Pop
Goodbye Tom, hello Biba
Duncan Fallowell
Said the Vulgravine of Tatt to the Bogus of Kitsch, "I do hope it survives long enough to restore the flamingoes to the roof garden. They were, after all, a feature. And what with the new Hilton by the roundabout — somewhere at last for the charabancs to stop, and Lindsay Kemp at the Green with Genet, well, the Bush is looking up." The Bogus, eyelids propped open with forks, spooned with his third Mocha mousse, having struck a chord with the staff. This is the Rainbow Room at Biba's and is it what it was? What was it?, the Vulgravine asked. A department store, Derry and Toms, a large yawn. in the middle of Kensington High Street which had long ceased to justify the volume of air it displaced. Even a change for the worse would have been an improvement. Biba's shop may fall between two stools, a manoeuvre confirmed by the Dorothy Perkins deal, too expensive to be a hip Woolworths, too cheap to be smart, not London's Bloomingdales but full of sofas, tennis courts of unused floor space, a relaxing lack of bustle. And the Rainbow Room? Do not get hung up on service or food: . both come and go without explanation. It has however hooked a double first. Some weeks ago the New York Dolls played their only London dates there, electrical heaven mainlining the jugular and we were teenagers again, emotionally retarded punks strung out on the noise like clothes on a line (memento mori: The New York Dolls, Mercury, E2.15). And it was here again last week, after a dinner of crudités and Bourbon, that San Francisco's four astonishing Pointer Sisters previewed their European tour.
They looked a dream and sang to kill. Life would be much simpler if one did not have to justify one's pleasures. Apart from the fact that the whole story is always unprintable and innuendo grows tiresome, there is that carping mentality which truly joyous entertainment annihilates. Yet we must do what we must do, close the mouth which has gaped overlong, and try to forget that birth, copulation and death are the only facts when you get down to brass tacks, however aromatic the metaphors.
To call the Pointer Sisters slick is to call the Indian Ocean wet, true but inadequate. To call them professional is to group them with chartered accountancy, another false start. To say they have style or class (American pronunciation) is to deflect the intellect into an act of pure observation along the lines of `pubescents suffer from acne.' The Pointer Sisters have all these qualities consummately in hand and move on from here in a breathless display of pop vocal virtuosity, jazzy influences beginning with the Andrews Sisters, in which exuberance never loses out to the technical precision their manner implies. What makes them outstanding is their capacity for uniting the rigours of extreme sophistication with the more urgent physical excitement of beat music. Soul, rock, jazz, be-bop, swing, scat, a capella, cabaret croon (not to forget a cooking instrumental back-up), it is all in there in the most glittering and ductile of alloys, then the conjuring trick which some might call ' star quality' or ' shazam! ' and the outcome is a new element altogether. Were you to buy the album, The Pointer Sisters (Blue Thumb, £2.19), much in these remarks would become clear, but ' they are natural performers and the patchiness of the record has no _counterpart in the show. Later that night in the library, Bogus of Kitsch wrote his very first fan letter. "Dear Pointer Sisters, Is there any chance of tickets for your only public London concert at the Victoria Palace on Jan. 27? Pop the Krug and think of me."
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