The life of Pi

The phone is ringing, his employees are about to leave for the night, and tomorrow evening his salon is set to host the launch of a young artist’s latest exhibition.

With a lift due in 10 minutes and a flu-ridden youngster to deal with at home, you would expect Paul Caddell to be focused on taming the one last, impossibly truculent, mop of hair in front of him.
You’d be wrong.
“Hold on,” he says, disappearing with his scissors behind a partition to turn up the volume on the shop’s PA “Wait until you hear this.”
If you only come out of Pi hairdressers with a new ‘do, then something’s gone badly wrong. The aesthetic of many of its competitors may well appear to be informed by Footballer’s Wives, but Pi, thankfully, prefers to take its lead from High Fidelity and Smoke.
So, while the University Street spot is certainly a reliable stop-off for that emergency rug rethink, given the joint’s dependably brilliant home-spun play-list (gospel Dylan covers, early Carpenters, Nuggets, lots of old soul) it’s also somewhere that will improve your record collection.
“It tends to be the thing that the customers comment on the most,” says Caddell. “And when we first opened it was an easy way to establish our identity. I was pretty militant early on – playing The Stooges at top volume and if anyone complained, I was like: fuck ‘em, but nowadays it’s not such a big deal. I think people know we’re enthusiastic about things and music is definitely one of them, and they like that. We get a great mixture of people in here – school kids, people in bands, office workers, there’s a wee 80 year old woman who comes in every fortnight. If we were up our own arse, I don’t think that would be the case.”
Caddell’s determination to ensure that Pi maintains a very different mood to most other hairdressers can be traced back to his earliest experiences in the trade.
In the early ‘90s he worked alongside Iain MacCreadie and David Holmes in Zakk’s on Bradbury Place – an environment that played a crucial role in the introduction of Acid House to Belfast.
“It was much more than just a hairdressers,” he explains. “It had links with Arts groups and helped run clubs. It was a joy going to work every morning. Everyone got on really well; everyone had something else going on outside of work. We’d all hang around together; it was great. We ran a club night in Corporation Street and, looking back now, it was all so new and naive.”
“We played Rebel MC one night,” he continues, “and were running round with big grins going ‘I’ve never heard anything like this before’. We didn’t really know what we were doing, but I think that added to the atmosphere. It wasn’t a trendy, exclusive thing – it was people getting off on brilliant music that they’d never heard before. Before we knew it, the whole thing had exploded. It was a really amazing time.”
A tribute to Caddell’s involvement is the title of the David Holmes’ tune that probably best captures the light-on-its-feet, give-it-a-go ambience of the period – ‘My Mate Paul’. While, these days, his ambitions for Pi may not extend to organising era-defining club nights, Caddell still insists on fighting the good fight. Last autumn he invited local designer Kev Largey to exhibit some of his work in the salon. Encouraged by the response, he decided to repeat the trick throughout 2006. During the summer, work by Glen Leyburn and Twisted Nerve boss Andy Votel will be lining the walls, while all through March Anna Fitzsimons (from LaFaro) will be providing the images.
Caddell is enthusiastic about this new chapter in the life of Pi.
“The main thing is and always will be the hair,” he says. “But as we have this space, why not use it for something a wee bit more interesting and challenging? Anna’s a customer and we got talking one day and it just developed from that. Same with Glen, he’s one of my oldest friends and a really great designer And Andy has been in Belfast loads over recent years and it just came up in a conversation one night. There’s no great master plan, it’s just about creating a vibe.”
He lifts a mirror. The Concretes are playing on the P.A.
“Is that enough off the back for you?”