daydream believer
Torch-holder for outré pop in The Pale Fountains, self-sabotaging songsmith supreme in Shack, Scouse enigma michael head spent years in the wilderness, battling smack, booze and music biz indifference. It’s what makes his current revival so poignant, joyous and – frankly – unexpected. “You could feed half of Liverpool off Mick’s positive energy,” discovers ian harrison.
portrait: john johnson
HIS
OTHER SUBJECTS HAD included Yves Saint Laurent, Charlie Chaplin and Agatha Christie, but in February 1992 French filmmaker Jérôme de Missolz had a humbler assignment – albeit one with its own strains of style, comedy and intrigue.
Shot for French TV network La Sept, You’ll Never Walk Alone was a dingy-yet-romantic overview of Liverpool’s music scene. Mersey faces included Ian McCulloch, Pete Wylie and early Beatles manager Allan Williams, but the most compelling screen time belonged to Michael Head.
Then 30, Michael Head fronted early-’80s chart hopefuls The Pale Fountains and then Shack, whose wheels had come off after just one underachieving LP, aptly titled Zilch. Filmed by de Missolz in the Head family home in no-nonsense Kensington, at Anfield watching Liverpool beat Bristol Rovers in the Cup, and wandering city hinterlands at night, Head seems adrift. “In a few months’ time I could be on the dole when me contract runs out,” he informs the camera, adding, “I dunno what the fuck’s going on.”
Yet the music captured on film is extraordinary. John Johnson Playing and harmonising in front of a washing machine piled high with domestic detritus, Mick and brother John cast spells, roving in a private realm of magic and ecstasy. It was just as well: as far as the Heads knew, studio versions of these songs would never be heard. Tapes of their second album, Waterpistol, had been lost in a fire at the west London office/studio of their Ghetto Recording Company label, which was soon to cease trading.
Cut loose from the music business, it could have been the last sighting of Mick Head, his story over before it had properly begun. No one knew then that those songs, and Waterpistol itself, would re-emerge in 1995 after producer Chris Allison retrieved the sole surviving copy on a DAT he left in the glove compartment of a hire car in New Mexico, or that Head would himself make a full return from the dark. Along the way there would be heroin addiction, a battle with the bottle, highs and lows, strife, alienation and more incandescent music. But in 1992?
“I’m into escapism. I’m a drug addict,” confides Mick in You’ll Never Walk Alone, several pints down at the now-lost Mount Vernon pub. “’Cos I take so many drugs, when I go to bed, at night, I don’t dream. With me, it’s like, I do all my dreaming in the day…”
With hope in his heart: out of the shack and stranded no longer, the future-facing Mick Head today.
Nature boys: The Pale Fountains in 1983 Andy Diagram
Head and McCaffrey on-stage, 1983.
Mick Head, Chris McCaffrey, Thomas Whelan;