothes and make-up was determinedly feminised – yet at the same time unmistakably heterosexual. In powder blue, pink and gold, the world suggested by the sleeve conveyed male swagger, lush sexuality and heightened cool. Its brilliance lay in the ambiguity of its sexuality, and the translation of this sexuality into a manifesto on modern glamour and primary Pop art source material – the pin-up girl.

The credit to Smile for Kari-Ann’s hair on Roxy Music slipped a chic, in-crowd name to the wider world. Keith had been the hair stylist of choice to fashionable London since the early to middle sixties, and in the early 1970s his reputation would be joined with that of Price as the imperial arbiters of modern style, ‘by appointment’ as it were to Roxy Music. As with Antony Price, Wendy Dagworthy, Jim O’Connor and Pamla Motown – all contributors to the early Roxy look – the ethos of Keith and Smile described the development of a new approach and attitude to personal style and outlook – the roots of this approach and its subsequent form being deep within their creators’ formative experience as Mods.

In keeping with the glamour and exoticism that Roxy Music would present from their earliest outings, Keith came from a background in which style, pop cool, and being a well-known member of fashionable London society were all commingled. As first an apprentice, then a stylist for Leonard at Grosvenor Square, and finally the owner of Smile, Keith would occupy a position in the swiftest current of metropolitan pop fashionability.

By the early 1970s Keith would have become an avant-gardist within his own profession – not just by experimenting with styles and colours that were still considered more peculiar than adventurous by many of his peers, but also in creating, by way of Smile, an embassy and venue for his own approach to personal cool. To have your hair cut by Keith at Smile (during a period when the ubiquitous consumer industry of style culture was yet to have assembled, and ‘otherness’ was still highly visible within a largely conformist society) would be something of a personal mission statement – it placed the client as a person of high fashion and progressive taste, tuned in to the latest style codes.

Keith Wainwright: ‘I became an apprentice hairdresser; and in those days you did five years – three years sweeping the floor and washing hair, then two years when you actually got to do people’s hair – mostly colour, perms and ancillary work to the stylist. When I very first started I was actually told not to speak to the clients – because my accent was too broad. And so I used to practise my elocution – but fairly soon I reverted to type.

‘I was a Mod, and the Mod scene in London was very, very localised. We used to go to the Embassy in Welwyn, or sometimes off to other venues. You’d get your clothes looked at, and your scooter looked at; but whatever you did, you didn’t ask a girl to dance, because you’d be on foreign ground. This was in the middle of the 1960s. At this time, me and my mates had all seen Breakfast at Tiffany’s – we had the suits, we were cool. I remember being desperate to get a suit from Austins, which became Cecil Gee in Shaftesbury Avenue.

‘I’ve always liked pop – I never liked jazz. The very first record I bought was by Doris Day, and after that my dad took me to see Frankie Lyman and the Teenagers at the London Palladium. I loved Fats Domino, the Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly, the Platters. The boys who liked Eddie Cochran were too rockerish for me. I didn’t think at the time that I liked specifically black music – these were just the things that appealed to me. At the time it was all Val Doonican and crooners. When I used to go down to Brighton on my scooter, we used to go to the Aquarium – where they always had a live group. I was more interested in musicianship than music, and purple hearts [amphetamines] weren’t our thing. Later, when I worked for Leonard, we used to take what were called “slimming pills” – and those weren’t even thought of as “drugs” in those days.

‘When I finished my apprenticeship I had what is now termed a “year out”, because I wanted to educate myself and travel. I was just twenty, and took a job on a boat going to South Africa. I took a quick commission and then got work on a cruise liner, going around the Mediterranean; from there I went back to South Africa, and then to Rio de Janeiro. On this trip I spent an extra day in Naples, and a guy I had been working with asked me to go to Rome – so I just got on the train and went.

‘In London I did Mary Quant’s hair for a while, because she lived around the corner from the hairdressers where I worked before I worked on the boats. At that time I also did Lady Annabel Birley’s hair. I liked Roy Orbison and all the same popular music that she liked, and when I told her that I was leaving to work on the boats she asked me to be a DJ at Annabel’s [Mayfair nightclub, founded by Mark Birley in 1963, and named in honour of his then wife] – and my life would have been quite different if I’d done that.’

In this particular chronology of style, Keith Wainwright would be a direct link between the elitism of Mod – and Mod’s influence within the new creative industries of television, fashion, advertising and media, almost more than pop – and the ‘new kind of aristocracy’ that Roxy Music would come to represent.

The individualism and style consciousness of Mod, however (all acceleration and clean, straight lines) prior to its commercialisation and evolution into different strands of music and fashion – psychedelia and northern soul, primarily – would be at odds with the more inward-looking hippy counter-culture of the later 1960s. Former Mods such as Keith, Janet Street-Porter, Jim O’Connor and Pamla Motown were rooted in both a working-class work ethic and a sharp, fast, outward-looking attitude. As such, the drug culture of revolution and inner exploration were anathema to their sense of cool.*

Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, Keith would radically dismantle the formality and traditionalism of salon hairdressing as it had existed in Mayfair and Knightsbridge since seemingly for ever – a hushed, middle-aged, conservatively feminine world of fluttery handed deferential service – and create a new approach to his profession which acted upon and encouraged the opening up of entrenched English boundaries of gender and class. In short, as a key agent of pop modernity, Keith used a unisex approach to hairdressing – then a statement of substantial originality. In this, he would share with Antony Price the recognition that changing attitudes to gender and sexuality were key to creating a modern style, and combine this new approach with technical brilliance as a stylist. Suitably enough, television and pop music would assist him in this process.

Keith Wainwright: ‘I worked at Leonard, in Grosvenor Square – it was an off-shoot of Vidal Sassoon. If you were a bit hip, you weren’t so much a Vidal Sassoon person because you knew about Leonard – you’d go there.

‘Because I’d done my five-year apprenticeship, I had phoned Leonard after I’d finished on the boats. They didn’t need a stylist, but they asked if I could do tints and perms. I then had an interview with Daniel Galvin and got the job. And because I’d done hairdressing on the boats, I’d also learned men’s hairdressing a little, as well.

‘Now at that time – the middle of the sixties – you either did men’s hair or women’s hair. And I was getting asked to cut the hair of the male hairdressers at Leonard...