How Paul Sampson Was Kicked Out of the Band
“Are you worried,” she asked as they lay in bed together, smoking in the dark – “Are you worried that if you cut your hair, you’ll forget how to play guitar?”
“It’s not that,” Paul told Della. “I just don’t think the band will go for it.”
Della had thought Paul would look better with short hair, and he came to think she had a point. Backstage, waiting to play support for a trio from London, Paul raised it with the others. Kennedy, the singer, was firm: “You can’t have short hair and play with us.”
Paul said that you can’t have long hair forever.
“What about Smiley Bob?” said Dave the Drummer.
Bob was old enough to have seen Iron Maiden playing pubs, but Paul was unimpressed. “That pony tail is basically a combover for his bald spot.”
“We could give Paul a wig,” Dave suggested, and that was stupid enough that the subject changed to taking the piss out of Dave. He might have a Master’s in engineering, but Dave was still a drummer at heart.
Paul decided to go ahead with it regardless of what the band might do. Perhaps they’d be more comfortable once it was a fact. Then came the question of how. Paul didn’t know any barbers – apart from one who’d offered him £50 to cut it all off for a YouTube video. There were times when Paul had been tempted to take that offer, but now it came to it, he didn’t want to give that guy the satisfaction. In the end, he borrowed some clippers from Skinhead Alex and asked Della to do it.
Afterwards, Paul was pleased with how it looked. Sleek. He’d always worried in case he had an ugly-looking head. Seeing his hair lying on the floor, it reminded him of a snake’s shed skin. He’d checked online, and he had about four year’s growth there. The tail end of his druggy days was in the split ends.
Della began brushing up the hair, and Paul almost stopped her. But what was he going to do with these clippings? He remembered a teenaged girlfriend who kept her hairbrush draggings in a jar, layers from all the different colours she dyed it. His hair was more mundane, so it went in the bin.
Kennedy was as good as his word and kicked him out of the band: short hair was not metal, despite the example of Henry Rollins. He also broke up with Della a month or so later. The band went on to do pretty well, getting a tour and a couple of articles in Kerrang!. Dave quit in Japan and was replaced by a career drummer.
Paul focussed on his career but sometimes wondered what might have happened if he kept his hair long. He had a clue, but it wasn’t something he could tell anyone, as who would believe him. One day he received a postcard from Riga. It wasn’t signed, but you recognise your own handwriting. Who knows what dead-letter office in what other life it had passed through, but Paul had never been to Riga, even if the band had. But the message told him it wasn’t as much fun as it looked: “The rock and roll lifestyle isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I’m going to leave the band.”
Background
I stopped hanging out on the rock scene after they closed my favourite club. That was around the same time that nu-metal was everywhere. I cut my hair when I went back to Uni, and settled into a buzz-cut about six or seven years back. There’s a lot I miss from those days, some of which this story has tried to capture.
My stories probably rely on disappearances and postcards a little too often. There’s something mystical about the postal system, which is why I spent part of my Masters obsessed with Derrida’s theory-novel The Post Card. I’ve always preferred sending my stories out through the mail rather than using the Internet. One of those projects I’ve never quite got around to is writing a novel by post.
Recommendations
Last week I talked about the places I try to find new music. One of the regular ones is my friend Emma's monthly mix, Audient which has published 70 shows dating back to 2018. We don't seem to talk about online curation any more, but this is a great example of that spirit - someone sharing their considered tastes with the world.
Audient is released monthly, alongside installments of Emma's visual diary. Sketches for the visual diary are produced daily, whatever Emma is up to. Some are necessarily simple, others are wonderful experiments. I love how the Internet enables these long-term projects. Blindboy talks about his podcast as a massive single piece of autofiction. Emma's visual diaries are very much in that line.
Emma is a an inspiration as a maker too. She is a designer and has produced a number of wonderful zines which are available on etsy. I particularly recommend cooking zine Nordkraftessen.
You can keep up with Emma via her mailing list.