Another beard appears after years away from the spotlight

After a period of hiding, the World of Beards has reawoken. Its beard may be straggly and unkempt, but it won’t be long before a well manicured beard for 2008 is proudly displayed.

Expect to hear about the beard that shamed all of Germany and new beard fashion very soon!

Each year King Williams College on the Isle of Man quizzes it’s pupils with possibly the hardest quiz ever devised by man. This Christmas the school has asked its pupils a number of questions about BEARDS! Clearly the future leaders of the country are being prepared for a life where a facial companion is a friend that will bring power and influence.

The World of Beards is frankly struggling to answer any of the questions on the quiz, let alone any on its specialist subject. Can you help? Those beard brain bamboozlers are:  14.

Well, The World of Beards is a peaceful world. It is against war and very much in favour of everyone getting along together and generally having a nice time. Recently, however, one of the major causes of war has reared its ugly head in our World: sport. More precisely, arguing about football.

Ok, the only example the World of Beards can point to right now is the 1969 Football War between Honduras and El Salvador – but that’s enough about football – we also recognise that there may be other factors involved, such as global geopolitical hegemony, but global geopolitical hegemony hasn’t been an issue we’ve had to deal with….yet.

So, in a bid to reunite it’s people the World of Beards invites you to contribute something to our global nation.  The World of Beards is a democratic world and so we ask you now to help write our global anthem in the forum below.  

So the World of Beards has sent me to Manchester. I gotta tell ya I’ve never seen such a load of miserable looking limeys. And I can’t blame em. True Mancunians seem to follow Manchester City.  D’yer know what else I found out? “Manchester” United aint even in Manchester. No wonder my weirdy beardy compatriot Malcolm Glazer bought em. They’ll have no complaints when he packs Manchester Red Sox off to Floirda, they’re in little ol Salford right now anyhow.

Shoot, back to why I’m here. First off it was Wayne Rooney, now Man City’s Sun Jihai is in on the act. He’s insisting that he will not shave until he returns to the first team.

“I want to keep the beard until I play my first game,” He told me. “I don’t think it’s good for me. After I play the first game I will cut it off, and my hair as well to make me more handsome!”

Well my friend, from what I hear up here from my Manchester buddies we could be about to witness the growth of one of sport’s longest beards. Sun just aint cutting it - literally and not literally, he’s transcending literal - he just aint that good.  I’m betting he quits the game and hooks up with ZZ Top to boost their sales in the East.

All this talk of growing beards as a public statement of adversity is a terrible thing. We should be celebrating our face carpets, not using them as acts of inverse schardenfreude.

What do you think? Have you ever grown a beard as a vehicle of your own failure? Tell the World (of Beards).

The World Cup is indeed a World Cup and undoubtedly the greatest sporting competion in the World, ever. Surely then the greatest beard sporting sportsman must be a World Cup winner. Sergio Barista is the only man to have held the World Cup aloft his facial furniture and therefore unrivaled as the World of Beards greatest sportsman.

Sergio Daniel Batista was born on the 9th November 1962 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Nicknamed El Checho (The Checho), he started playing in the youth system of Argentinos Juniors, with whom he would later win the Metropolitano and the Copa Libertadores in 1985. In 1986 he captured football’s greates prize, winning the World Cup with Argentina. Many have claimed that the 1986 World Cup belonged to one man, Diego Marradona. Not the World of Beards. While Diego was doing the fancy stuff in front of goal, Sergio was the unsung hero of the team. He was the defensive giant on whose shoulders Diego danced upon.

After single handedly winning the World Cup for Argentina in 86, Batista would go on to win a runners up medal in 1990 and later a move into football management with his beloved Argentinos Juniors. Sadly though his beard could not inspire his squad in the way it did with the national side and he was sacked after only six games in September 2004. On his sacking Batisa told the World of Beards, through our resident translater (a 15 year old on work experience)  ”one knows that soccer is thus. There are things that people do not realize, that just promotes and has been time to adapt to the category. But in the long run I know that it is going to arrive the recognition towards my person”.

Well Sergio, we formally recognise your person. The World’s Greatest Sportsman (with a beard).

Is Sergio the greatest? What about Brazilian ace Socrates or Georgie Best? What also of other sports, tennis player Marc Rosset for example – nicknamed the Yeti because of his straggly long hair and beard? Have your say in our forum.

Official Update!

Recent forum activity has suggested that Ricardo Villa, 1978 World Cup Winner was also bearded. The World of Beards can confirm that Ricky had a handlebar tache, not a beard at the time of winning the Cup. He did not lift the World Cup above a bearded face. 

The Argentina World Cup Squad 1978 (note no beards) 

Here in 1978 shortly after as he signed for Tottingham Hotspurs

The World of Beards is a trend setting world. Today we are proud to introduce our latest recruit, style Guru Lance Pinkerton. Lance will show us what it takes to turn that bit of facial fluff into an accessory you’ll never want to be without. His first case study, the legendary Noel Edmonds.

Hey there. Beards are like shoes - although not made of leather and not really benefiting from a polish - they add to your image. No one knew how to get the look better than my hero, Noel Edmonds. How else do you think he became the face of the Austin-Montego in the 1980′s? Yeah that’s right. Noel knew what his beard was saying about him – adventurous, cool, tough, a maverick, uncompromising, sexy. And so did the Montego. The ad men loved it. Check it out:

It is in this spirit that The World of Beards is fully behind this man’s Tache for Cash campaign. 

World of the Beard friend, Mr Andrew Ettinger BA (hons), is growing a moustache throughout the month of September. Why? For charadee mate. Although he doesn’t like to talk about it, Mr Ettinger is raising money for the Everyman charity. The World of Beards applauds you Mr Ettinger and encourages its inhabitants to give generously. Bravo.

To donate go to Mr Ettingers TacheBack page.

Growing facial hair can be a lonely, isolated experience. Add your words of encouragement to our forum.

Bonjour, my name iz Professor Toulloise d’Edward. I have been asked by World of Beards to provide some insight into the philosophical underpinnings of la barbe. The first question I would like to pose World of Beards’ global readership iz ‘what is a beard’? I can ‘ear a collective sigh as the question eez read, and the scoffing comments of the over-confident layperson “I know what a beard iz, ‘ow ridiculous”. But if we apply a little scrutiny to the question we see that all iz not so clear!

A way to apprehend the difficulty of beard definition iz via Sorites Paradox. The name ‘sorites’ derives from the Greek word soros meaning ‘heap’.  The following sequence explicates the little-by-little (il)logical sequence of the heap paradox.

1 grain of wheat does not make a heap.
If 1 grain of wheat does not make a heap then 2 grains of wheat do not.
If 2 grains of wheat do not make a heap then 3 grains of wheat do not…
If 9,999 grains of wheat do not make a heap then 10,000 do not.
10,000 grains of wheat do not make a heap.

Surely we see now that the same argument applies to male facial growth. (Of course it is different for a woman as even the slightest facial hair on a female constitutes a beard).

1mm of stubble does not make a beard.
If 1mm of stubble does not make a beard then 2mm of stubble do not.
If 2mm of stubble do not make a beard then 3mm of stubble do not…
If 9,999mm of stubble do not make a beard then 10,000mm of stubble do not.
10,000mm of stubble do not make a beard.

I am sure now that you will not be so sure to call a beard a beard! The heap paradox shows that even a facial growth of infinite length cannot be defined as a beard with any confidence. Of course our empirically-minded friends in the social sciences have established what they believe to be the measurement of facial hair poised precisely between stubble and beard: 4.35 mm (exactly the length sported by TV’s Russell Brand). I will leave your readers to judge the validity of this finding for themselves!

But now I bid you adieu, and leave you with the wisdom of my mentor, the late great Jacques-Louis le Vendredi: ‘A beard is much like a woman – a pleasant decoration for a while but ultimately pointless’.

Do you have a reposte? Do you even have a beard? The World of Beards invites you to comment.

In common with any great book, or two-star bed and breakfast, or quick knee-trembler round the back of Castle Cary train station, no beard is ever truly the work of one man. In an occasional series, The World of Beards looks at the faces behind the faces behind the beards. This week Steve “BurkeyBeard” Bukowski speaks exclusively to Tony Wyoming, facial hair guru to some of pop’s brightest beards. 

Turn to the index of almost any book on that hunchbacked sex-monkey we call pop, be it academic or apoplectic, and chances are, under “W”, you’ll find an entry for Tony Wyoming. Pamela des Barres’ I’m With The Beard, Danny Sugarman’s No-one Gets Out Of Here Unshaved, even the notorious Led Zeppelin tome Barber Of The Gods –
Wyoming dances through all of these volumes like a five-foot two colossus of a footnote.  Starting his career in the late fifties and still grooming strong today, Wyoming has taken care of the maxillio-tonsorial whimsy of four generations of rock royalty and, indeed, still owes a number of them money. I interviewed Wyoming in his elegantly minimalist kitchen (a style choice he compares to the precise beardwork that is his trademark, but that his wife attributes to a firm of bailiffs) and began by asking him how he first collided with the glittering orifice of pop. 

SB: How did you first collide with the glittering orifice of pop? 

TW: What?  

SB: Which pop star did you first work with? 

TW: In the late fifties, as London was getting ready to swing – at this point more of a wobble than a swing, really – the King’s Road was the place to be. I was lucky that I was working in a gentleman’s hair boutique just a stone’s throw away, in fashionable Penge. We had quite an array of stars pop in for a trim and something for the weekend – footballers, restaurateurs, minor royalty, ballet dancers, female impersonators, and so on – but I never really had a chance to explore my real passion – beards and moustaches. The owner of the boutique, Ted Grind, was really very old-school and had little time for facial hair and often laughed at my obsessions as well as my complexion. One day, Lance Grit, one of the early English Rock and Rollers, found himself in the boutique after the number 30 bus he had been travelling on skidded on some coleslaw on the Croydon Road. Ted took one look at the shaken hip-swinger and said “Bloody layabouts. Call that music? Oi! Nancy-boy Tony – deal with this freak.” I sat the stunned leather-clad lad down and in his dazed state he confided in me – for two years he had been wearing a false left sideburn and could I do anything about it? I guess I never looked back from then on. 

SB: Our readers who are familiar with your work will be surprised to learn that you started your career with sidies, considering the beard-related nature of your more famous creations.  

TW: Well, for me, sideburns were, and are, a sideline, if you pardon the pun.  SB: Just this once. What did you do for Lance? 

TW: Lance’s sideburns were never going to make the grade. Bear in mind that in those days you couldn’t get a licence to play bongos in an espresso bar unless you had two matching sidies of regulation three-inch length. Lance’s career was in the balance, so we worked together over a matter of months on designing a full and extremely wide waxed tache that would reach up to the hairline, drawing the eyes away from the false sideburn. Looking back, it was a really ambitious project, but I was young and world seemed full of possibilities. Funnily enough, I bumped into Lance years later at the Speakeasy. He said, “Piss off and leave me alone”, which I found really quite moving.  

SB: You really came to the attention of the alert pop fan in the late sixties with your groundbreaking work with David Crosby, eventually becoming the world’s first ‘beard roadie’ when you went on tour with him. 

TW: Well, firstly, I know for a fact that when the Beatles did their last tour, Mal Evans, their road-manager, would often catch George Harrison cultivating some bum fluff totally in contravention of Brian Epstein’s instructions. Mal would hold down George and remove the fluff with a piece of gaffer tape. I once joked about this with John Lennon and he called me “a gormless twat”. He was a great man, with such a gift for language. That said, I suppose I was the first beard roadie, although these days my business card reads “Beard Solutions Consultant”.  

SB: So how did you and David Crosby meet?   

TW: By sixty-seven I had my own boutique in trendy Neasden and a steady client list of pop stars. That whole hippy look was very good for business, but that tache McCartney grew to cover up the fact he was dead meant that the pointed Edwardian was the only facial furniture any self-respecting pop star would be seen in. I was in a rut, creatively speaking, and was desperate to branch out. Crosby had left the Byrds and was in town doing press for his new band. I don’t remember if it was CSN or CSNY at that point – Crosby certainly had at least outline planning permission for the Y –  and he wanted a new look. He was really getting into the whole cowboy thing; guns, rotting teeth, syphilis, and, of course, moustaches. I was introduced to Crosby at the UFO club and when he said he was looking for someone to advise him on, as he put it, “a great big handlebar”, I jumped at the chance. I burnt down the boutique for the insurance, bought a passport and never looked back.  

SB: What are your memories of touring in the USA? 

TW: Crosby was very pleased with the handlebar but it was a high-maintenance piece, so when he was putting together that first Crosby Stills Nash and Young tour he asked me if I could tag along and help out. The day before that famous Madison Square Gardens gig,  was re-pointing Crosby’s handlebar when I noticed Stephen Stills paying a lot of attention to what I was doing. Eventually, Stills took me to one side and asked me if I would help him with a handlebar of his own, but only if it was bigger than Crosby’s. Their rivalry was legendary. The “handlebar escalation war”, as I called it, got silly in the end. By the close of that first tour both Stills’ and Crosby’s handlebars needed a complex net of cables strung from the lighting rig just to stay off the ground. Look back at the Woodstock film – you’ll notice they never move an inch. Now you know why – the tache support systems literally rooted them to the spot. The second tour was even more ridiculous. Stills and
Crosby needed separate limos, dressing rooms, and sometimes, venues just to accommodate the handlebars. When the taches started getting their own riders and groupies I knew it was time to leave. I also remember a sticky situation crossing the Mexican border some time in nineteen seventy.

Crosby had nagged me into building a “stash tache” – a special compartment in the handlebar where he could hide his Peruvian flake. Well, the tache was frisked at the border but luckily the guard came across a whole beef taco that Crosby had dropped in there by mistake a couple of evening before. When the guard held up the taco with a questioning look, Crosby simply said, enigmatically, “badminton” and we were waved through customs on the grounds of ‘confusion’. It was a close thing, though. An inch or two further frisking to the left and it would have been a very different story. Oddly enough, I never really clicked with Neil Young, despite his strong record of beards over the subsequent years. Neil’s approach to his beard and tache was ‘the rougher the better’. He liked first-take trims as they seemed more honest to him. He wasn’t afraid of mistakes; in fact he loved them. A bit of missed stubble here, a little divot into the beard there. He was obsessed with keeping his beard real and vital. This approach was so different from someone like Mick Fleetwood, with whom I worked years later. With Mick we would spend hours and hours in the studio overgrooming his beard again and again, sometimes even trimming each hair in turn to build up the perfect beard. There’s a lot to be said for that technique, but the risk is that you primp so much that you lose the original rough magic of the beard.  

The serialisation will continue…