Back in the early 80s, the British music scene had a bunch of bands making lush and vaguely jazzy pop. Some of those bands, like Aztec Camera, are still fondly remembered today. Some, like Haircut 100, are not.
Haircut 100 was formed in 1980 by singer and songwriter NIck Heyward. After a number of lineup changes, they were signed by Arista and put out their debut album Pelican West. Four hit singles later, Heyward quit to pursue an unsuccessful solo career, and the rest of the band continued with even less success without him, releasing the now long out-of-print Paint and Paint and disbanding shortly thereafter.
Four cheesy-ass videos for near-perfect pop songs:
Favourite Shirts (Boy Meets Girl)
The debut single.
Love Plus One
The big transatlantic hit.
Fantastic Day
This song has an awesomely cheesy video too, but for whatever reason the suits pulled it from the Youtube (but left the others up.)
Nobody’s Fool
The last single before it all fell apart.
And the rest of the album? Pretty heavy on the filler, to be honest. Heyward apparently used all his lyrics on these four songs, because the rest of the record is largely instrumental. Musically, its all pretty heavy on the chuka-chuka funk guitars and brass hooks of the first two singles. There’s nothing really bad on the record, but Favourite Shirts is Lemon Firebrigade is Baked Bean is Marine Boy and so forth. A lot of reviews say that the album is front-loaded, but its really more that your ears become desensitized to it by track 6.
I can’t really fault their consistency, though. They had their one thing and for a few short years they shined and polished it until they had a few 3 minute blocks of perfection. No band since then, bar perhaps Vampire Weekend, has come close to perfecting the sound of rich twentysomethings on exotic vacations.