correct you balloon popping so and such...October 9
John spent his 21st birthday in Paris with Paul.
THE ORIGINS OF THE 'BEATLE CUT'
John: "Paris has always been the object of English romanticism, hasn't it? I fell for Paris first of all, even before Hamburg. I remember spending my 21st birthday there with Paul in 1961 . . ."
In Paris they visited Jurgen Vollmer, a friend from the Reeperbahn, who had moved there to study photography. He wore his hair brushed forward in a fashion which was popular among some French youths, and was a style he had been introduced to by Astrid Kirchherr, who cut Stuart Sutcliffe's hair that way when they were all in Hamburg. John and Paul decided they wanted their hair like Jurgen's and asked him to do it. Jurgen Vollmer: "I gave both of them their first Beatles haircut in my hotel room on the Left Bank."
Paul: "Jurgen was in Paris on that trip, and we said, 'Do us a favour, cut our hair like you've cut yours.' So he did it, and it turned out different, 'cos his wasn't exactly a Beatle cut, but ours fell into The Beatles thing. We didn't really start that. The impression that got over was that it was just us, that we'd started it all. We kept saying, 'But there's millions of people in art schools who look like this. We're just the spokesmen for it.'"
Astrid had initially copied the style from a Jean Cocteau movie. Cocteau's favourite actor, Jean Marais, wore his hair brushed forward to play Oedipus in Cocteau's 1959 Le Testament d'Orphee and so that is the ultimate origin of the famous Beatles haircut.
Aunt Mimi told the Liverpool Echo that she remembered the time that John slipped off to Paris to "sell his paintings" and that some unsuspecting Frenchman has a Lennon original on his wall.
