Tom Dunne: Yes, I've reached that stage. Should I let a family member cut my hair?
Tom Dunne sporting a full head of hair at Feile 1990 in Thurles. Picture: Eddie O’Hare
The lockdown had reached the ‘let your child cut your hair’ stage. My wife is adamant. “You’d be mad,” she says, but I look at the dog, Murph, and he is better groomed than me. My 14-year-old daughter cut his hair. He looks majestic. I finger my locks sullenly.
My hair and I go back. It had its own agent during the Nineties, I was its ‘plus one’ at parties. It opened doors for me, made friends. There were people who didn’t know me but were familiar with my hair. I coasted on its coat tails. Naturally, mistakes were made.
I dated a few people and I know it was more about the hair than me. Sometimes the hair would turn against them. “They have to go,” it would whisper in my ear at night. “It’s not you, I’d tell them it’s the …..well, you know.” I always felt I was next in line for the bullet. The hair kept me as long as I was useful.
It would have been better suited to an earlier era. In the Sixties, a centimetre past the collar was enough to undermine society. The Beatles only had to comb it forward to bring down the old world order. Shoulder length hair was an admission of drug taking, loose morals, devil worship and human sacrifice.
By the Seventies long hair ruled the world. Nothing said Rock Star God quite like flowing locks. Jim Morrison, Mick Jagger, Robert Plant bestrode the globe. “I am a hairy man at the peak of my powers,” it said majestically. Today no one can remember the music of Peter Frampton, not a note, but God, that chart topping hair!
However, despite punk’s teachings I maintained a soft spot for long hair. I surreptitiously bought a copy of CSYN’s Déjà Vu. “Put that in a brown bag,” I told the man in the shop. The bus journey home, my illicit goods under the seat, was endless.
One of its songs was called I Almost Cut My Hair. The only thing that happens during the song is that after a period of mature reflection they decide against cutting it. They opt instead to, in their words, to let “their freak flags fly”. I couldn’t admit to liking them, but deep down I liked this crazy, coiffured, freedom shit.
So when the moment came in my life that a Recording Contract, was signed, I took off my watch and I stopped cutting my hair. The place I was going to wouldn’t need time management, but it would need hair and lots of it. How was I to know it would get the upper hand?
Today, knowing its evil past, knowing what it got up, the situations it dragged me into, it’s hard to feel great sympathy for it as its falls on hard times. Its Farrah Fawcett days are gone. These days it’s like sharing a head with a fading forties movie star. I sit listening to it as it demands cigarettes and searches the fridge for something to drink.
“It was the music that got small!,” it shrieks, “not me.” “Look in the mirror, love,” I want to tell it, “tell that to the mirror!” But I don’t. I don’t share its cruel steak. I was an innocent bystander, a very reluctant witness to its shenanigans.
Your hair, unless you are, specifically, Bono, Mick Jagger or Ron Wood, has to go. It’s part of the deal. It’s the pact you sign.
I am my hair’s carer now. I walk it and the dog twice a day. People admire the dog and laugh at me. Untrimmed, its default look is mid -seventies Terrorist mug shot. Throw in some Covid, year two, fashion statements, athleisure wear that is now habitual and its easy to see how the dog is outshining me.
The best I can do with it now is let the children have their fun with it. They are watching online hair cutting tutorials as we speak. The ‘combover’ and Grecian 2000 are not options. As with most things to do with your hair, best to meet the crisis head on.
