On November 12, 1964, the aspiring pop star told the BBC that brutality against hairy men “just has to stop”. It was a cheeky stunt, but it signaled the unconventional spirit that Bowie brought to a career of fearless reinvention.
We’re used to seeing awkward high school yearbook photos of future stars who were barely recognizable before fame changed them. This 1964 BBC TV clip is different. The 17-year-old sitting in the Current Affairs studio is unmistakably David Bowie, but back then he was just plain David Jones. As the founder of the Society for the Prevention of Abuse of Long-Haired Men, he was there to seek understanding. “I think we’re all pretty tolerant, but over the last two years we’ve had comments like, ‘Darling!’ ‘Can I carry your handbag?’ thrown at us, and I think that has to stop now,” he told presenter Cliff Michelmore.
Researchers on the Tonight Program featured an interview in the Evening News published a week ago in which “David Jones, of Plaistow Grove, Bromley,” founder and chairman of the International Federation for the Preservation of Animal Filaments, “quit a job in commercial art to go into the pop business.” Jones told the newspaper: “Anyone who dares to grow their hair to their shoulders has to go through hell. It’s time we all come together and stand up for curls.” References to “pop business” suggest this may have been a publicity stunt. After all, he had appeared on a BBC music show four months earlier as the lead singer of Davy Jones and the King Bees.
By the time the news hit TV, young Jones and his hirsute friends had come up with a catchy new name and claimed to have a following of 1,000 teenagers across the UK. In fact, most of his publicists were bandmates in his latest pop group, Mannish Boys. Jones claimed that he began growing his hair long before the Rolling Stones arrived with unkempt hair. “It takes a long time to get to this length,” he argued. What’s interesting is that by modern standards his hair is not that long. Perhaps that’s why Jones and his friends didn’t have to go to the hair salon to shampoo their manes. “Our mothers do it,” he revealed. “They’re very good.”
While the TV show was clearly a joke, the 1960s were a battleground for culture wars over long-haired men. Twenty years after World War II, many of the older generation of “short backs and sides” could not understand why young people would choose to express themselves in this way. Some boys were expelled from school for their shocking insubordination, while older teenagers found the workplace could be a hostile environment. In 1969, 20-year-old welder Graham Wadsworth’s refusal to cut his shaggy hair infuriated his colleagues at a British engineering firm, prompting them to go on strike. The company’s human resources manager complained, “We understand civil rights and other issues, and young people have different ideas, but we need to project a positive image.” The dispute was resolved when it was agreed that Wadsworth could return to work as long as he did not eat in the canteen.
Source: BBC Culture – www.bbc.com
