In the early 80s Haircut One Hundred scored four top 10 hits - Favourite Shirts (Boy Meets Girl), Love Plus One, Nobody's Fool and Fantastic Day. In 2018 band leader Nick Heyward – a solo artist for over 30 years – explained how everything he’d done musically had been powered by prog.
“Prog set me up for life. Like the literary classics, prog bands set the foundation for modern music. This all filtered to me from my brother’s bedroom. Pete had a purple room filled with amplifiers and incense.
We lived in Beckenham and me and my mate Austin and I were into Bolan and Rory Gallagher. I have strong memories of bunking into gigs at Crystal Palace Park and Austin would always get us backstage.
One time Gryphon had just finished and I heard Breathe coming out of the speakers. There was this connection with the sounds coming from Pete’s room and a moment where I went, ‘Wow, this is music.’
The first Genesis song that got me was I Know What I Like In Your Wardrobe. Then I got into A Trick Of The Tail, especially Entangled and Ripples. I played it over and over – it was an intro to conceptual records and it was like reading a book. This wasn’t the music I knew from my parents – The Carpenters or jazz.
I wasn’t playing an instrument yet and this new music looked and sounded impossible. Pete could play; he taught me D major. I took that and worked on it, coming up with D, C and G. That’s how I wrote Fantastic Day.
I hoped to meet Mike Rutherford… I met Francis Rossi from Status Quo instead!
I wanted to be XTC or Talking Heads but when I wrote the Haircut One Hundred album Pelican West, it had Genesis at its heart – and Chris Squire’s Fish Out Of Water is how I got into bass.
In the studio, I didn’t have the musical ability for prog; but I’d like a song to start with a car sound effect, or with birdsong, and I always wanted to tell a story. That’s prog.
I never crossed paths with Genesis but Mike & The Mechanics played a festival bill I was on. I hoped to meet Mike Rutherford, so I stood by their equipment – and I met Francis Rossi from Status Quo instead!
Genesis are eternal and what they wrote became like a bible; open it up, everything rings true. You marvel and go,‘What gods wrote that?’
My new album is called Woodland Echoes, and the influence of prog is becoming more apparent. I’ll probably be full-on prog in a year, bursting out... like a Dance On A Volcano!”
