On 18 November 1973, The Straits Times ran an article on its front page announcing that the Liquor Licensing Board was cancelling the liquor licenses for 12 discotheques and nightclubs in Singapore.
Among the hotspots that lost the right to sell alcohol at that time were The Penthouse, Barbarella, Lost Horizon, Gino’s A Go-Go and the Pink Pussycat.
The judge who issued this order, Mr. T. S. Sinnathuray, stated that this action was taken as a way to deal with the poor reputation that discos had earned in Singapore.
I have my doubts that this measure was sufficient to clean up the discos, because I found an advertisement for the Pink Pussycat from around this time that announced that the following two groups were performing: Diana Dawn and The Pakal♥l♥s and The Hi-Jacks.
“Pakalolo” is the Hawaiian word for marijuana (ganja), and when people smoke marijuana, they get “high,” like the “Hi”-Jacks. . .
And it looks like some people were indeed getting high, as The Straits Times carried a story from around this time (21 July 1972, pg. 6) about someone getting arrested outside the Pink Pussycat for possessing marijuana. To quote:
“A man was fined $400 today for having 21 kartoos of ganja outside the Pink Pussycat discotheque.
“Abu Hamid bin Jafar, 24, of Malaysia admitted having the drug at the entrance of the discotheque in Orchard Road at 10:30 p.m. yesterday.”
So it seems obvious that even without alcohol, people were probably still getting high at the Pink Pussycat in the early 1970s, if not from marijuana, then certainly from the music.
Although I have no idea what Diana Dawn and The Pakalolos performed, there is an advertisement in the same paper for a popular American movie from that time, Shaft’s Big Score, which started with one of the best disco grooves ever created.
If the Pakalolos could play anything even remotely close to this (and I suspect that they could), then there were good times to be had at the Pink Pussycat in those days. . .
This Post Has 4 Comments
Interesting article. I looked at this because a colleague at work mentioned Pink Pussycat and I googled images and came across your blog. Los Pakalolos was quite a good band. Drug culture then was rife and it was because of this that the government organised Operation Ferret in 1976. Those suspected of being users were sent for mandatory and if positive were sent to drug rehab centres for six months.
Thanks for the comment. Did Los Pakalolos have a Hawaii connection, or was it just common knowledge in the drug culture of the day that pakalolo is the Hawaiian word for Marijuana?
There is a lady cleaner at my work site who worked there in the seventies. Asked her. She said the band were from Philippines. I suppose they knew what it meant. They were Spanish conversant. I told her to bring any pictures she had of the interior of the club and she said she would bring it tomorrow. I wrote three books on Singapore Sixties but will leave later decades to other scholars.
According to what I’ve read/been told there were bands from the Philippines employed all over SEA from the ’30s to at least the ’70s. General Sosthène Fernandez’s father was supposedly a Filipino musician.