Talking Passions: Stephen Parker

This week on Talking Passions we met up with a firm Bristol fave in the way of Stephen Parker, founder of Shambarber. Now the modern barber shop has become synonymous with good chat, great style, and of course, fantastic cuts for girls and guys. Shambarber’s no different, except that Stephen his friends also find the time to delve into Bristol’s music and festival scene, and have created a whole Shambarber experience that extends out from the cosy shop in the heart of Stokes Croft. I managed to catch up with him recently to chat about where it all began.

Adam Chisman (TP). “As a young boy what did you want to be when you grew up and how did you get to where you are now?”

Stephen Parker (SP). “I think I first wanted to be an airline pilot when I was a kid but I was totally useless at maths so that was never gonna happen. A lot of my family are academics, and I’m the last of four kids so I was kind of expected to go down that route but I was never really into academia. Started my A-Levels and then dropped out, and wanted to get a trade because I wanted to go traveling but I didn’t want to be on a building site. I’d always worked in fashion and hair type stuff so I decided to get into it, and just kind of fell into it really when I was seventeen. All of my family were incredibly disproving when I started. Laughs. I started at Franco’s Barber Shop, which is up on Gloucester Rd, in 1997, twenty years ago now. Learnt there on the brush and then moved on up.”

TP. “Fantastic. How did Shambarber come together?”

SP. “Probably about eight or nine years ago I was still into cutting hair but wanting to do something a bit different. I’d been going to Shambala since pretty much the first one and Shambala’s such a lovely festival, I’d always had such amazing times there, but the late night music was never quite what I was into. I was always into my techno scene and that sort of stuff. I just wanted to bring a bit more of that to Shambala so I approached Sid directly, the guy who runs it, and asked him if we could do a late night house and techno tent. He was really up for it as he was on the verge of doing something himself, but he said if we were going to do it we’d have to come up with an unusual idea. Obviously I was a hairdresser at the time and I wanted to do something different, so I thought we’d do a barber shop with a secret entrance to a knee’s up. A barber shop in the day and then a little door whatever that may be.. sometimes it was a wardrobe, sometimes it was through a caravan, those sorts of things, and that’s how we came up with it. We went from there.”

TP. “That’s amazing. And how did Shambarber barber shop start?”

SP. “Around about the same point I started thinking I’d quite like to have my own shop. I saw the benefits of having a brand that wasn’t just driven by what it does, I suppose a little bit like… I’m not trying to equate Shambarber with Red Bull or anything like that, but I’d been reading some articles on the way companies like Red Bull do their branding and how they achieve what they achieve. So you’re not just a product, you become what your product is associated with. I wanted to build a brand up, so that when I opened the shop people would have an idea of what it was about before it became an entity, if you see what I mean. That kind of worked well. The festivals enabled me to get a crowd engaged in whatever Shambarber is before we even cut any hair as a salon. That took us to four years ago when I took the shop on. I came down to Stokes Croft and it was the first shop I looked at. I Googled shops to rent on Stokes Croft, came down, saw it and then put a deposit on it the next Monday. Laughs. A very short search. At the time Stokes Croft was bit rough. I had a lot of friends who were like, ‘You really want to open a shop on Stokes Croft?! Are you sure about that?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, it’s gonna go well.’ It was still a bit of an unknown entity at that point and it could have gone either way. It was only a year or so after the riots, and it wasn’t like it is now with tourists and cameras photographing graffiti. When I was a kid you wouldn’t walk down here, you’d pull up on your bike and cycle through as quickly as possible. Now it’s great, it’s still got that vibe but it’s not half as dangerous I suppose.”

TP. “Absolutely. Well a haircut’s a statement, you’re wearing your personality on your body to a certain extent. Where do you look for inspiration when trying out new styles and ideas?”

SP. “I suppose a lot of it still really comes from film and music and stuff like that. It’s kind of driven by, especially men’s styles at the moment strangely enough, TV shows. There’s a lot of people who want haircuts like Peaky Blinders at the moment. People are influenced by certain waves of culture. I think that different ideas have a time and have a moment. The 20’s and 30’s, short fads and almost pre-war era of haircut is very popular at the moment. I think that when TV shows reflect that, then hair reflects that. One begets the other.”

TP. “Yeah, I think you’re right. Well everyone has had that haircut from hell and I’m sure you’re no different. Can you tell me about the worst haircut you’ve had in your life?” 

SP. “Oh yeah. My worst haircut was done by myself before I became a hairdresser. This is late 90’s, I was big into free parties, techno and all that sort of stuff. I had a completely shaved head, with these braided, platted dreadlocks, four or five of them tucked behind my ear. They had bits of stuff tied to them, bits of UV stuff, bits of metal. Shocking!”

TP. “That is a hell of a style! I would love to have seen it.” 

SP. “Luckily this is pre-phone cameras so there’s not many pictures of me. The I had the ubiquitous ‘curtains’, 90’s rave curtains. Then I had the free party rave mullet as well, which was all shaved on the front and then long at the back. That was another special look.” Laughs.

TP. “That is amazing. Now as you already mentioned you are involved in the Bristol music and festival scene, and often throw some serious parties. Can you tell me a bit more about how you’re involved in the music scene?”

SP. “Well I suppose on the Bristol party front we’re not as involved as we have been say three or four years ago, we’re more orientated towards the festival stuff. But in the last two or three years we’ve done stuff with Just Jack, hosted rooms for them, been involved with Alfresco Disco, again hosting barber shop rooms and straight up party rooms, and we also went through a period of doing live broadcasts from the shops. We did a thing called ‘Barber Shop’, which was a bit like ‘Boiler Room’ except a barber shop version. We got decks and stuff in here and did about five or six of them. They were brilliant. We had Soul Clap play, Roman Flügel played, Midland played. We used to do them before Just Jack so we’d have three or four hours in here and we’d broadcast it live on the internet. It was going really well but the shop kept getting absolutely nailed so I had to pull back on that. It was really great when we first opened up to promote the shop having big artists play here, but you’d come in on a Monday and taps were hanging off the walls so we had to stop. Laughs. But party-wise in Bristol we still wanna do stuff, but because of the size of the stuff we do for Love Saves The Day and Shambala we’re just focusing more on that these days. Two big wollops a year.”

TP. “Nice, and I know that this year you have something very special lined up for Shambala Festival this year don’t you?”

SP. “Yeah, we’re doing a new thing called Stiletto Disco which is basically a kind of homage to all things stiletto. Even though stilettos are great and it’s all fun, Shambala want to kind of promote empowerment of both of the sexes this year, that’s their vibe. They like a message Shambala. So we wanted to find something that was both male and female, and stilettos were first used by Arabian horsemen to fire arrows. You’s stand up in stirrups and use your stilettos to hook you in, and then fire the arrows. They were first a really masculine item. And then I think the French courtiers in the 1400’s or something started wearing them to emulate the Arabian soldiers, to emulate the masculinity. After that in the 1600’s women in London began wearing them to emulate men. Rich wealthy men in London would be wearing stilettos, and then women started doing it as a fashion thing, smoking pipes and cutting their hair short and wearing stilettos. They were still a male item, so to look like men. There’s a weird crossover there, and also stilettos are awesome! Everyone wants to see a big shiny spinning stiletto. So the entrance to the tent is gonna be a giant stiletto slide. You come into the tent through the entrance and then you climb up the back of a stiletto and slide down it onto a dance floor. You’re kind of ‘born’ into the venue via stiletto. Laughs. That’s what we’ve got planned, and then hopefully next year we really wanna try and get at a few more festivals. We’ve been in talks with a couple of other festivals and we’d really like to take Stiletto Disco to a few more, and obviously Love Saves The day with the Temple of Lust.”

If you’d like to get in touch with Stephen or Shambarber you can via Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or call the shop on 0117 942 2087.

Words: Talking Passions.

Pictures: Shambarber & Talking Passions.

Here’s a feature on Bristol24/7 called Talking Passions. It’s a Bristol-based interview series that hopes to inspire your creative side by interviewing passionate individuals in Bristol’s arts and music scenes. The driving force behind the series is a belief that within each of us is a creative soul with untold capabilities. It’s not always easy to follow your dreams, to believe in yourself and try to make it work, and it should be celebrated!

Started by local journalist Adam Chisman, and with links to various Collectives in the city including Liquifyah, The Coconut Collective, as well as Irish online magazine Ceol Caint, Talking Passions comes in two weekly parts, with brand new written interviews on talkingpassions.com and Bristol24/7 and audio interviews on BCFM’s The Bristol Music Show and Soundcloud.

Be sure to check out Talking Passions on Facebook and Twitter @PassionsTalking to keep up to date with the latest interviews, and email [email protected] or use the hashtag #talkingpassions if you’d like to know more or recommend someone for a future interview. You can also become a patron and sponsor Talking Passions at www.patreon.com/talkingpassions