Haircut 100’s New Album Is Shear Brilliance

The first and only time Nick Heyward released an album with Haircut 100 was 44 years ago on the band’s 1982 debut, Pelican West, before parting ways to pursue a solo career. Before breaking up, the band released a second album, Paint and Paint, in 1984, without Heyward, their former lead singer and writer of their best-known hit, “Love Plus One.”

When Heyward, along with the original lineup of bassist Les Nemes and guitarist Graham Jones, regrouped in 2022 to work on the band’s 40th anniversary deluxe box set reissue of Pelican West , the collaboration led to a reunion performance on BBC Radio 2’s “Piano Room,” a concert at O2 Shepherd’s Bush Empire, and 18 more shows with longtime drummer Blair Cunningham. Once reassembled, the band also started working on their second Haircut 100 album with Heyward, Boxing the Compass .

Aside from previous attempts at reunions and the band reconvening in 2004 for the VH1 series “Bands Reunited,” they didn’t stick. “We could get back together, but staying together is really hard,” says Heyward, “especially in today’s world.” Jetset singer Melvyn J Taub, who came on board as the band’s manager, was the glue they needed. Working without a manager during their early ’80s heyday is something they say contributed to their split, but Taub, who died in 2024, changed all that. “It was a combination of Melvyn and the universe,” says Nemes. Heyward continues, “He’d [Taub] seen what happened with the shows, and he had this mad idea to take it further.”

Inside, Boxing the Compass, a nautical term for changing direction and reversing course, sounds as if 44 years never passed since Haircut 100 first made their rounds with a spectrum of pop, soul, funk, and jazz.

“Come Back to Me” opens where Heyward left off with the band, and the final song he recorded with Haircut 100, the 1982 hit “Nobody’s Fool.” Partly inspired by a line in the 2007 film Atonement starring James McAvoy and Keira Knightley, every starts with a nostalgic trip back in time, to a post-World War II 1960s and ’70s, Vauxhall Vivas, and the dreams of staying forever young.

Haircut 100’s unmistakable amalgam of beats flip throughout the album on “Vanishing Point” and “Soulbird,” and the dancier “Raincloud,” a song Heyward originally started working on in 2008. The tempo steps back with “Sunshine” and picks up on the more fun-loving “The Unloving Plum,” the oldest track on Boxing the Compass , originally demoed in 1999. “ Well, it’s a book, isn’t it?” Heyward says of Boxing the Compass, closing on the soulful, jazz-and-sax, filled “A Wonderful Life”, another track archived since 2008. “That’s why we all love albums, isn’t it? It has an introduction and the songs are like chapters; it’s a book, so it has to have a narrative, and it has to tell a story somehow. The best albums do that.”

Working with producer and musician Sean Read, who has played with Dexys and Soulsavers with Dave Gahan and who has worked with Beth Orton, the Charlatans, and Manic Street Preachers, the band recorded in East London, tapping into some of Heyward’s old demos. Some of the finer moments for Nemes in the studio were during rehearsals, when the band was just kicking around ideas and jamming. “We’d go in and make stuff up,” says Heyward, which led to some of the newer songs: “Someone,” “Sunshine,” “Vanishing Point,” and “Come Back to Me.”

“I’d like to do the whole album like that,” adds Nemes. “The next one should be absolutely live. Just run the tape, record, and see what happens. Keep it down to very few overdubs and a few bits on top, just the basic band playing live.”

Heyward adds some visualization around the band’s free-range rehearsals. “It was just like rolling mist down the river,” he says, “maybe late September when the river has a mist on it, and you get spiders, webs, foliage.”

Keeping in line with the navigational terminology behind the album title, they move off course while considering releasing a prog album next. “And we’ll all wear wizard hats and capes,” says Nemes. Heyward adds, “And we’re dressed as spiders.”

The jokes keep coming, even the alternate title of the album, according to Heyward: “It was going to be called Boxing the Compost .”

In some ways, the band’s Boxing the Compass era is reminiscent of ’82, the year everything exploded for the band. The energy is still there, and the fun, as they head toward their fall 2026 tour with Squeeze and Adam Ant. Haircut 100 shared the “Top of the Pops” stage with Squeeze in 1981 and were also featured as a comic strip in the British magazine Look In, which frequently showcased Ant. They even have this “utopian dream” of building a live-in studio off a cliff edge along the coast of southwest England, in Cornwall. By day, Jones could run the property as a bed and breakfast, and by night, Haircut 100 would record. During the early 1980s, they already romanticized the idea of living and hanging out together as a band and did just that with Heyward, Nemes, and Jones sharing a flat above a flower shop on Gloucester Road in London.

Haircut 100 are still dreaming. And as much as the band are still linked to their past, they’re also facing the future and the release of more music. “We’re obviously long-term planners,” jokes Heyward of releasing new Haircut 100 music in 2070. “We’re 44 years ahead of the game.”

With age also comes wisdom and the enlightenment that “most things really don’t matter,” says Heyward. “How many times have you put yourself through something, then thought, ‘What a waste of time and energy that was?’” Heyward adds. “Nothing is ever as bad as you imagine. I’ve learned in 65 years that most of the time, the thing you’re dreading doesn’t happen.”

Even in conversation, the band still delivers lightness and positivity, just like the songs that spilled from Pelican West like the saccharine twists of “Love Plus One,” “Favourite Shirts (Boy Meets Girl),” and “Fantastic Day,” more than four decades earlier, and everything new on Boxing the Compass.

“We’re a bit more long in the tooth, a bit more hardy,” says Nemes. “We don’t have knee-jerk reactions to situations. We’ll go away and think about them and come back. You spend your whole life looking up at the stars and thinking you’re just this little tiny speck in this massive universe, and you shouldn’t get upset about what somebody just said the day before. Just let it go and move on.”

The difference now is that they’re best friends, says Heyward. “Best friends play, and they bicker,” he says, “and they fall out, and then they fall back in.”

Another sign that the band should reunite came from Peter Jackson’s 2021 Beatles documentary, Get Back, which Heyward first saw during the pandemic. “Our dreams were taken away for a while,” recalls Heyward. “It was a whole new world, and nobody really knew what was happening. I thought, ‘All they [the Beatles] had to do was turn up to the studio, and that’s what we were doing. We’re still doing that every day now. We keep turning up, because we’re too old to split up.”

Now 44 years on from Pelican West, the band’s reunion surprised even them, but it was predestined that Haircut 100 would get back together since everything started materializing from the moment Heyward, Nemes, Jones, and Cunningham reconnected in 2022. “We didn’t do anything,” says Heyward. “It all landed at our feet. People approached us, and it happened so many times that after a while, we just thought, ‘Well maybe the universe is telling us all you have to do is turn up, and I’ll arrange everything else.’So we just went along with it and kept turning up. And we’re still turning up.”