Arabesque - City Cats.

Arabesque was created as an all-girl trio at the height of the disco era in 1977 in Frankfurt, Germany.

After an unsuccessful first album, the group lineup was changed by keeping original member Michaela Rose and replacing the two other girls with new members Jasmin Vetter and Sandra Lauer. After they split up in 1984, Jasmin and Michaela continued on as the duo "Rouge", while Sandra started her own career as a solo artist with the help of her future husband, Michael Cretu.

Arabesque were extremely popular in Japan, and also had success in the USSR. In 1980, the single "Take Me Don't Break Me" became a hit, which only scraped the German Top 40. Their next single, "Marigot Bay", would become their only Top Ten hit a few weeks later. Their last singles "Ecstasy" and "Time to Say Goodbye", became hits only after their split, in various European countries, as they sounded very close to the "Italo-disco" sound, a very popular music genre of the European discothèques at that time. Those songs spread and gained success through LP compilations of dance/pop music, and bootleg tapes, so, the group could never take advantage of this success, as neither those songs could properly appear on any music charts as "singles" anyway. (That was a common problem for many '80s European artists.) These last Arabesque singles also introduced the "Italo-disco" sound to Japan, under the term "eurobeat", previously used in the UK for the Stock Aitken Waterman productions. That soon lead to Japan's Super Eurobeat music style