Haircut One Hundred are back. Not in the half-hearted, nostalgia-circuit way that qualifies so many reunions, but properly back — original line-up, new material, and a record they believe finally delivers the follow-up their 1982 debut Pelican West deserved. That album was the biggest-selling record of its year, spawning Top 10 hits in Love Plus One, Favourite Shirts (Boy Meets Girl), Fantastic Day and Nobody’s Fool. Then, by January 1983, it was over. Frontman Nick Heyward was out, the band stumbled through a failed second album, and what remained was decades of near-misses, brief reunions, and unfinished business. The new album, Boxing the Compass, is their attempt to close that chapter properly.
In a pair of extended conversations with MusicRadar, Heyward has been opening up about the origins of the band, the chemistry that made them tick, and what it means to finally have the classic line-up in the same room again — making music that feels like it belongs to them.
The story starts, as many do, with punk. Heyward and a friend made their way down to Tin Pan Alley, where Nick bought a guitar and his friend Rob picked up a snare drum. Bands formed, line-ups shifted, and by 1979 Heyward was standing outside a Wimpy Bar in Beckenham when he met guitarist Graham Jones. The two bonded immediately over a shared love of music and, as it turned out, a shared experience of heartbreak. “Graham and I spent a huge amount of time together, especially as both of us had recently gone through breakups,” Heyward recalls. “We lived and breathed the band, rehearsed constantly and focused all our energy on making it work.”
The parting with Rob was amicable but inevitable. He was gravitating toward bands like The Birthday Party while Heyward and Jones were pulling in a funkier direction. That funk instinct would become central to everything Haircut One Hundred produced — a lightness of touch that felt effortless but was the product of serious musicianship and relentless rehearsal.
Nowhere is that clearer than in the story of how drummer Blair Cunningham came to join the group. After recording Favourite Shirts, producer Bob Sargeant — who had also worked with The Beat and produced the Lotus Eaters’ First Picture of You — told the band plainly that they needed a stronger drummer. Heyward and bassist Les Nemes went to see Cunningham play, having been told he was, in Heyward’s words, “the best drummer in the universe.” The credentials backed that up. Cunningham had trained at Ardent Studios in Memphis, working with Stax artists including Rufus Thomas and Maurice Wyatt. His brother Carl had played with Otis Redding before dying in a plane crash. “When Blair got behind the kit we were just flabbergasted,” Heyward says. The band had found their engine.
What emerges from these conversations is a picture of a group that arrived at their sound through genuine discovery rather than calculation. Heyward recently recalled a conversation with guitarist Graham Jones in which Jones asked: “Do you remember when we were playing around and discovered F?” It’s a small detail, but it captures something important about how Haircut One Hundred worked — curious, instinctive, finding things out together. That spirit is clearly what Heyward is trying to protect when he pushes back against the idea of formula. “People sometimes say ‘I’ve got a formula’ — well, yeah, and you’ve just stopped 700 songs coming your way,” he says. Rigidity, in his view, is the enemy of the very thing that made the band worth listening to.
The reunited Haircut One Hundred have already toured both the UK and the US, and by all accounts those shows confirmed that the chemistry between the classic members remains intact. Boxing the Compass is the recorded proof of that — the album they never got to make when internal pressures tore the band apart in early 1983. Heyward is clearly aware of the weight that carries, but also of the opportunity. Forty-plus years on from Pelican West, the band that discovered the key of F together in a Beckenham rehearsal room is still finding things out.
Sources: Latest from MusicRadar, Latest from MusicRadar
