Nick Heyward: 'Sixty is definitely a landmark you can't ignore'

“It’s definitely a landmark you can’t ignore, it’s very real. But it’s good, it makes you get a move on.”

In the diary for this autumn is Haircut 100’s first UK tour in 40 years, but first up is an 80s Classical concert in Millennium Square, Leeds, with the Orchestra of Opera North and fellow 80s pop stars such as pop legends Nik Kershaw, Go West, Heaven 17 and T’Pau’s Carol Decker.

As a latterday convert to “most things classical”, it’s a show he is looking forward to. The eureka moment happened while hearing the adagio for strings in Gustav Mahler’s Fifth Symphony in D, he says. “I don’t know why but I changed (radio) station at this particular point, it was April 30, 1998. I was in the dining room and I heard this piece of music on Classic FM or Radio 3 – which I didn’t normally have on, it just happened – and it just summed up that whole year completely.

“I was drawn in and I became that piece of music and as it ended it brought it right up to the present moment; everything that had happened that year, this was a journey through this music and then it left me in the place I was in and I felt beached, and I literally was in tears by this piece of music.

“That was the moment that I discovered it, although obviously with all things like clothes or music – music especially – you discover it when you’re ready. I discovered The Beatles after they’d been split up 10 years.”

Heyward first worked with strings at the end of 1982, when he met Paul Buckmaster, the cellist-turned-arranger who worked on Elton John’s classic albums Madman Across the Water and Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only the Piano Player. “He came in to do the songs Whistle Down The Wind and Club Boy At Sea and he did some arrangements for us, I think it was 20-piece strings,” he recalls. “I was 21 just, so to hear them in the same room where we’d recorded Favourite Shirts and Love Plus One was amazing. I knew it was a pretty magical room anyway because Bohemian Rhapsody had been recorded there and it was not that long before that I’d bought that record and I couldn’t believe how beautiful it was in every way...Then years later I’m actually in the same studio.”

Conversations about reforming Haircut 100 began while assembling material for a box set reissue of their album Pelican West to mark its 40th anniversary, along with a live album of a concert from 1982. “That’s another thing about turning 60,” says Heyward. “You start to go, if you’ve got anything to do, now’s the time, what are you hanging about for? There’s some sort of physical change as well. I did genuinely feel it’s now or never...And 40 years is grounding.

“Les (Nemes), Graham (Jones) and myself have a strong bond of being mates from that period, we lived together. Haircut 100 was our dream in our flat above a flower shop. We joked about shaking audiences’ hands and them pulling us in, we were imaging it, that’s why when it did happen you joked about this stuff but the joke has actually been turned into reality. Living together was easy and we had fun together and (those memories) are always there so it’s quite easy for us to pick that up.

“It’s funny with old mates. You know when you’ve got mates that you haven’t spoken to for years and you’re on the phone and then you’re off again, there’s no social awkwardness of anything, you pick up where you left off, you’re laughing immediately and you just plug in to how you were.”

The difference between 1983, when the band broke up, and now, Nick says, is they have a “really brilliant” manager. “Management is a very important part of anything,” he says. “Imagine a great football team with an awful manager, it just doesn’t happen. Like with Brian Epstein when he died, The Beatles got messy.

“This time we have a really brilliant manager who could see what was happening with getting back – looking at things like the (BBC Radio 2) Piano Room – because it was the 40th anniversary. They wanted to look after a band like Squeeze and they thought Haircut 100 would be good. So we’ve got a really good manager now who managed the Manic Street Preachers and Wet Leg and Del Amitri, so we’re in good company. That happened naturally and that’s the reason why we’re now doing a tour and why we’re staying together becase we have proper management.”

Back at the start of Haircut 100, Heyward had intended the band would be like his then heroes Talking Heads. Pop stardom, it seems, to got in the way of his more serious musical ambitions. “That’s the way we were going, I never thought it would go pop like that – but everything was going pop at that point. Depeche Mode went pop, The Human League went pop when everything had not been.

“Even our first NME interview, when we were still living above the flower shop, no hits, no nothing, just an idea, living and breathing being a band, but Adrian Thrills did the interview like a pop interview – Graham’s favourite colour, Les’s favourite cartoon – and that was the way that NME was definitely starting to go because they’d had the industrial age music and everything had been quite bleak for a while.

“This was the 80s and things were starting to develop and change and even electronic music – for example, The Human League’s Being Boiled and it wasn’t long before they were writing as good as ABBA – Don’t You Want Me is just an amazing pop song.

“So it was starting to happen anyway and that was the influence of that. We started out being influenced by Talking Heads, thinking we were going to have a Talking Heads-style career in that way, be on (The Old Grey) Whistle Test. But that was a good because we were a real band, it was an organic happening.

“Pop was a distraction but it was inevitable because it was happening to everyone at that point, it was part of the evolutionary process that was happening in music at the time. I think if we’d have resisted it we wouldn’t have been having this phone call.”

Heyward reveals the band intend to release a new album. “Because of new management, it’s got to the stage of in what weeks is Blair (Cunningham, the band’s drummer) available, can Les come over from Spain, where are we going to do it, who with and how. I’ve got songs so they might be used, it’s all going to be put into the creative melting pot and new material will come out, I’m sure. Hopefully we will do them on the tour.”

80s Classical takes place on Friday July 28. Haircut 100 play at York Barbican on November 17. https://haircut100.com/