Fantastic Days

'Warm, honest and utterly unputdownable' Gary Crowley

'Beautifully written with some real poetry' Shaun Keaveny, BBC Radio 2

'Music memoir of the year, no contest' Pete Paphides

In 1981, Nick Heyward and school friends Graham Jones and Les Nemes signed their band Haircut One Hundred to Arista records. Less than two years later, frontman and principal songwriter Heyward had left. But within that short period, they scored four Top 10 singles, a number two platinum album with Pelican West and countless magazine covers for Heyward who had become both a pin-up and a star.

Forty-four years later and the original reunited Haircut One Hundred have finally released their second album. The intervening years saw Nick carve out a critically acclaimed solo career, one that saw him at home on the eighties nostalgia circuit whilst being feted by the cream of nineties britpop aristocracy when he signed to Alan McGee’s Creation in 1998. Since 1983 he has released nine solo albums. This is Nick’s story. It is a book about childhood dreams and jealousy, about international fame and being a commercial outcast, about depression and enlightenment and about the longest overdue comeback in pop music history.

In Fantastic Days, singer-songwriter and ’80s pop sensation Nick Heyward tells the story of his time as frontman and songwriter for Haircut One Hundred, his depression and breakdown following the band’s split, time spent on Creation Records in the mid-’90s, his (non-denominational) spiritual reawakening and the subsequent reformation of the band he left in 1982. Fantastic Days is a funny, self-deprecating and soul-searching read.