Sugar makes my barnet bouffant

From Rod Stewars autobiography..

 

The Queen and I have one thing in common: both of us have had more or less the same hairstyle for the past 45 years. Well, if you find something that works for you . . .
For Her Majesty: the carefully organised shampoo and set. For me: the tousled mop of spikes — equally carefully organised, I should add.
Before graduating to my blond and spiky look, there was the early Sixties bouffant. Or, as we called it, ‘the bouff’ — as in ‘Mind the bouff, mate’ or ‘Oi! Get off me bouff!’ (One was very protective of one’s bouff.)
It was all in the back-combing and the blow-drying. The back-combing wasn’t a problem, but the blow-drying was complicated by the fact that my parents’ house entirely lacked a hairdryer.
If you wanted to dry your hair, you sometimes poked it (and this isn’t particularly recommended in the manuals) inside the open oven, and sort of baked it dry. But you can’t bake a bouff. Or not a good one, anyway.
Fortunately, my sister did have a hairdryer. Even more fortunately, she was living just up the road. So I’d hop out of the bath, dress and leg it round to Mary’s while my hair was still wet.
And because I had a lot of hair to work with, the bouffant that I was able to create was, quite simply, enormous. It was beehive-scale: it made Dusty Springfield look like a rank amateur.
Of course, the problem was getting the hair to remain standing up. The DIY solution was to mix a spoonful of sugar with water and apply that to the hair.
The heat from the hairdryer would then cause the sugar to set and (if you were lucky) your bouff would solidify. Unfortunately, when you woke up in the morning, it was as though someone had attacked you in the night with a stick of candyfloss.
And, even fortified with sugar, you were still prey to the elements. Picture me, if you will, carefully dressed and styled for the night, accompanied by my mates, down in Archway Station as the train thunders in — and all of us cowering into the wall, with our arms up over our heads, trying to protect our bouffs from getting toppled by the wind.
The bouffant evolved into the spiked top during the late Sixties. [Guitarist] Ronnie Wood and I used to do each other’s barnets. The idea with the top bit was to look as though you’d just rolled out of bed after a night of enviable debauchery — though, of course, the look wasn’t casually achieved.
In particular, there was a lot of hanging upside down at the drying stage — or, at least, hanging forward from the hips and letting gravity play its part.
Then came the next era of big hair, when the circumference of your hairdo expanded by at least four inches in 1982 and stayed that way for three or four years, whether you wanted it to or not. It was something to do with the economy, probably.
Anyway, it seemed wrong to be living in the Eighties and not trying to maximise the bigness of your hair.
Over the years, Ronnie Wood and I have come to see our hair as an early warning system: if it doesn’t want to stand up, after all the tricks, then we know we’re sick and it’s time for us to take to our beds.
Do I still spend a lot of time thinking about and working on my hair? Yes. Am I aware of having good hair days and bad hair days? Definitely. Am I more than averagely relieved to have been unaffected by typical male pattern baldness? You bet. (Had it set in, I’d have gone for a weave, like Elton.)
Does any of this interest in my own hair border on narcissism? Well, say so if you must.
****************
To read, in Rod's own words, what a total cheating shit he was..go HERE. I found it terribly amusing. How can a man admitting to being an asshole endear himself? I don't know, but, he does. The whole thing is a riot to read and looking at the photos of his preference in skinny blonds, I would have fit right in back in those days. I would have been overjoyed to be a notch on his bedpost back then. A name forgotten sqeeze. So would every woman I knew back then. Ahh, Roddy, you sexy little scamp.