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By now, National Wake was not only a tight, professional outfit with extreme dedication to the cause of their music, but had evolved a highly original hybrid of punk, reggae and township music to go along with their increasingly incendiary lyrics. Songs like “Stratocaster” and “Bolina” reflected the tensions and paranoia surrounding the band, which by now sounded unlike any other rock outfit in South Africa. Their power as a live act attracted the attention of the local branch of WEA Records through the company’s adventurous talent scout Benjy Mudie, who approached the band with an offer to record an album in early 1981. “The band when I met them were already fully formed,” says Mudie. “A lot of that was the combination of those four guys—Gary and Punka were so skin tight, coming from a real African perspective. Steve Moni was a melodic guitarist with all these nice lines. And then Ivan had this frantic punk-folk guitar and vocal style. The combination made National Wake the defining band of the time.” National Wake had already been considering the idea of capturing some of the more than 20 songs that made up their live set list at the time. Steve Moni recalls that “Ivan and I were talking about doing a recording, to get the new songs down. We basically got sponsored for studio time by friends, and the sound engineer (Graham Handley) offered us a slot at a reduced rate after midnight in Satbel Studios in Commissioner Street, one of the leading 24 track studios. To save time and money, we put everything down at one time with very few overdubs and in just a couple of takes, which gives the recording its live feel. Kelly Petlane played all the horns. Some of the other guys around the band played ad hoc percussion, cowbells and shells and whistles, that sort of thing. Ivan then took the tapes to WEA. I went to watch the pressing of the vinyl. The record came out with some empty space where the unprintable lyrics should have been…” Benjy Mudie explains further: the album was recorded and then mixed in two or three days. I then put it into production only to be met with a stern phone call from upstairs saying we couldn’t put the record out, because of the lyrics. But I said we had to make a statement. We then got legal advice that the line in “International News” about the choppers going into Angola, under the current censorship laws, was committing a crime. We changed the lyric sheet to have the
lyrics blacked out but made it look deliberately stupid, then put it out anyway.
The album was released in 1981 to what initially looked like encouraging signs. One song, “Time and Place,” began to receive limited airplay on local radio, and the band were booked to play a high-profile weeklong showcase at the Chelsea in Hillbrow. Plans were made for state broadcaster SABC to record a video of one of the shows. But then, just as success seemed within reach, things began to fall apart. The pressures of playing for what was essentially a segregated audience in front of the official media heightened underlying tensions within the band itself, bringing an overwrought Gary Khoza close to breakdown. As Steve Moni remembers the situation, “after the record came out, we played for a week at the Chelsea. And as the week progressed, things deteriorated to the point that Gary wanted to leave and just be an ordinary citizen of Soweto. National Wake was not cohesive at that point, at least personally. It was a question of whether we could even last the week.” After Ivan Kadey made a dramatic daybreak visit to the Khoza family house in Soweto, Gary agreed to continue, but the end was approaching. Benjy Mudie received a threatening visit from the Special Branch of the police, and the record was essentially blacklisted from broadcast. Worst of all, the band were about to lose their safe haven in Parktown. “After the album release things got more intense,” Kadey recalls. “We were dragged down to the Hillbrow police station to meet with some plainclothes officer who was obviously from some state security intelligence division. He advised us to leave the country immediately, expressing his considered opinion that if we re-named ourselves Exodus we’d probably make it big overseas. In the final days we were being visited about three times a day—cops simply walking through the house, looking in ashtrays, poking around, never saying anything, just coming and going at will.” The record was released in the UK by WEA’s British subsidiary, but without promotion, financial support or even the remotest understanding of what the band actually represented, it sold poorly and disappeared almost without trace. However, among those who did hear the album were such luminaries as Ahmet Ertegun, the head of Atlantic Records, who sent a telegram expressing