Wednesday, March 13, 2013

The House of Lords Back in the Days of Glam Rock


I'm reading a drop fucking dead awesome book at the moment: Treat Me Like Dirt by Liz Worth, an oral history of Toronto's punk scene in the late '70s. And near the beginning there's a tiny little bit about the House of Lords — the hair salon on Yonge Street south of Bloor — as told by Margaret Barnes-DelColle (who ran New Rose, Toronto's first punk store):

"I worked at these stores on Yonge Street... at the time it was the whole glam rock thing happening with David Bowie. Everybody was wearing satin pants and bright colours and lots of makeup; the guys were wearing lots of makeup and shag haircuts.

"There was that hair salon on Yonge Street called House of Lords. On a Saturday — nowadays you can't even imagine it — but imagine a hair salon having a lineup outside of people wanting to get a shag haircut. I lived thirty minutes outside the city and yet I took a bus into town to go stand in line at House of Lords to get a shag haircut. So there was that whole glam rock thing that everybody was really into."

And there was some pretty famous hair coming out of that building, too. The House of Lords website boasts that they've trimmed the locks of The Rolling Stones, Alice Cooper, Rod Stewart and David Lee Roth.

-----

Photos via the House of Lords website.

You can buy Treat Me Like Dirt here or borrow it here.

No comments:

Post a Comment