Glam Rock, Perfect Hair, One-Eyed John, And The Honey Monster

"Ziggy played guitar, jamming good with Weird and Gilly, The Spiders From Mars. He played it left hand, but made it too far, became the special man. Then we were Ziggy's band."

The first thing I see when I walk through the door of the hairdressers is my own face. Which isn't as bad as it could be. I'm still not sleeping very well, but not killing half a bottle of bourbon every night has definitely left me looking a little healthier.

"Are you having hair washed?" asks the foreign lady with the violent hands and the love of scalding hot water.

"I washed it at home," I reply.

I really like having my hair washed, but not Dominatrix-style. A few years back, this place had a girl of around my age who always ran the water at just the right temperature, had a wonderfully gentle touch, and took her sweet time. Now it's any one of a group of brusque, impatient women who order you around in halting, broken English and make sure that if they're not having fun then neither are you.

I give my jacket up to Violent Hands and she practically shoves me in the direction of an empty chair before stomping out of sight. As there's nothing else to look at, I study my reflection and wonder why my nose is a little crooked when I've never broken it, why one eye is slightly larger than the other. Strange how unfamiliar a face I've been wearing my whole life can seem.

The woman who cuts my hair is friendlier now than she used to be. Not friendly enough for me to know her name, but warmer than in the past, when this time we spend in each other's company often passed in sullen silence. That's at least partly my fault for two reasons. First, I'm not usually that chatty with strangers. Second, I didn't actually realise that it was customary to tip your hairdresser until about eight months ago. I'm not kidding. I just didn't know.

I've been having my hair cut here for around nine years. The woman has been here all that time, but she hasn't always been my hairdresser. At a guess, I'd say she's probably cut my hair about thirty times. Only on the last two occasions have we managed a decent conversation.

"How much are we taking off today then?" she asks, offering a smile an expert would probably just about pass as genuine.

"Not too much. Grade two at the sides and back and just tidied up on top." The words I've been saying to hairdressers since I was twenty, the last time I had a hair re-think.

She nods, goes to work. I watch her in the mirror because there's still nothing else to look at and she's more interesting than me. She's late thirties or early forties or maybe older and looking good for her age. Wears flattering clothes and not much make-up and it's a tidy combination, effortless. Her hair's fucking awful, though, a fluffy almost-mullet in shades of false blonde. But then all hairdressers have bad hair. It's written in stone somewhere.

She glances in the mirror and catches me smiling, takes it as a cue to strike up a conversation. We're getting better at this, me and the woman who cuts my hair. We talk about work and the weather and the tsunami and the annual invasion of gypsies our hometown is yet again experiencing. Then she says something that really surprises me.

"Didn't you grow your hair out once?"

I'm sort of surprised and horrified and amused all at the same time, because I did grow my hair out once. It was 1996 and I was singing lead vocals in a sixth form rock band called Agent Cooper. We'd been going a few years by then, and we'd progressed from Eric Clapton and Chuck Berry to Radiohead and Ash to our own compositions. I grew my hair because it seemed right. Like Jack Black but without the irony, I wanted to rock, and rock has long hair.

The fully-haired version of Agent Cooper only made the one appearance, at that year's school Variety Show, where they performed Aeroplane, by the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, and Perseverance, by Terrorvision. Halfway through the latter track, we added an impromptu version of Queen's We Will Rock You. It was better than it sounds.

That day, my hair was jaw-length. I wore black nail-varnish and lipstick, shades with the letters 'A' and 'C' painted on the lenses, and a half-open black shirt with the words 'Rock Star' scrawled across the front. There were photos taken, but I've no idea where they might be now.

The next day, I had my hair cropped very short. I've never grown it since.

"Yeah, I did," I say to the woman who cuts my hair. "It was awful. I just wanted to try something different. That was a long time ago. I can't believe you remember."

She laughs, genuinely entertained by my reaction. "Didn't you have it in curtains before that?"

"Oh, Christ. Why do you remember that? I had that hair right through my teens."

"It was fashionable at the time."

"I used to plaster my head with gel. There wouldn't be a hair out of place."

I did, too. I had perfect hair. The curtains were combed and styled to within an inch of their lives every morning before school. That was my first real hairstyle, my escape from whatever my mum thought looked good on me, which was usually something horrific and fluffy. I look back now, and I see a boy pouring half a pot of gel into cupped hands each morning as a reaction to a childhood of distressingly big hair. I wanted small hair, tiny hair, miniscule hair. I wanted hair so firm and flat that I could hit my head and not feel it.

One day, outside Chemistry, this girl called Lianne walked up to me and reached out towards my hair. I fancied Lianne like mad, and was starting to suspect that she might like me, too. That day, she didn't actually touch my perfect hair, to do so may have spoiled its beauty. But she let her hand hover close, and she said, "Your hair is always...just right. Never out of place."

And that, friends, was validation.

"I didn't get that done here," I tell the woman who cuts my hair. "That was when I lived in Burnt Oak."

"Did you go to The Clip Joint?"

I actually gasp. "Not for that, but I used to go there when I was a kid. And that guy..."

"...with one eye..."

"...John."

And we're both laughing and she has to take the clippers away from my hair for fear of causing me an injury.

John used to cut my hair when I was very young. He had a glass eye and hair like Peter Stringfellow. A few months ago, I was on a bus that passed through the town I grew up in. I remember passing the tube station and looking at the newsagents beside it and recognising the guy behind the counter. When my parents split up, before my mum remarried, my dad used to pay her maintenance. Every Saturday morning, mum would send me to that newsagents to pay for our week's papers with a fifty pound note. The same man that used to change those fifties, fifteen years ago, was still there. As if that wasn't weird enough, the bus passed The Clip Joint some ten seconds later. I looked out of the other window and there was One-Eyed John and his Peter Stringfellow hair. For a moment, it was like being back in my childhood.

"I had it cut at Michael's, on the broadway," I say.

"Oh, right, by the car place," she replies.

"That's the one. He was responsible for the curtains. It was a woman here who finally ended that nightmare."

But I'm thinking of Michael's, remembering knowing a girl at sixth form who was related to the guy that gave me the curtains, remembering her having this huge and very public break-up with her boyfriend in the common room. She was a pretty girl, a dark-skinned Cypriot who always wore expensive clothes and make-up. The other thing I remember only because of what happened in the common room that day. The Cypriot girl had a lot of facial hair that she disguised, somewhat unfortunately, by bleaching it. This might be effective for the pale-skinned, but her colouring made it look ridiculous. And they were arguing, and everyone was there, and it was getting more heated by the second...and then he said it. It was only two words, and it was one of the most childish insults he could possibly have dreamed up. But when you're sixteen, shit like that matters.

The two words were: "Honey Monster."

I remember silence. I remember a room full of people with dead straight faces. The Cypriot girl stormed out, and the silence continued as we listened to her footsteps clattering down the six flights of stairs and then the door that led outside being slammed closed. And then the room erupted.

Even then, though my lungs hurt from holding in hysterical laughter and my vision was watery with tears, I felt strangely proud of the people that were in the common room that day. Because maybe it wasn't that big of a deal, but I knew, we all knew, that if one person laughed we would all laugh, and if we all laughed, we'd never see her again.

I talk a little more with the woman who cuts my hair, but the conversation veers off in a new direction, leaving at least half of my mind trailing in its wake, a little stunned at just how many connections I can draw from a certain style or a certain hairdresser, making me recall things I hadn't thought about in years. It's the kind of stuff I feed off as a writer; characters like One-Eyed John, incidents like the dark-skinned girl with the bleached facial hair, memories of believing it was cool to look like I was in a T-Rex tribute band. Funny where inspiration comes from sometimes.