Songs About Cats: From Nina Simone to Radiohead

In 1987, a plasticine cat in a dinner jacket sat at a piano in a smoky animated nightclub and mimed to a recording Nina Simone had made thirty years earlier. Sixteen years after that, Thom Yorke opened a Radiohead track with a cat walking through the front door carrying half a head. Songs about cats sit in the strangest corner of pop music: they are treated as novelty, and yet they include a UK top five single, a Soviet chart phenomenon, a three million selling Japanese record sung by a six year old, and one of the most paranoid songs of the 2000s. The cat is rarely just a cat.

What This Piece Covers

• Why Songs About Cats Show Up in Every Genre
• Nina Simone Became a Cartoon Cat and It Rebuilt Her Career
• The Italian Black Cat That Took Over Japan
• The Soviet Union’s First Twist Was About a Cat
• Rock and Roll Songs About Cats: Strut, Fire and Taxidermy
• Radiohead’s Mongrel Cat Is Not a Pet
• The Piano Tune Named After a Different Animal in Every Country
• Frequently Asked Questions

Why Songs About Cats Show Up in Every Genre

Dogs get loyalty songs. Horses get freedom songs. Cats get something else: independence, sex, menace, and comedy, often inside the same three minutes. That range is why songs about cats survive across genres that agree on nothing else. A rockabilly band, a Soviet state radio producer, a children’s choir in Bologna and an English art rock group all reached for the same animal, and none of them meant the same thing by it.

There is a practical reason too. The cat is one of the few animals that reads identically in almost every culture while carrying completely different baggage in each one. A black cat crossing your path means bad luck in Italy and good luck in parts of Britain and Japan, which is why the same melody about the same black cat could be a joke in Rome and a hit in Tokyo. If you want the long version of that split, we traced the history of black cat superstitions from Egyptian temple cults to Halloween decorations.

Nina Simone Became a Cartoon Cat and It Rebuilt Her Career

“My Baby Just Cares for Me” was not written for Nina Simone and it is not, strictly speaking, about a cat. Walter Donaldson wrote the music and Gus Kahn the lyrics in 1930 for the film version of the musical comedy Whoopee!, where Eddie Cantor sang it and then kept it as a signature tune. Simone recorded it in late 1957 as a throwaway at the end of a session. It landed on her debut album Little Girl Blue, released in February 1959, and then sat there doing nothing for almost three decades.

The Advert That Restarted a Career

In 1987 the recording turned up in a UK television commercial for Chanel No. 5. Charly Records rushed out a single, it entered the UK Singles Chart on 31 October 1987, and it climbed to number 5. It also went to number one on the Dutch Top 40. Simone had not been near a chart in eighteen years.

The video is the part that matters here. Aardman Animations, the Bristol studio later known for Wallace and Gromit, made a claymation promo directed by Peter Lord. In it Simone is a cat, performing in a nightclub full of other animals, intercut with live action shots of a piano, brushes on a snare and a double bass. An entire generation in Europe met one of the greatest American vocalists of the twentieth century in the form of a plasticine cat. It is one of the odder facts in music history and nobody planned it.

The $3,000 That Cost Over a Million

The bitter footnote: Simone had sold the album rights to Bethlehem Records outright for $3,000 rather than take a smaller advance against royalties, partly to fund her studies. That decision is estimated to have cost her more than $1 million in lost royalties over the following decades. The cat sang, the perfume sold, and the woman who made the record saw almost none of it.

The Italian Black Cat That Took Over Japan

On 11 March 1969, at the eleventh edition of the Zecchino d’Oro children’s song contest in Bologna, a four year old named Vincenza Pastorelli sang “Volevo un gatto nero” (I Wanted a Black Cat). The lyrics are a small legal drama: one child trades a crocodile, a giraffe and an elephant for a black cat, and the other child hands over a white one instead. The song is a tantrum about breach of contract. It was credited to the brothers Francesco and Mario Pagano (writing as Framario), Armando Soricillo and Francesco Saverio Maresca.

It finished joint sixth out of twelve entries. The contest was won by “Tippy, il coniglietto hippy”, a song about a hippy rabbit, which tells you something about 1969.

Kuroneko no Tango and a Six Year Old at Number One

Losing turned out to be irrelevant. A Japanese version, “Kuroneko no Tango” (Black Cat Tango), was released on 5 October 1969 by Osamu Minagawa, born 22 January 1963 and therefore six years old at the time. It went to number one on the Oricon chart and sold three million copies, which made Minagawa the youngest artist ever to have a million selling record. A song that placed sixth at an Italian children’s contest became one of the biggest selling singles in Japanese history within seven months.

This is the pattern with songs about cats. They travel absurdly well, they get translated without much resistance, and they keep outliving the context that produced them. If you have ever wondered why a melody like that refuses to leave your head, the mechanism is well studied, and we covered it in the science of earworms.

The Soviet Union’s First Twist Was About a Cat

In late 1963 the lyricist Mikhail Tanich brought a sheet of paper to the composer Yuri Saulsky. The verse and chorus were written quickly at the piano. The result, “Chyorny Kot” (Black Cat), was performed by Tamara Miansarova and is generally described as one of the first Soviet twists, a genre the state was not enthusiastic about importing. The editors of the popular radio programme “Good Morning!” heard it and said immediately that it would be a hit. They were right, and it was soon sung in Polish, German and Czech.

The best detail comes from Saulsky himself. After a concert in Krasnoyarsk, the director of the local House of Officers told him the evening had been wonderful except for “Chyorny Kot”, which she had taken as an unpleasant coded jab at Soviet agriculture. A song about an unlucky black cat living around the corner had been read as an agricultural policy critique. Nobody does subtext like a nervous cultural administrator.

Rock and Roll Songs About Cats: Strut, Fire and Taxidermy

Western rock discovered that the cat was a useful stand in for the kind of person a song could not describe directly. Three examples from a four year window make the point.

“Stray Cat Strut” by the Stray Cats came out on 17 April 1981 on Arista in the UK, where it reached number 11. The American release was slower and much bigger: it entered the Billboard Hot 100 at number 43 on the chart dated 25 December 1982, the highest new entry that week, and peaked at number 3 in March 1983. The lyric is a tomcat with no money and no fixed address, which was also a fair description of a rockabilly revival band in 1981.

“Cat People (Putting Out Fire)” arrived on 12 March 1982, with lyrics by David Bowie and music by Giorgio Moroder, written for Paul Schrader’s film about people who turn into panthers. It only reached number 67 in the US and number 26 in the UK, but it went to number one in New Zealand, Sweden, Norway and Finland.

Al Stewart’s “Year of the Cat” has the strangest origin of the three. The melody began life in 1966 as “Foot of the Stage”, a song about the British comedian Tony Hancock. Stewart put new lyrics to it in 1975 with pianist Peter Wood after his girlfriend left a book of Vietnamese astrology open at the relevant page. The Vietnamese zodiac has a cat where the Chinese one has a rabbit, and the Year of the Cat ran from 11 February 1975 to 30 January 1976. Alan Parsons produced it at Abbey Road in January 1976, Phil Kenzie added the alto saxophone solo in one or two takes, and it reached number 8 on the Billboard Hot 100 in March 1977 and number 31 in the UK.

The Love Cats and the Stuffed Cat Problem

The Cure recorded “The Love Cats” in August 1983 at Studio des Dames in Paris, straight after a concert in Brittany, with Phil Thornalley on double bass, Lol Tolhurst on vibraphone and Andy Anderson on drums. Released on 21 October 1983, it became the band’s first UK top ten single at number 7 and reached number 6 in Australia early the following year.

The video was shot in a mansion the band claimed to be interested in buying. The plan called for live cats. The live cats declined to act, so the production switched to taxidermied ones, which is why the clip has a faintly haunted quality that nobody intended. Robert Smith’s own verdict is worth quoting in full: “The Love Cats is far from being my favourite song: composed drunk, video filmed drunk, promotion made drunk. It was a joke.” The joke was the band’s commercial breakthrough, from a catalogue that later fed into shoegaze and most gloomy guitar music after it.

Radiohead’s Mongrel Cat Is Not a Pet

“Myxomatosis” sits near the end of Hail to the Thief, released in 2003, and it opens with four lines that no other song on this list would attempt: “The mongrel cat came home / Holding half a head / Proceeded to show it off / To all his newfound friends.”

The title is the name of a man made disease introduced to control rabbit populations, so the cat arrives already surrounded by the idea of engineered cruelty. Thom Yorke has explained the song as being about the gap between what he witnessed and what was reported afterwards, citing coverage of the Drop the Debt and Jubilee 2000 protests around 2000, where peaceful demonstrators were described as troublemakers. His line about it: “I was there, and no, it wasn’t like that. I must be ill, because what I saw and what was reported was a totally different thing.” He also said the song is “about wishing that all the people who tell you that you’re crazy were actually right. That would make life so much easier.”

The cat is the mechanism, not the subject. A story gets carried home, half of it is missing, and the version that gets shown around is the edited one. The band recorded it in 2002, first tried an electronic arrangement, then rebuilt it around a fat 1980s keyboard sound owing a lot to Tubeway Army. It is the least cuddly cat song ever written and it is also the smartest use of a cat in a lyric that we know of.

The Piano Tune Named After a Different Animal in Every Country

Not all songs about cats have lyrics. There is a short, anonymous piano piece, played almost entirely on the black keys, that nearly every child who touches a keyboard learns by accident. In German it is the Flohwalzer, the flea waltz. Elsewhere the animal changes completely.

• Japan: Neko Funjatta, I Stepped on the Cat
• Korea: 고양이 춤, Cat Dance
• Finland: Kissanpolkka, Cat’s Polka
• Bulgaria: Koteshki Marsh, Cat March
• Russia: Sobachiy Vals, Dog Waltz
• Hungary: Szamárinduló, Donkey March
• Czech Republic: Prasečí valčík, Pig Waltz
• Mexico: Los Changuitos, The Little Monkeys
• Netherlands: Vlooienmars, Flea March
• Poland: Kotlety, Cutlets

The same forty seconds of music, and four countries independently decided it sounded like a cat while others heard a donkey, a pig or a plate of cutlets. A melody carries almost no fixed meaning on its own. The neuroscience side of that is in our piece on how music affects the brain.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the best known song about a cat?

By sales, “Kuroneko no Tango” is hard to beat: three million copies in Japan in 1969, sung by a six year old, adapted from the Italian “Volevo un gatto nero”. By cultural reach in the English speaking world, “Stray Cat Strut” and “The Love Cats” are the usual answers, both of them chart hits in the early 1980s.

Did Nina Simone record a song about a cat?

Not exactly. “My Baby Just Cares for Me” has no cat in the lyrics. The cat came from the 1987 Aardman claymation video directed by Peter Lord, which portrays Simone as a cat singing in a nightclub. The video accompanied the re-release that reached number 5 in the UK.

What is Radiohead’s “Myxomatosis” actually about?

Media distortion and self doubt. Thom Yorke linked it to seeing peaceful protests reported as violent ones. The cat carrying half a head in the opening lines is an image of a story arriving home already edited beyond recognition.

Why is the same piano piece called a cat in some countries and a flea in others?

The piece is anonymous and spread orally, so each country attached its own nickname. The bouncing black key pattern suggests small quick movement, and different cultures picked different small quick animals: cats in Japan, Korea, Finland and Bulgaria, dogs in Russia, donkeys in Hungary and Slovakia.

Are there famous cat songs outside Europe, Japan and the US?

Yes, and Soviet pop is the clearest case. “Chyorny Kot”, written in late 1963 by Yuri Saulsky and Mikhail Tanich and sung by Tamara Miansarova, was one of the first Soviet twists and was quickly translated into Polish, German and Czech.

The Cat Keeps Getting Away With It

Six decades, five languages, one animal. The cat let Nina Simone back onto the charts in a form she never chose, sold three million records in Japan for a six year old, smuggled a twist rhythm past Soviet radio, gave The Cure a hit they made while drunk, and handed Radiohead an image of truth arriving home in pieces. None of these songs share a genre, a market or an intention. They share a cat, and the cat does something different in each one, which is roughly what cats do everywhere else. For more on the animal’s long career in culture, our archive on the Longcat meme and the history of the theremin covers adjacent ground.

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