The Disco Cats

There are records that capture a moment so precisely that they become historical documents as much as musical ones. Freak It Out, the sole album by the Disco Cats, is one of them. Released originally in 1979 on the Beat City label in Zimbabwe and subsequently issued in France in 1980 on Reprise Records, with distribution across Africa handled by WEA West Africa and WEA Filipacchi Music, the album is a twelve-track document of South African township disco at its most energised and most assured.

The individual members of the Disco Cats remain unidentified in any source currently available, a gap that is all the more striking given the quality of what they produced. What is documented in full is the creative architecture around them. The album was produced by Almon Sandisa Memela, the Donnybrook-born guitarist, arranger and producer whose career stretched from sessions with Miriam Makeba and the Skylarks in the 1950s through to the funk and disco productions of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Memela wrote or co-wrote several of the album's key tracks, including the extended opener Do You Know My Name and the driving That's Your Choice, both of which appear on the French Reprise pressing as the two longest and most fully realised pieces on the record. Publishing was credited to his own Mpumelelo imprint. The remaining compositions were shared between Masike Mohapi, Tata Sibeko, T. Majola, S. Dlamini and Thokoza Memela, a tight circle of South African writers and session players whose collective fingerprints give the album its cohesion.

Across twelve tracks including Stay By My Side, Give Me A Day, Sweet Words, Little Daddy and Evil Place, the Disco Cats delivered exactly what the dancefloors of the era demanded: synth-edged grooves, warm vocal harmonies and a rhythmic momentum that placed them squarely within the township sound that was flourishing across South Africa at the turn of the decade. The Apple Music catalogue lists the album at thirty-eight minutes, a lean and purposeful running time that gives Freak It Out the feel of a record made by people who knew precisely what they were doing.

The collector market has long since recognised what the biographical record has not. Original pressings of Freak It Out command prices between ninety and two hundred and thirty dollars on the secondary market, with 274 collectors currently listing the record on their want lists and average ratings of 4.25 out of 5. For a group whose names remain unknown, that is a remarkable legacy.