WORKING LUNCH.  WITH CLIVE ALLWRIGHT.  
With a name like Clive Allwright, you can’t help but smile and think of a few jokes. Nudge nudge, wink wink, ya alright darlin’? ‘Crazy Clive’ admits he has a reputation as being a nutcase and confesses to still getting up to a bit of mischief these days. However since turning 40 – call it a mid-life crisis, coming of age or just getting too old to be the perennial party boy – Clive has become considerably more grounded. He has swapped his jetsetting lifestyle as an artistic director and educator for KMS California for a house in Sydney and a family, plus has big plans for his own salon he’s hoping to use as a base for his own bespoke style of education. It seems as though Clive is doing ‘alright’ after all. By Jenny Burns.

Clive Allwright spent nearly two decades clocking up frequent flyer points whilst travelling the world spruiking hairdressing education. An integral part of the Toni&Guy camp for many years, he joined KMS California in the late nineties and became their International Artistic Director, a role that saw him educating, doing conferences, working on marketing and promotional videos and campaigns and generally, spreading his passion for hairdressing under the KMS banner. Not bad for a lad from West London working class who had no idea what he wanted to do at school. When he was young, Clive and his family moved to Northamptonshire, where as a teenager he worked at a little barber shop/corner store in his village. “I used to work there on Wednesday nights and Saturdays,” recalls Clive, “basically washing hair, sweeping the floor, that kind of thing. I actually wanted to be an electrician, which I started when I left school, but I hated it. I spent a lot of time digging holes in the rain and it was cold and wet and awful.

“A friend of mine was working in a local salon washing hair and he used to get good tips. So I thought that was what I wanted to do. I never really wanted to become a hairdresser, I just wanted to work somewhere that was warm and dry and the thought of being with pretty girls was very tempting.”
Clive’s supportive mother decided that if her son was going to become a hairdresser, he was going to do it properly, so encouraged him to send his CV off to Vidal Sassoon. Next, Clive had an interview with legendary colourist, Annie Humphreys.

“I was really a kid from the country,” Clive laughs, “so I had my whole day planned, my big trip to London. Annie asked me why I wanted to be a hairdresser and I told her because I wanted to work on a cruise ship – because at the time all I wanted to do was travel. The interview was over really quickly; I was in and out in 15 minutes.

“Anyway, I was walking back to the tube station at Sloan Square and I saw a little salon nearby, so I thought I’d ask if they had any vacancies. I told them I wanted to do an apprenticeship; next they sent me up to their main salon in Mayfair to see the manager. I ended up getting the job.

“I went home and mum said: ‘Did you get a job with Vidal Sassoon?’ and I said: ‘No, I got one with another salon, but I can’t remember what it’s called. I had an interview at Sassoons, but these other people seemed really friendly.’ Mum was upset because she thought I got a job with some basic suburban salon, but it turned out that it was the original Toni&Guy salon, and I’d gone in and spoken to Bruno Mascolo.”
Although Clive never really had much of a desire to be a hairdresser, all that changed once he got the Toni&Guy mojo.

“It was 1985 and a time when Toni&Guy really started branching out,” Clive says.
“Bruno went to the US and Tokyo was just opening up. I remember saying to my dad: ‘These guys are amazing!’ They were doing seminars in Japan and America and travelling all over the world and to the average person, a hairdresser who travelled was unheard of.

“That was where Toni&Guy really helped me. They didn’t just teach me the ABC of cutting hair; they taught me passion and gave me a really great career to look forward to.” This was also a time when Clive caught the bug to travel. He was working in London after completing his apprenticeship at Toni&Guy when he was offered a job at a salon in Hong Kong through a mate who had also moved from the UK to work in Asia. Believing it to be an opportunity to see the world, Clive jumped at the chance. “It was really the first time I’d been out of the UK – in fact, the first time I’d been on a jumbo jet,” Clive says. “This mate of mine who went out there first told me that Hong Kong was like Beverly Hills, which of course was a complete lie, so when I landed there, I went into shock.
“The hardest thing for me was that working in Hong Kong was a completely different world of hairdressing. Everyone had their hair permed back then, so you’d do this Asian perm, and then you would blow-dry it straight. I was more of a cutter, so blow-drying wasn’t really my thing.

“It was really hard at first, I just couldn’t get it. See, I was this cool kid in London, one of the bright young stars at Toni&Guy, but in Hong Kong I felt totally useless. What I didn’t realise at the time was that it exposed me to a whole new world of hairdressing.” Clive’s boss at the time was aware that Hong Kong salon life was a bit of a challenge for the boy from London, so he encouraged him to start working with a photographer from France, who was shooting for Vogue and Elle. “So that’s how I started to learn session work,” Clive adds. “I was still working in the salon, but doing editorial work as well. I learnt another side to our skill – changing the image from hair that looked like it had be done by a hairdresser to hair that looked like it belonged in a fashion magazine.” But it wasn’t always smooth sailing. “The photographer was French and he was very arrogant,” Clive laughs. “‘Eet looks like sheet!’ he would tell me, ‘change eet!’ I learnt a lot from him.”

After two years in Hong Kong, Clive returned to Toni&Guy in London. But the Asian adventure fed his desire to travel and he wanted to do more. After meeting an Australian girl he moved to Perth for a while, but craving the big city lights, he ended up in Sydney. During this time Dennis Langford was opening up Toni&Guy in Sydney and as Clive had been Dennis’ apprentice in London, he was welcomed with open arms. “It was a great job,” Clive says enthusiastically. “I was doing everything – going to New Zealand to do seminars on the weekend, teaching at the academy and working in the salon. I jokingly said to Dennis one day: ‘If you give me anymore responsibility, we’ll have to change the name to Toni&Clive!’ At the time, I was also working with TIGI, going out on the road and doing seminars and shows for Toni&Guy.”After a while, Clive realised that he’d reached as far as he could go within the Toni&Guy operation. The next step was to buy into a franchise and he wasn’t ready to do that.

“I love education,” Clive ponders. “It’s really my favourite thing to do when it comes to hairdressing. I learnt a lot from Dennis. He taught me how to present; such valuable lessons from such an amazing public speaker. I’ll be forever grateful for that; he’s been such a big influence in my career.”

Clive had been with Toni&Guy for around six years when he met an American fellow called Jeff Saylor, who was in Australia looking for a distributor for KMS California. Jeff and his family had just moved to Sydney and didn’t really know anyone, so Clive made plans to catch up. Eventually he was offered a position to do exactly what he was doing with Toni&Guy, but on a much more global scale and with kms. Soon after, Goldwell/KPSS took over the KMS distributorship in Australia and the profile of the brand increased enormously.
Clive was based in Australia technically, but really living out of a suitcase. He spent a long time travelling from Sydney to cities around the globe, but eventually it took it’s toll. Next, the US KMS office asked Clive to move to Los Angeles.

“That was a big step for me,” he recalls. “I loved living in Australia but it was a good career move. I think the older you get, the harder it is to move countries and change cultures. I loved the travelling involved in my work, going back and forwards, but I couldn’t sustain that for much longer.

“I was like a fish out of water when I moved to LA. Unlike New York, where you can walk around and feel empowered and just find all this stuff, I didn’t really warm to Los Angeles very well. One Sunday morning I’d made a decision that I was going to go back to Australia the following day. I’d had enough and I didn’t have many friends. That afternoon I went to the pub and met a couple of guys who were funnily enough, electricians, and English too, and they changed my opinion on LA. They invited me around to their house and brought me into their lives, so after that, I decided to stay.

“Whilst I was in LA, I got to go everywhere. Each week I was on a plane, going all over the world. I travelled more than any other hairdresser I’d ever known. Was it fun? Sure it was fun. Fun, but at the same time, nerve-wracking. Educating internationally was a real personal challenge for me, because public speaking was something that everyone told me I was good at, but I suffered incredibly from nerves, so I’d feel ill every time I had to get on stage. I was petrified beforehand, but once I got up on stage, it would suddenly go and I’d become me again. It was funny because people would come up to me after a show and say what a natural I was on stage. Little did they know that I’d been vomiting in the toilet just minutes before I started.”
During a trip to Sydney when he was living in LA, Clive came into contact with an old client and fell in love. He got married, moved back to Australia and inherited an instant family - his wife has a nine-year-old son and Clive has a 17-year-old daughter in Perth. Life suddenly became domesticated.

“I was going through a bit of a down period when I turned 40,” Clive says. “I don’t know if it was a mid-life crisis, but more about getting to an age where you don’t want to stay on the rollercoaster. Travel isn’t really the glamorous thing it used to be. It’s more about getting from A to B for me and when you travel a long way and have to constantly get used to different time zones whilst being productive, it’s really difficult. I didn’t want to keep jumping on a plane every five minutes. I wanted to find myself a base.”

For Clive, a base not only meant his own salon, but somewhere to conduct education. He had a brief interlude last year as a partner in an existing Paddington salon, but realised that he really needed to make the move on his own. So he’s still looking. He has big plans for his own space, one that will encompass a salon with a cool NYC vibe, but also an area large enough to hold a series of unique, bespoke hairdressing education dates, calling on his contacts all over the world for a ‘holiday in Sydney with a few workshop dates thrown in’.
“I’d spent so much time building up salons for other people and building up their staff, I felt as though it was time for me to do it for myself. It’s going to be a big step, but I’m really looking forward to the challenge. I’ve worked with so many hairdressers in different countries all over the world and I want to bring a little bit of that back into my own salon. “Now I get up in the morning, get in the car and look forward to doing something for me.”For Clive, education is his passion. “I do love education and I have a lot of patience with people.

When I started, I wasn’t one of those people who had a natural ability to do hair. It was taught to me. It was someone who took a lot of time and a lot of patience to teach me and I’ve never forgotten that, nor how hard I found it initially and how rewarding it was in the end. Education is such a powerful thing in that you have to teach something to someone else, so it enables you to really understand what you are teaching. And there’s no better way to understand something than to teach it to someone else. A lot of students tell me that they often feel intimidated by teachers, so they feel comfortable with me because I’m approachable and down to earth. I have a reputation as a sort of ‘Bob the Builder’ because I don’t look like a hairdresser, so I get to talk to people on their own level. That’s who I am – there’s no ego, I’m just an ordinary bloke, friendly and down to earth, but I’m good at what I do.”On the subject of hairdressing education, Clive says that things have changed quite a bit over the years. And the biggest thing he has noticed is educators having to change the way they teach to accommodate the different attitudes within younger generations.

“Education can be a difficult thing because now everything is so accessible to young people,” Clive explains. “Everything is about NOW. When I did training as an apprentice, we’d be at work until 10 o’clock at night. It was almost like the harder you work, the more you are going to learn. These days, it’s about working smarter, not harder.

“My 17-year-old daughter can txt, watch television, listen to her iPod, surf the net, all at the same time and still know exactly what’s going on. I can’t focus like that. In my day, you were quiet, you listened, you were polite, and you asked questions. These days, everyone wants to be a star. “I remember when I was at Toni&Guy, we’d do an evening of education and there’d be two haircuts, then an avant garde section, then something else – the whole thing would take all night. Now, everything has to be done in 90 minutes. It starts at 6.00pm and ends at half seven; it’s got to be lively and colourful, it’s got to contain short bursts of information that is interesting and holds their attention. Their lifestyle is so much more important than ours was to us. Talking to young people now, they want to learn, they want to be around successful people, but they also want a life. And as educators, we have to adapt.”All work and no play isn’t really Clive’s style, even though he has quietened down a tad compared to his younger days. 

“Sure, I had a reputation as a wild party boy – hairdressing is synonymous with that kind of lifestyle,” Clive grins, “but I’ve calmed down now that I’m married. I think also you just grow out of it. Flying in and out of the country all the time, I kept getting stopped by customs, so I asked a customs officer one day why I always got stopped. And he said it was because I had ‘hairdresser’ on my travel documents. So now I put ‘educator’ on my arrival form and I don’t get stopped hardly at all.”

Okay, okay, we get it – your partying days are over. Well, sort of. But how about one for the road? How about a terrible tale from the archives of Crazy Clive?

“Once I was flying back from Frankfurt to LA with Jeff Saylor and he had these sleeping tablets from an Australian doctor,” Clive grins. “When we got to the airport, he said: ‘I’m going to take my tablets now so that when we get on the plane, they’ll start to work.’ So he took his tablets, but the flight was delayed for an hour. I tell you, it was like that scene in Weekend at Bernie’s, trying to get him on the plane; he was completely out of it. Finally we were seated in business class; Jeff loosened up the belt on his pants to be a bit more comfortable. The stewardess came around and offered me a Bloody Mary and Jeff went into a really deep sleep. Suddenly, he must have had a dream or one of those feelings when you think you’re falling, and he jumped up right out of his seat, knocked the drink all over us and other passengers. It was a huge mess! Then, he got up to go to the bathroom to clean himself up, forgetting that he’d undone his pants, and his jeans fell around his ankles. Smack! He hit the deck hard and was lying in the middle of the aisle in his underpants. Anyway, he stayed in the bathroom for about four hours. He put the change table down and rested his head on it and had a sleep like that because he was too embarrassed to come out.

“During this time, I’d been chatting to this fellow next to me, who said he was meeting his girlfriend at LA airport. He really wanted to get some sleep before he saw her, so wondered if he could have one of Jeff’s sleeping tablets. We were about two hours from LA and by this time, Jeff had returned to his seat. He said that the guy could have all his sleeping tablets; he didn’t want to touch them anymore after what had happened. So the guy took two and when we landed, I couldn’t wake him up. Jeff and I thought: ‘Oh great, we’ve killed him!’ Anyway, we got off the plane and while we were waiting for our luggage, we saw him being wheeled off in a wheelchair. All we could think about was his girlfriend – can you imagine her, being on the other side of customs, seeing her boyfriend arriving passed out in a wheelchair? It wasn’t really funny I suppose, but afterwards we laughed and laughed.”
And no doubt there’s plenty more where that came from…