I was a long-haired teenage boy in the 1960s. Why did everyone hate us so much? | Alan Clayson

It wasn’t always clear why our buzz-cut parents felt so threatened by our cascading locks – but guys like me needed to express ourselves

Throughout the mid-to-late 60s, I had to fight every literal inch of the way over the matter of long hair. As I practised being Mick Jagger before the bedroom mirror, it was always on the understanding that, within hours, I might be in front of that same mirror after a parentally-dictated trip to the barber.

No amount of backcombing, pulling or applications of a thickening gel called Dippety-Do could disguise the brutal shearing. I’d be left making the best of a bad job, sprucing up for a Saturday night of raging pubescent hormones and perspiration.

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