Prisoners Go Go Band

Prisoners Go Go Band’s one and only record is a remarkable thing. It was created in the early 1980s in a South Africa under apartheid, which was not only hostile to “race mixing,” but culturally conservative, as well. While punk and alternative music existed, it received scant attention by major labels and no radio airplay. Distribution through record stores was limited to commercial music. Certainly, a mixed-race band influenced by Can, Red Crayola, Pere Ubu, Henry Cow, and Derek Bailey was not prime for mainstream hearing. Nor was Johannesburg in 1981 exactly the most inviting place for such a band to release its own record. But that is what the Prisoners Go Go Band did.

In 1979, Yunus Momoniat, Iqbal Momoniat, and Neil Goedhals formed a friendship which lead them to playing music. They called themselves the Prisoners Go Go Band. They never played a live show - neither the music they played nor the ethnic make up of the group allowed for that - but they did record their music. In a desolate part of Johannesburg, in Yunus’s DIY recording studio, the three drafted some friends (the “special guest on fire”) and recorded hours worth of songs and sounds. From that they came up with an album and had it pressed up as a LP. However, through mishaps and circumstance, it was a record few people got to hear and even fewer possessed - less than 100 copies were circulated.

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