If you’re going to Berlin, you’ve got to get the Berlin ‘bowl’,” my more directional friends tell me. I think they are trying to stitch me up. Still, there’s no escaping the fact that Berlin is the capital of the concept haircut, and as I’m going there for the weekend, it seems a shame not to try it out. Its denizens are low on cash and high on creativity, which makes a hip cut the anchor of a Berliner’s look – granny-scaring shocks of hair, Myra Hindley-style mullets and aggro-mohawks.

Up for courting danger, I investigate my options. “Nobody goes to a hair salon,” advises one Berlin resident. “I haven’t had a proper haircut for years – my friends do it.” On the recommendation of art-community chieftains, I look up Charlie Le Mindu on MySpace: he tends the tresses of some of the city’s edgiest inhabitants. Armed with a sacrificial head of hair (long, shapeless, style-free tresses), I set out for his Kreuzberg des res.

While you should try not to judge a hairstylist’s abilities on their own haircut, I couldn’t help but quail at the sight of Le Mindu’s “Plonkon”, so called because it looks as if the hair has been, well, plonked on; plus a bleached rat’s tail. With a gulp, I hand myself over.

Resplendent in a gold-sequined tail coat, he parks me at his dressing table, which is surrounded by party props: red patent-leather fetish heels (yes, his), and a black velvet riding hat with a long, cherry-red wig on top – his cycling helmet, he says.

“I sink ah’m going to cut you a fringe that sits in your eyes,” the Bergerac-born Le Mindu announces gleefully.

“But then I won’t be able to see,” I wail.

He seems not to hear: “Then you can have a banane.”

Great. A banane, it turns out, is a quiff. I’m all shook up.

Le Mindu takes up his tools while I work on tranquillising myself.

Now aged 21, he trained at Vidal Sassoon and Toni & Guy, but didn’t hang around for long at either. “I really can’t work in a salon where everyone gets the same haircut,” he says. He took techniques from both, but most of the time “it’s just feeling”, he says, grabbing a large chunk of hair by my ear and bluntly chopping it like a bunch of weeds. As references, he cites the “really big hair” of John Waters’s leading ladies, Cher’s wigs and – oh, the irony – the Queen.

The confidence of youth is evident in his scissor-wielding, as is sufficient familiarity with the rule book to be able to defy it. “I like to do easy hair, not super-crazy,” he says reassuringly.

In Berlin, Le Mindu has been a pioneer of the pop-up hair salon (a trend that’s also starting up here; see www.hairpod.net). He sets up shop in the bar-club White Trash Fast Food and works through about 20 (drunk) clients a night. “They wake up and can’t remember what’s happened,” he says. “They ask for radical cuts, but I am strict. If I don’t want to do the style they’re asking for, I charge more.” His club cuts (always on dry hair) start at £25 (a snip!) and take 20 minutes.

Half of Le Mindu’s work is in the styling. While snipping away, he volunteers all sorts of different options: “You can do a middle parting and backcomb it, or make a ponytail, so it looks as if you have a bob.” More hairdressers should do this, please.

Before long, it’s time for the mirror moment: Le Mindu has been gentil with me – no bowl, no rat’s tail. And I can see. The concept is all in the styling; it’s not radical, just quietly original. The acid test, of course, is other people’s reactions, mostly to the tune of: “You look younger/thinner/taller.” Yay! Wrong, but yay.

Now, you don’t have to go to Berlin for a Le Mindu mop – he has just landed in London to cut hair at Girlcore, a suitably cool east London club night. However, despite his favourable rate, please don’t ask for a plonkon. And, says Le Mindu, girls who don’t know what they want get a bob. With a rat’s tail. Snip!

www.charlielemindu.com; www.myspace.com/charlielemindu

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