PHOTOS: MATTHEW BELTER | Some records you outgrow. Others grow up right alongside you. For more than forty years, Haircut 100 has been the second kind for me—the sound of a certain light, a certain feeling, the kind of song that quietly turns an ordinary afternoon into a memory you keep.
“Love Plus One” has been a soundtrack of my life for as long as I can remember, and I’m hardly alone in that; I felt it again last September in Anaheim, camera in hand, watching faces in the crowd light up, watching people cry over memories they’d carried in their pockets for decades. You don’t shoot a show like that so much as get swept up in it. I came away thinking the same thing I’d just been talking over with Richard Blade—that there’s a rare kind of music that refuses to age, and Nick Heyward has spent a career making it.
So, when the chance came to sit down with him ahead of Boxing the Compass—only the second album the classic lineup has made since 1982, and, fittingly for this publication, arriving on vinyl the way it was always meant to—I’ll confess my heart was in it every bit as much as my notebook.
What I found on the other end of the line wasn’t nostalgia. It was a man still chasing the magic, still talking about turning up to the studio like it’s the best job in the world, still steering by the same compass that first pointed him out to sea all those years ago. We covered the reunion, the records that shaped him, the strange arithmetic of keeping a promise the universe seemed to make to him when he was barely out of his teens—and where, after the whole long voyage, the needle finally settles. Here’s how it landed.
I read that the band reconvened for what was meant to be a business meeting that ended up feeling more like a reunion of old friends. Can you take us into that room—was there a specific moment you realized this wasn’t going to be a meeting; it was going to be a band again?
It was never that definite, because we didn’t want to get our hopes up—we always hope the band is going to stay together. The key position is manager, and that’s the one we lost back in 1982; it had never been filled since. So, we could get back together, but staying together was the hard part. Even after we played Shepherd’s Bush Empire, I was still wondering, is this going to last?
But it started to build—the 40th anniversary, then the gig, and then the BBC Piano Room invited us on, which is a big deal over here. When the BBC wants to help you, you think, wow. Then a manager who’d looked after Wet Leg and the Manic Street Preachers rang up and asked if we needed any help. That seemed to be the feeling around that time—people actually wanting us to stay together, which felt different from every other time. We wanted it, and so did everyone around us. And honestly, we’re too old to split up now.
You left after Pelican West, and the band went on to make Paint and Paint without you in ’84. More than forty years later, you’re writing and recording with Graham and Les again. What did it take—in yourself, not just on paper—to walk back toward something you once chose to walk away from?
It wasn’t really a return, because we’ve known each other all along and we’ve always been friends—old friends just slot straight back into the same position. Les, Graham, and I have so much history—the band years, but also before that, when we lived together, and all the good times since. We’re a real band—it was our dream, and it happened. That goes beyond everything else, and the truth is everything else just gets in the way. We let that stuff get in the way before, which is why we didn’t stay together. So now we just keep having to let go, and because we let go, it keeps going.
It’s too easy to get bogged down in the reasons not to do it—the music business has changed, there’s no money in touring, no money in records. But none of that is a reason not to do it. We’re a band, so we get on with it. Every time the four of us—Les, Graham, Blair and me —play, I can’t think of anything better to do with my life. It’s the best job in the world. We’re foolhardy enough to think there are more albums in us, because we just keep turning up, the way we did when we were young. We didn’t get to turn up and do our thing for forty-four years. Now we can, and it’s precious. We’re not going to give it away.
“Boxing the compass” is a sailor’s term for naming all thirty-two points in order—a way of coming full circle. Why that image for this record, and after the whole journey, where does the needle finally settle?
Haircut 100 has always had a nautical feel—the sou’westers, the fishermen’s caps and socks. Even Pelican West felt like it had something to do with the compass. I went on the Ocean Youth Club as a kid and was always drawn to the sea; Jonesy lives by the sea now and gets his rock pools with every tide. None of us are sailors, but it’s about the compass, about direction, and about a complete change of direction. We were lost at sea for so long, and this is coming back to port—back to land, back to life, and then setting sail again.
It’s an adventure. You get calm waters where anyone can steer the ship, and then you get tested in the choppy ones, but there’s a reward in reaching your destination—another album, another book with its own chapters and titles and story. We stepped off stage back in 1982 into the distance, and now we’re stepping back on with those screens fading away—that Stax rhythm playing, “Nobody’s Fool,” introducing ourselves again, and then the car pulls up and we’re funking again. It’s meatier this time, because it’s more American-influenced; before it was more British, Level 42, South London. Now we’ve had a year going back and forth to America, more cinema, more TV, more records, more life. On the sleeve we look like old sea dogs—skin gone leathery, full of salt water, sea captains still heading off on an adventure.
This is only the second album the classic line-up has made since 1982. How do you write a follow-up to a record people have carried with them for forty-three years without either chasing it or running from it?
I actually wanted to be able to play Pelican West and then Boxing the Compass straight after, so it felt like there was no time in between—not forty-four years, just the next record. Time doesn’t really exist. It exists on our bodies and on the environment, but music is timeless. When a recording hits you, it doesn’t matter what time it is, it’s a timeless place. So, I didn’t feel that pressure at all; you just do your best, and that’s all you can do.
The process simply began, and I love making albums—I find it exhilarating. It’s hard work and a challenge, but you’ve got that vision in your mind, body, and spirit, and you know when it’s finished and when it’s not. You can’t gaslight yourself, and you can’t be gassed by anyone else. When this one was done it was within budget, ready, as good as it was going to get—and I was already on to the next one. Some of the old formats have fallen by the wayside—there are no videos to make anymore, no mini discs, no eight-tracks, fewer CDs—but there are still records. In the end it’s like writing a book or a poem: you just know when it’s finished, even if it’s only two lines. It’s a thrill to be part of.
You’ve said, “Come Back to Me” picks up where “Nobody’s Fool” left off —“a continuation of the dream and a kind of atonement.” Atonement for what, exactly? What were you trying to make peace with as you wrote it?
It’s about the loss of time—and the amount of time itself is a kind of atonement. There’s that moment in the film Atonement when Cecilia puts her hand on Robbie’s and the teacup shakes, he nearly spills it, and she says, “Come back to me.” It absolutely kills me, knowing it came from a writer—all that shame in the family, and then this resolution, atonement, continuation. It’s a desperately sad film. Haircut isn’t as sad as that, because we’re still alive, and as long as we’re alive there’s no regret.
The band format is timeless—you take off, get into your position and your role, and that transcends all the flack you take to make it happen. You’re just flying through it, making magic, and there’s the chance you’ll inspire somebody the way you were inspired. Music can make me weep. I never thought “Love Plus One” would be the soundtrack of people’s lives—people drive thirty thousand miles to come and weep at a show, because it was their song; they’ve lost family and loves to it, and it means something. You have to put all your own stuff to one side for that to happen again.
And all you’ve got to do is turn up to the studio. That’s all the Beatles had to do, and they couldn’t—that’s what Get Back showed me. Look at the magic they made in that room, and the personal stuff is the only thing that stopped them. That’s what keeps great bands apart, and it’s a tragedy. That’s what cinema is, really—a reflection you can learn from. It’s entertainment, but it can affect you as deeply as a pop song.
In 1981, on your very first Top of the Pops, Squeeze asked Haircut 100 to support them. Forty-five years later you’re finally doing it, across America. What does it feel like to keep a promise the universe seems to have made to you when you were barely out of your teens?
It’s that feeling that it’s never too late to fulfill a dream. As long as you’re living and breathing, it’s possible—but you have to get over yourself, step aside of yourself. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thought I’m too old for this. I was told I was too old at twenty-three, by all sorts of music-business people and managers, “You’re past it.” And you think, well, yes, that’s what you think. But I love being creative, and that’s the reason I do it. You might decide I’m not commercially viable, but I love what I do as an artist. It’s a choice to live the dream of being an artist—that’s the dream.
You’re sharing stages with Squeeze and Adam Ant—three acts who defined a moment, then had to figure out what comes after one. Is there an unspoken understanding among artists who’ve all lived the rise, the quiet years, and the return?
That’s what we all are in pop music, isn’t it—moments in time. You’d love to be consistent, and we all look in awe at certain people’s moments, like David Bowie’s. They’re these bodies of work that are so awe-inspiring, and you don’t even know why it happens while you’re doing it. I suppose a lot of it is work ethic. Look at Paul McCartney—if he hadn’t been in The Beatles, I don’t think there’d be all those songs, that whole body of work, one after the other.
That band looked really competitive, but it was good competition. Being George must have been hard going. But even that tension is the tension you need to get a tune. A guitar string on its own is pointless; you put it on a guitar, stretch it, get the tension right, and it tunes to a note—and then it becomes a melody. It all comes out of the tension. Watching Get Back, that’s what struck me—out of all that tumult you got “Let It Be,” you got “Get Back.” It amazes me—all that frustration goes into recording, and then this magic comes out. It’s like the first time you hear “Up the Junction” and just go, wow.
Boxing the Compass gets a vinyl release a week after digital. Pelican West was a vinyl record first and forever. When you hold the new one as an LP, does it feel like it joins that lineage—or like something separate that just happens to share the format?
It feels special. Honestly, I didn’t feel Boxing the Compass was even a thing until we did the vinyl—that’s when it made sense, even to cut it, because you get the space between the songs. That space was a vital part of the process, and it had been missing for me. The gap between “Come Back to Me” and “Vanishing Point,” for instance, was really important—that’s the way the car pulls up. It’s like cutting in cinema; it has to be right, and you just know when it’s right. You can’t do it purely by timing, not even with AI—it’s total feel. It’s like feeling a live set—if it’s all on a click, you lose that sense of when it’s right to start.
A lot of that came from Jeff Cooper, a real vinyl buff at Denmark Studios in Maidenhead—what he doesn’t know about vinyl isn’t worth knowing. My wife Sarah and I went round to his house just talking about vinyl and playing things. He used to take pressings back to the shops, and I didn’t even know pressings changed once you had them—I thought they were all generic, that’s how naive I was.
His attention to detail is why the vinyl sounds so good. We ended up cutting it straight from the mixes to keep an organic band sound, rather than mastering it for vinyl, because that digital sound just wasn’t what we wanted. The record has to sound like the band, and the vinyl really does—like the band’s in the room next to you, because those are Danton Supple’s mixes, straight out of the studio. The digital is loud; the vinyl’s quieter, so you just have to turn it up.
For a generation, Haircut 100 was a record you flipped, a sleeve you studied. Now music is mostly something people swipe past. What’s gained, and what’s quietly lost, when an album stops being an object you can hold?
I really hope that doesn’t go, because there’s something special about it—that extra magic is getting less and less, and I’d hate to lose it. We actually set this album up for exactly that. There’s loads to look at on the sleeve, loads of information to run your finger over, old school – to read again and discover. It’s so in our psyche. One side is even harder to make out than the other, just because of the typeface, so there are little hidden secrets tucked in there, like something under a blanket or under a lapel—bits and bobs, and all the lyrics. You can still have that experience if you want it; it’s all there to be found.
It’s been said your “boyish charm is still luminous.” Be honest, what’s one thing about being in this band at this age that your twenty-year-old self simply would not believe?
I wouldn’t have believed any of it. I wouldn’t have believed we’d split up, stay lost at sea for over forty years, and then get back together in our sixties to make the follow-up. Nobody writes that—they just don’t. I’d have assumed we’d simply carried on. I do have fun imagining the utopian version, the idealistic outcome, but that’s just playfulness, because the reality is that we’re here doing it now. The whole music business has changed, and yet we’re still doing the thing we love, which is being a band. At twenty you have no idea of the future—you didn’t really think there was one. Sixty-five would have sounded like great-grandad territory. That’s exactly why I love the old sea dogs on the sleeve, all leathery and weathered.
Looking back Nick, who were your most important musical inspirations?
There are so many, Matthew—the influences came thick and fast back in the day. I’d play James Honeyman-Scott’s guitar solo on the Pretenders’ “Kid” over and over, not believing how brilliant one moment in a pop single could be. You’d have just been living with XTC’s White Music, and it was 1979 and they kept coming, great pop song after great pop song. You’d be watching Top of the Pops, you’d hear “Up the Junction,” and your eyes would light up, and your ears would be on fire—you couldn’t believe the excitement these singles caused. And with that came the aspiration, the dream that you might one day sound as brilliant as the bands you grew up on.
It wasn’t just new wave, either. There was big band music my father played in the car—Oscar Peterson, Duke Ellington—and you’d think you could never be that good, but you dream of it anyway. You’d be in your bedroom miming to Brian May, imagining it was possible.
And I’m still like that now. You hear someone like Lola Young or Raye and think, how was that record even made? With Raye’s “Where Is My Husband!”—how is the vocal that fast, how is the structure that unusual? I’ll probably go and buy Sound on Sound to find out how on earth they did it, because it sounds otherworldly. Even scrolling social media, I’ll hear Joe Dart on bass and Cory Wong on guitar and think, that sounds amazing—I love how dry and in-your-face it is. Or some kid with a guitar singing a protest song into their phone, and you go, wow, that’s really good.
Music is everywhere now; it’s just in different places. You don’t have to wait to get signed anymore—you start making music about your cat, or a piece of cheese, stick your phone in front of you, and you’re off and running. It looks really exciting. God knows how it’ll evolve, but it will—that’s the thing, it’s always evolving.
Every record has a run-out groove—that final spiral after the last song, where the needle just keeps turning in the quiet. When you picture the run-out groove on a career like yours, what do you hope is still in the room after the music stops?
The magic, the inspiration. That’s the only reason for doing this. It’s the thing that put stars in my eyes in the first place—for me it was seeing XTC, that moment where you just go, yes. So to leave behind some of that magic, and to know it carries on—because the recordings are timeless—that’s what I’d want. Just to have left that, and to know I was part of that creative process, because it does it for me. That’s what I hope is still in the room.
Haircut 100’s Boxing The Compass is in stores now—on vinyl.
