IT’S technically impossible for a sound to have a mullet – and yet 80s music persisted. These bands were roughly 4:1 on the haircut to music front:
Bananarama
Venus is still popular today everywhere from dancefloors to razor ads, and Gillette chose the song especially because you can actually hear Bananarama’s stiff, vertical hairsprayed locks in the track’s vocals.
Van Halen
Beloved by teens worldwide, Van Halen’s hair resembled what any 13-year-old boy finds most comforting: his mother. Cut layers into shoulder-length, chestnut hair and you’re looking at either a young Eddie van Halen or the new head of the PTA.
Kajagoogoo
Kajagoogoo believed that if you take Bananarama hair, then hack away at it with scissors and dye, it’ll make for songs that are just as beloved and commercially successful, right? What was that one hit they had?
The Police
Eventually The Police split, which was obviously going to happen once they stopped having identical looks and admitted Sting’s hair was best. You can’t perform as a unit if you don’t all have flicky bleached blonde ‘dos.
Wham!
Not even sarcastic: George Michael had a mullet and it looked good. Conspiracy theorists reckon he couldn’t actually sing at all, we were all just so mesmerised by his tresses we never noticed.
Duran Duran
The band were actually named after the ‘dur-an, dur-an’ noise of hairdryers desperately trying to tease their hair into anything like the majesty of George Michael’s. Ended up resembling the row of photos in a hairdressers’ window that optimistic customers point to.
Bon Jovi
Listen to Livin’ On A Prayer and the very riffs themselves tell you it’s by five men with the silhouettes of cocker spaniels after nasty encounters with static electricity.
Phil Collins
Collins’s midlife crisis albums powerfully demonstrated that you can be a multi-million selling artist and still it all means nothing because you’re losing your hair. That’s what makes his records so emotionally raw and harrowing.