Greaser Slick: Hair, Grease, and Attitude

Hair was not incidental to the Ton Up Boys identity — it was central to it. The high pompadour, the swept-back quiff, the elaborate tonsorialism that required significant quantities of Brylcreem, Dax, or Murray's Pomade — these were as much a uniform as the leather jacket, and they were maintained with an attention and seriousness that the word grooming cannot quite contain. Getting the hair right was not vanity; it was craft.

The style originated, like so much of British rocker culture, in America. The young Elvis Presley's pompadour, high and shining under studio lights, was the template. Eddie Cochran's variations on the theme, seen in grainy photographs and film clips, provided working models. British barbers with names like Savini's and Victor's learned to build the structures that their young clientele demanded — high-volume, Brylcreemed architecture that could withstand a crash helmet and still look roughly correct when the helmet came off, if you kept a comb in your jacket pocket for emergencies.

The maintenance involved was considerable. The right products, applied correctly to dry hair with a brush and comb, then set with a final pass of something petroleum-based — Brylcreem being the household name, though serious stylists had stronger opinions about superior alternatives. The result needed to survive wind, rain, helmet pressure, and the general entropy of a long night out. That it usually did was a testament to both the products and the techniques.

Wearing your hair in a quiff in the early 1960s was a declaration that attached you to a specific cultural tradition. It identified you, instantly and across a distance, as someone who had chosen the Rocker side of the great division. In a decade when youth identity was being newly invented, the height of your hair and the shininess of your jacket told everyone who you were before you opened your mouth.