Barbicide and seduction tips from the man who cut Elvis’ hair

He told me he cut Elvis Presley's hair. And there, among all the other posters of Elvis on his barbershop walls (Elvis as movie cowboy with six-shooter drawn, Elvis sneering into a microphone, Elvis as Marine) was a framed photo of him cutting Elvis' hair. Or was there? Did I make up that story and come to believe it? Arthur was something of a fabulist, back then. But so was I. I don't know now if the Elvis story was his or mine. Let's just say, between us we cut Elvis' hair.

Even in the '80s he was an "old time" barber. The sort who stood his scissors and combs in Barbicide and laid his brushes and clippers in a glass-fronted cabinet filled with ultra-violet light and sharpened his cut-throat razor on a strop that hung from your chair before manhandling your head into place like you were Anne Boleyn.

He had a vast bric-a-brac of Zippos and Nubrush Scalp Vitalisers and hair tonics and combs and brushes and ciggie papers and pipes for sale. He was also a tobacconist and Gertrude Street was then a place of daytime drunks who had made him a brusque retailer. Your haircut would be punctuated by uncivil sales of Marlboro Reds to street folk with shoplifters' eyes, and bothersome transactions of Tally-Ho to weed freaks who he'd ask, "Just papers, eh?".

Getting a haircut in those days was an act of trust, an egalitarian exchange. Even the Governor-General would pay heed to his barber's oratory while he was swathed in the cape. You were in the man's church. He who holds the cut-throat holds court.

Mostly, Arthur held forth about women, to me. If you wanted to impress women you'd best take them dancing rock ‘n' roll, he said. You hold them tight and spin them and fling them high. And, then, when the dance slows, if you stroke them on the neck, right here, well ... that's the key, they just can't help themselves. He had women figured out. I nodded along and assured him I'd take the women I knew dancing and stroke the special place on their necks. I don't know if his methods would work on the modern woman. For that matter I don't know if they worked on any women. But it was kind of him to let a young man glimpse his playbook.

I went back to Fitzroy this week, after 35 years. Gertrude and Smith Streets have changed utterly. Anna's Delicatessen, where I bought Russian potato salad, is now a Crumpler shop. The Greek men who sat at plastic tables in lace-curtained shopfronts playing backgammon are gone. Over there was a second-hand bookshop with a curled cat and a water-damaged Thackeray. Next door a shoemaker. Think of that – someone who funded a life making shoes. It's a cafe now. Everything is, if it isn't a boutique.

But one shop hadn't changed. A hairdresser/tobacconist looking like a Scorsese set where some goodfella was about to be whacked. The same gaudy baubles of post-war American optimism were laid out for sale. And there was Arthur leaning on the back of his chair waiting for his next customer, looking at me as I looked in his window. He's old now; the oiled black wave of rocker hair crashed to white wisps. He didn't recognise me. Well, he cut a young man's hair, and I am not that. Everything outside his window has changed. But in there it's still 1955. If you're passing and think it's strange looking in through that window at the past – imagine how strange it is for him, looking out, at you, future being.

On the west wall is the big mirror in which I watched him cut my hair. I remember those first moments after I rose from his red leather chair and slanted my head at that mirror to see what he'd done. I felt like a Lighthorseman, I felt like Joe Strummer. That's what Arthur's haircuts could do. You could ride at Turkish guns or lift the roof off the Hammersmith Odeon with a haircut like that.

We looked at each other through his window a moment. I could have gone inside and asked. But I don't want to find out he didn't cut The King's hair. Because he did. For me, anyway. And if you go down to Gertrude Street and have your hair cut by him you too will be able to tell people, "the guy who gave me this haircut once cut Elvis' hair."