Live at Squamish provided people with great atmosphere, great music, and great haircuts... wait, haircuts?
The festival which took place Saturday and Sunday (Aug. 20 and 21), featured representatives of a barbershop from Vancouver, but they weren't of the quartet variety as you might expect at a music festival.
Tucked away at the back of the artisans' section of the festival was a tent featuring real barbers cutting hair while music played beside them at the more intimate Green Couch Sessions stage.
The Belmont Barbershop from Vancouver was featured at this year's festival. It seems that the concept of cutting hair while listening to music is catching on in the music industry.
"Hair and music kind of go hand in hand. Rockers like to look a particular way, barbers and stylists are required to make them look that way. I'm a big appreciator of music so it's fun to work closely with that," said Belmont owner Dustin Arthur Fishbook.
"Musicians themselves are pretty much responsible for taste making. They're looked up to by a lot of people and therefore help drive trends and style," he said.
Getting your hair cut at a live performance is growing in popularity, but according to Fishbook, the concept has been around for some time.
"When I first started cutting hair. I used to cut at the local rockabilly night at Pat's Pub in Vancouver. It actually grew my clientele by 25 per cent just by doing that. So I've been working side by side with music ever since I've been in the business," Fishbook said.
The Live at Squamish opportunity arose when Rich Hope, one of the barbers from the shop, received an invitation after performing as a musician at last year's festival.
"I was here last year playing and they asked me to come again because they know I do this as well, so they wanted me to be involved and do the shop up here," Hope said.
"They called me up after last year, and said, 'We'd like to do this concept' and they laid it out and it was like, 'That sounds really fun.'"
According to Hope, the shop was as busy as it would have been in Vancouver, but the change of scenery was certainly welcome.
"We probably did seven or eight guys each which doesn't sound like a ton but we only started at 2 o'clock. Pretty normal day for us, just somewhere else doing the same thing," said Hope.
"It's fun to do stuff like that and not be in the office; it's good to be out just screwin' around. At a festival like this it's not too hard to just stand around and cut hair all the time."
For Fishbook it's a nice change from the confines of the shop, but more importantly, it's also about the music.
"I've done quite a bit of public hair cutting before; it's always fun and fantastic. You get exposed to a whole new level of potential clientele. It's interesting, it's different, and it gets us out of the shop which is a nice change of pace," Fishbook said.
For more information on the Belmont Barbershop, visit www.thebelmontbarbershop.com.
