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Music

24th Jul 2018

Alex Turner shaves his head for performance on The Late Show

The chameleonic frontman has mixed things up once again

Kyle Picknell

He now looks like a minor character in Trainspotting

Alex Turner is a man of many looks.

From his long greasy locks faux-Elvis drawl of the AM era to the fluorescent v-necks from Topman and fringey mop of the Whatever People Say I Am, That’s Not What I’m Not breakthrough, he has continued to change and alter his appearance to best suit the music he is playing as the band’s sound continues to evolve from album to album.

After the release of the divisive (but still excellent, in my honest opinion) Tranquility Base Hotel & CasinoTurner’s look was one of the whiskey drinking deadbeat poet rotting away in a Nevada Hotel somewhere, a caricature that appears in many of Tranquility‘s songs, all sideburns and sorrow and yellow-tint spectacles gazing over from across the bar.

Perhaps conscious of his slow transformation into a parody of himself, Turner has now done pretty much the only thing he hasn’t tried with his hair – to completely fuck it all off.

It looks a bit strange at first, more Tom Hardy as Bane than Brad Pitt in Mr & Mrs Smith, but it does kinda grow on you.

He debuted his new look whilst the band gave a lively performance of ‘The Ultracheese’ on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, which you can watch – in black and white, for some reason – below.