Farewell Keith Wainwright; popularly known as “Keith at Smile”, the Chelsea salon he co-founded, and which was allegedly the first in London catering to men who wished their hair styled longer. Keith went on to become a sort of, um, long thread, or long hair, twining the pile of Britain’s shaggy post-1960s culture.
He had a credit on Roxy Music’s first album, for stiffening the boys’ quiffs, and he rendered Toyah Willcox’s barnet seven shades of shocking, both for Derek Jarman’s Jubilee, and her own solo sprauncing. Keith even had a part in Bowie’s epoch-making hairstyling – but more of that… never.
Because what is the anecdotage of those of us, um, in our dotage, if not the curlicues and twistles of our lives, lying like so many clippings on the floor at our feet. Keith entered my own via Janet Street-Porter, who, so far as I can recall, fell in and out of love with him on a regular basis – perhaps depending on what he’d done colourising-wise that week, or month.
I, too, began seeing Keith on a regular basis – sure, he wasn’t cheap, but he was indisputably a brilliant hairdresser – nay, an artist of the tonsure! – and then there was the gossip: nothing nasty, or manipulative, just the usual he-said, she-did that typifies all social spheres, wherever they may be set spinning.
And there were Keith’s deep London cultural roots as well: he was a Bermondsey boy, a docker’s son, who initially went into hairdressing not because he was a nancy boy (he wasn’t), but because it was an honest trade a working-class lad could be apprenticed to. Anyway, Keith took great pride in his work – and like all those whose metier consists in making others feel better about their appearance, and who are good at it, he had a practical sort of philosophic bent; by which I mean, he could make you feel – altogether unjustifiably – better about yourself.
With many ageing males, the locus of anxiety is, of course, an actual locus on the head: specifically, the increasingly isolated tuft of hair at the top of the forehead, that, as, baldness encroaches from all sides, threatens to become a mere island, isolated from the mane, and so manifestly for… the chop. In my own anxious case, I’d taken to calling the hateful promontory – rather prematurely, as it transpired – “Hair Island”, and would cavil to Keith about it, as he dipped and snipped around me in the chair.
A dapper chap, he was, with a beautifully sculpted little moustache-and-goatee combo, shaped something like an hourglass, with the pinch point at his lips. Now his hour has come – but for me, his wisdom endures: one day, I broke down in the chair, vouchsafing that I felt cursed – that having teased my older brother meanly for his premature baldness, my own widening foreshore of a forehead could only be justified: my fate would be to end, inevitably, with the pattern males loathe even more than the ones on Cath Kidston tote bags.
Keith gripped my shoulder with the steely, pincer-like fingers that were the result of decades of manipulating finger-like steel pincers, and pronounced with calm authority: “Don’t worry – remember: I have a lot of experience with hair. You’ll keep enough to avoid male-pattern baldness before you die.”
So reassured was I by this, that I didn’t look at the back of my head again for another decade; while, since I’m tall, no one else did much either – except for my rapidly burgeoning youngest, who, from time to time, would run his finger around on the top of my head, while asking me why I didn’t have any hair there.
Kids, eh? I just ignored him. When I did, at last, properly focus on the mirror, as Keith held it poised for me to regard his rearview work, and saw the bald patch, I near-yelped: “But I thought you told me I wouldn’t go bald!?” Whereupon he ejaculated: “What did you expect!”
Before reiterating his remarks of a decade previously, to the effect that he never said I wouldn’t lose my hair, only that I wouldn’t have full, male-pattern baldness before I, um, died.
Well, Keith is gone – but his “What did you expect!” lingers on, as does Hair Island. I think of the remark as not just his epitaph – but everyone’s; a bit like Spike Milligan’s “I told you I was ill”, or Marcel Duchamp’s “D’ailleurs, c’est toujours les autres qui meurent” (“Besides, it is always the others who die”.
What do we all expect, if not those inevitables: death and hair loss? Awaiting a stem-cell transplant that may cure my cancer, but will undoubtedly lay waste to Hair Island, I’m wondering whether Keith’s prophecy will play out, or…
