A new start after 60: I left marketing to be a barber – and I almost cried when my dad gave me his blessing | Work & careers

Phil Yates was nervous about telling his dad he wanted to be a barber. “Get a trade! Don’t leave a job unless you’ve got another job lined up!” were his mantras. Therefore, he says: “I was expecting the worst.” But when Yates plucked up the courage to tell him: “I’m kicking marketing down the road. I want to do this,” his dad replied: “That’s fantastic. Life’s so short.”

Yates was 60. Did parental approval really matter? “It almost made me cry,” he says. His father, a fishmonger turned factory worker, had lived on the streets as a child. “It was huge for him to drop the whole thing about being safe and secure and say: ‘Go and do what you really want.’”

Yates had never even cut his friends’ hair, though as a teenager, after moving to New Zealand from London, he’d bleached his own, dyed it orange and got his mum, a hairdresser until she had Yates and his sister, to give him a David Bowie Starman look.

Now, Yates has resigned from his marketing job at a software company and enrolled on a full-time level 4 certification at barbering school. Most of the other students were 16. “I think there was a bit of: ‘Holy shit, who’s this old man?’”

The course was nearly finished when Yates walked into the high-end Hava & Co barbershop in Auckland and said: “Hey, I’m looking for a place …” The next day, the owner came to the barber school. They had coffee, and the owner said: “Come and work for me during the Christmas period. Sweep the floors, see if it’s right for you.” Yates has been there ever since.

Yates grew up in England and was into fashion, buying paisley shirts and corduroy trousers in Wembley, north London, before the family moved to Karaka in the New Zealand countryside. It was 1973. At school the teacher introduced him with the words: “Here’s another one from the Land of Strikes.” “The first thing I did was run away from home.”

He left school at 15 – “It was a misalignment,” he says – and then home at 16, fed up with trekking in and out of Auckland to listen to bands: punk, post-punk, ska, rockabilly.

His first job was working in a factory that made boxes. Then came concreting, photolithography, a company that made billboards … Eventually, he found a job at a design studio in his late 30s, doing graphic design and marketing. “There was no grand plan,” he says. “When I saw something that sparkled a little bit more for me, I went over that way.”

Yates is 63 now. “I love to cut hair,” he says. He still sweeps floors, too. “Because, hey, I’m here to work. Don’t want to sit on my arse looking at a mobile phone.”

He calls himself “the rocking barber” on account of his trademark pompadour hairstyle, born about 20 years ago, and his love of rockabilly music. “Music is kind of everything,” he says. He has a 1957 jukebox at home, and his own internet radio show called Grits and Grease. He also curates his “cutting playlists”.

So why rockabilly, of all the music he’s loved? “It was a completely new type of music. It has this raw, primal energy. And the look: the beautiful quiffs, boots, jeans.”

Of course, Yates cuts all styles – only two clients have a pompadour. On busy days, he’ll have 16 or 17 clients, each with a half-hour slot. That’s only 22 minutes for cutting when you take out hair washing, paying and booking in the next appointment.

Yates thinks he “likely” has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and being on the move – his hands going nonstop with those scissors, chatting, shifting his feet – the rhythm suits him. “I bring this energy to it,” he says.

“Even a buzz cut can make me feel good. Because every single cut has to be your absolute best … You’re doing a project with your hands; then you finish it and you let it go.” Potters, artists, musicians might have to wait days, weeks, months or years for that satisfaction. “But I get that 16 or 17 times a day.”

He hopes one day to travel, barbering as he goes. People can change jobs, Yates says, but it’s not always a new start. Becoming a barber “has brought so much inner happiness. There’s a vibrancy in my life that was lacking. An incredible satisfaction.”

As he says: “With scissors, you can create something magnificent.”

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