For better or worse footballers always seem to have a certain knack for standing out. Be it their height of the fashion footwear questionable clobber or bombastic barnets, players of the world’s most popular sport always manage to set themselves apart from the herd. And through the years, inevitably, Coventry have had some players who undoubtedly looked the bees’ knees at the time, but with the benefit of hindsight, photos from years ago often leave modern fans sniggering behind their hands. Be it Jack Rudoni’s curls from the current crop of stars, Noel Whelan’s boy band-esque curtains from the 1990s, Brian Kilcline’s Viking-worthy mullet, Sam Allardyce’s impressive Magnum P.I. ‘tache, or even Ernie Hunt’s sizable sideburns, we City fans have enjoyed some wonderful hairdos down the years. But are any quite as impressive or striking as the bright ginger perm once sported by CCFC legend Ian Wallace? We’ve all seen the images, one in particular is so painfully 1970s it looks made up. This is partly because of the shock of bright orange curly hair, but also because it was paired with an away kit so ugly it is generally considered the worst in football history – yes, the Coventry chocolate brown away strip. Coventry Live recently caught up with Paul ‘Sweeney’ Todd, the now 82-year-old barber who gave Mr Wallace this particular cut. Paul, still plying his trade at Sacci’s in Stoke , was once the unofficial barber for Coventry City, spending decades cutting the hair of players, staff and management partly due to his shop’s location around the corner from Highfield Road, then the home of the Sky Blues. He starting cutting hair for the players in the mid 1960s, getting them all shipshape and shiny throughout the club’s glory years, including promotion through the football league pyramid to the top flight and FA Cup glory in 1987. Now nearly 60 years after the city last got promoted to the top echelon of English football, they are about to be promoted to the Premier League – 25 years after being relegated. We caught up with Paul to see what he remembered about his days cutting hair for the Sky Blues, including arguably the most infamous Coventry City haircut of all time. “Ian Wallace had terrible hair,” Paul told CoventryLive. “When he washed it, he just couldn’t get it to go the way he wanted. He said to me one day, ‘Paul, What can I do with it?’ I said, ‘just get it permed.’ “Well, perms were all the rage in the 70s. So I permed his hair, and that’s how it came out. It looked as though somebody had inflated the top of his head. He was over the moon and after that everyone was asking for a perm. “Wallace and Mick Ferguson were great mates, they were always in my shop, like a lot of the players they’d often just pop in to have a chat and hang out.” Though it may have been all the rage at the time, the male perm is one cut that didn’t last the test of time, and Ian’s shock of ginger hair became famous in football circles for the all the wrong reasons, not helped by a photo in particular of him modelling the infamous brown away strip. The combination of the potentially worst haircut of all time and the worst kit of all time has seen this particular image go down in history. “The Sun newspaper did an article on the haircuts of the 70s. They put all the players in, everybody that had the perm, Kevin Keegan and loads of others. “And at the end they put, ‘And this was a disaster,’ with a brown strip on with this mop of ginger hair.” But despite its infamy, Paul bumped into Ian Wallace years later, and he was still happy with it. “I saw Ian years later when they had Jimmy Hill’s commemoration at the Cathedral. I walked in, he was as bald as a badger by then. He looked at me and went, ‘Toddy, you gave me the best hair I ever had.’ Even after all these years, I was pleased he liked it.” Big hair or not, Wallace’s time with the club is better remembered for his antics on the pitch. A striker with an eye for goal, he spent four years with the club and was a menace to Division One defenders, scoring close to a goal every other game. His form earned him three caps for a very good Scotland team while he wore the Sky Blue, followed by a move to then European Champions Nottingham Forest. Make sure our latest stories always feature at the top of your Google Search by setting us as a Preferred Source. Click here to enable or add us as your Preferred Source in your Google search settings.