We went out last night, dressed up. Jane had on her black suit and really high heels, I wore a black ruched 30’s dress and a tiny hat with a veil. It was murder with my cigarette but we both looked beautiful.”

Don't forget the Rita Hayworth red earrings, said Jane, laughing.

The two girls left at midnight for Cabaret rutura adorned with an extended image and relieved for a chance to dress up in a way that they hadn’t enjoyed since they were kids and had rifled their mother’s old clothes trunk.

Rock Cabaret is booming.

In the early days of punk, groups had to find new places to play, since promoters of the familiar venues treated their anarchism with deep and fearful suspicion. A certain amount of loose entrepreneurism was born there accidently. Small old clubs that had at one time existed solely for the convenience of foreign students or girls from Scandinavia with one day off a week and a few meager pounds saved from their stint of looking in after someone’s children, washing up, cleaning the house in Hampstead and trying to learn English, were taken over for odd nights so that punks could find an audience. Do It Yourself was born with punk and has lived on. After a while things quieted down. Then came the rise of Factory, the rush to experimentalists. Gary Numan on the right; those who saw their music as an extension of the Dadaists—the European intellectual movement of the late 20’s—and the fractured work of the American avant garde film school, on the left.

It was many of these latter groups who became involved in the placement of their live music against the screening of much that was apposite to their work. Small independent cinemas began to have late night showings combining film and live groups. The resulting frisson harkened back to the hippie days of art labs (a major influence on a young David Bowie; a major downer for me when faced with the bewildering confusion of Jimi Hendrix and Jefferson Airplane on the sound system and pigs’ intestines on the screen, but that’s another story). Thanks be, the coming-intothe-80’s view of mixed media was more defined. It was separated so that the links could be forged but didn’t wrap itself up into such a mind boggling mess that only the grateful recipients of a few tabs of acid could get any enjoyment out of it.

By last year New Rock began to mix its treats more openly. Groups appeared with fire-eaters and jugglers as show openers. But it was more the air of the circus hitting town than a defined piece of existentialism. But it broke the old order. The small clubs thrived again, this time for the New Romantics to waft around in. Rock poets began to re-establish themselves first and foremost through the childlike tantrums of Patrik Fitzgerald (who received a fair amount of empty beer and coke cans as thanks for his efforts in the early days), and—a more serious and major influence— the lugubrious punk efforts of John Cooper-Clarke, whose mix of stand-up comedian and Lennonesque spite (plus a resemblance to Dylan) has finally brought him fans, and whose fate appears to be —judged by sociologists—as a seminal artiste.

While a new kind of comedy has emerged—the Comedy Store and the Comic Strip stage regular “political” young comics before an audience who have the freedom to indulge in face-outs, without having to leave their seats, or simply boo people off stage should the wish take them—so has a new kind of cabaret.

Rock Cabaret in 1981 has become more than simply a mixed media affair. While Dexy’s Midnight Runners do London shows with comedy duos and dance troupes, old small venues have re-opened their doors under new titles to fit the new approach. The cabarets can be anything from the new kind of jazz cabaret format that the Mike Westbrook Brass Band have still to receive their just rewards for having first introduced nearly ten years ago, to electronic disco and cabaret mixed, to the more overt result of punk: Richard Strange’s Cabaret Futura. While All My Eye and Betty Martin in Chelsea combine the art school approach with a restaurant and cabaret which features anything from jazz to mime artists, Strange’s Futura rests more firmly in the arena of contemporary music.

Finding few places that he could perform in himself, Strange set up the cabaret as a loose outfit that he booked in to Scandals, originally a London gay club, for one night a week. The mix was anarchistic and bewildering. Yet in the early New Romantics day it met a need to parade an audience whose view of life was the vicarious exaltation of emotional bleakness perpetuated not by Joy Division with its obvious personal suffering, but the affectation of it by such groups as Spandau Ballet.

Futura has changec^ great deal in the past six months. Now^ptrange’s aim is to create at least a party a week, the kind where word gets around and everyone seems to naturally congregate. Just as on Saturday nights we all once met to find out if anything was happening (just in time to get a bottle of cheap wine as an entrance ticket to someone’s front door). Running on Monday nights in Wardour Street (forever it seems the stomping grounds from the early days of the Who on) Futura may now expand back to its old location at the ravaged Blitz’s for a second weekly stint. Futura stage about eight acts, nobody headlines, and the issuing melee the audience is treated to the bizarre, the spectacular and, occasionally, the boring. Bands, poets and performing artists nudge elbows; audio cricket matches; electronic tapes and old Marlene Dietrich records play at half time.

The introduction of rock cabaret at least provides a loose-limbed showcase for anyone with enough confidence to ring Strange and get up on a stage; at best it breaks with tradition in playing those acts in a highly non-competitive arena. For any artist the informality, the knowledge that you’re not simply an opening act playing to an empty or discreetly polite auditorium, gives you more than a fighting chance. In a music arena reeling from a recession, it’s a minor but important challenge to the status quo. For an audience...well, Jane and her friend met a “load of people we knew who we hadn’t arranged to meet or anything.” Their feet hurt, but their minds had been tickled wonderfully. ^