Last Saturday night, Smokey Robinson took to a London stage for the first time in ten years. Meanwhile, several miles across the city. Boney M. was playing at the Rainbow. Tough on the West Indian quartet, one night have thought, having to compete against the long overdue return of a black music legend. Don't you believe it. The Rainbow, although not quite full, was very healthily populated, thank you very much.

Of that copulation, most were white and ranged from polite lacks of young, well-scrubbed teenagers to the odd middle aged couple on the lam from a night in front of the telly. Boney M., you understand, are a pop group and by definition they draw fans from right across the age range. Its four members are black; its music, on the other hand lies firmly in the white pop tradition.

A mock-reggae version of "No Woman No Cry" may have been one of the first Boney M. cuts to register, but the group's schtick remains catchy melodies, set to a German-manufactured disco beat. I happen to think that they are also vapid, but the people who paid tickets clearly don't agree.

True at no point did they go overly bananas, even when the quartet slinked on to the elaborately mirrored and neon-lit set, but each song was awarded energetic applause, and the "Belfast " finale met with a customary barrage of cheering and whistling.

To me however it was a case of Boney M turning out their hits like people shelling peas. Plop, plop, plop - one after another — one pretty much the same as another. There was only one surprise, a so-so reading of Leo Sayer's " When I Need You," and only one genuinely moving moment, " Still I'm Sad," the hymnal reworking of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" that is unlike anything else Boney M. have ever recorded.

Otherwise, plop plop plop – "Daddy Cool" becomes "Plantation Boy" becomes "Sunny" becomes "Belfast" becomes "Ma Baker". Nobody seemed to care that the strings, so important to the groups studio sound, where missing: nobody seemed to care that there wasn’t one distinctive voice to be heard.

Ah well, different strokes for different folks.

Bob Gallagher

Tonight Boney M delivered their Manifesto: "We always say: There is No Business like Show Business, and there is No Time like Boney M. Time. Because Boney M. Time is Anytime, and Anytime is Boney M. Time!"

Get out of that one, Metaphysics fans. What we have here is known as Entertainment and what we're supposed to be doing is Having A Good Time, because having a good time is What It's All About and is everybody happy? Bet your life they are.

Middle England turned out in strength this evening. There were Mums and Dads and kiddies, pre-Christmas treated. There were suburban regiments of young married's, perfumed and Sketchley-fresh, giggling girls from convent schools and awkward youths in anoraks. There were many Asians but nearly no blacks.

Infallible hitsters, Boney M. know this market well, have attuned their act to its every preference with a finesse that's nearing perfection. The repertoire combines the inevitable ("Ma Baker", "Rivers Of Babylon") with the predictable ("No Woman No Cry", Leo Sayer's "When I Need You") and more bizarre inclusions like Neil Young's "Heart Of Gold".

There's the astonishingly popular "Brown Girl In The Ring", the distasteful "Belfast" (both songs performed with identical jollity) and what's certain to be our next Xmas monster, Harry Belafonte's 1957 atrocity, "Mary's Boy Child".

Genuinely impressive is a slow number, sung by Liz Mitchell. "Still I'm Sad": an eerie spectacular of coloured lights and billowing, impenetrable mist that envelopes stage and stalls alike. Almost my choc-ice.

Most hilarious was the old cabaret melodrama, "Big Spender". Enter, stage right, the energetic Bobby Farrell, cutting a dash tonight in fur-lined glitter-cloak, and Marcia sings "The minute you waked in the joint I could see you were a man of distinction! "Yes indeed, though it was the ballet tights that gave him away on that score, no doubt.

Boney M., it hardly needs saying, are polished and slick and professional.

But musically they're awful. Pioneer purveyors of the electronic nursery-rhyme, they've put popular music back by three decades with brain-numbing ditties of irresistible idiocy and sinister efficiency. It's sparkling dreck; gimmicky, synthetic music conceived with a cold eye to the Deutschmark.

And everybody loves it. "Get up and dance!" they're told and, young and old, they soon oblige. Gamely, inhibited English limbs strike compromises with the rhythm; they clap and sing and, every so often, glance about to reassure themselves that everyone else is doing the same...

They are, of course.

Paul Du Noyer

News paper unknown

Boney M. at Hammersmith Odeon, London 1st December 1978

WELL LET it be said that old spindly legs and his peacock coloured crew did all their bits and that the fans had the night of the year. Everyone, that is, bar a mature Jews in furs and jewels who called it a concert once the dry ice clouded out into the stalls. Poor woman — she put up with fog-horn volume. She barely winced when the flashlight blinded her during singalonga Boney. But dry ice — that was the limit

Visual? I'll say. Canvas covered the back and stage ceiling. Two arches and a great big star in red and white flowers lay against the curtain. The costumes — dazzling. Not to mention Bobby (applause drowned his second name) who gamely grooved for a song at a time — then jigged on the spot, then had a fidget, arms behind back as if he needed a wee.

Behind Bobby Applause stood the robotic musicians — the keyboard fella done up like a Bedouin — blasting out a fair version of the Munich Sound. Without strings it was a shade cheap'n'nasty, "Rasputin" not half as rousing as the record. Not that such sonic subtleties bothered the assembled. They greeted each and every item with the enthusiasm of the faithful, for 'Daddy Cool' and the pop pot-boilers ("When I Need You", "Big Spender", "King Of The Road").

Tell you summat: never has such a genuine assortment of ordinary folk filled the Odeon: Arabs, Pakistanis, greasy-haired girls with glasses, blokes in anoraks. It was like Saturday shopping in Tesco.

SuperPop 1979