“We had a manager for a while but unfortunately it didn’t quite work out,” Morgan explains, “so we took the reins back three years ago and figured that we were doing a good enough job on our own, so we just kept doing it. It seems to be working really well so far, so we’ll definitely keep it up.”
Things have been going quite well for Bonjah of late. Currently, the band’s half way through a three-month long national tour in support of its third record Beautiful Wild. After attracting plenty interest with the pre-release singles Evolution and Blue Tone Black Heart, the record has enjoyed a particularly amorous response since its release last April.
“General feedback on the album is just that a lot of people really like it,” Morgan says. “Our fans seem to be really enjoying it. There’s no doubt there’s some people out there saying, ‘why don’t you play more reggae?’ like the old days.”
Beautiful Wild’ssales performance suggests that the percentage of fans making such complaints is miniscule. The album debuted at Number 41 on the ARIA charts and it’s been popping in and out of the Australian Independent Records Label Association (AIR) Top 10 since release. A further representation of Beautiful Wild’s widespread impact is the fact that the majority of gigs on the current tour have sold out in advance.
“Going around the country, we never really had the shows sell out, so we weren’t expecting too many to sell out,” Morgan says. “It’s just blown us away. We knew that the album was going to be a bit of a new sound, so it’s part and parcel that it would attract some new listeners. But we definitely weren’t really thinking about that when we were writing and recording the album.”
Beautiful Wild is the most straight-ahead rock album in Bonjah’s catalogue. It’s not bereft of dynamic scope – the title track and latest single is a mid-tempo slow-burner – but by and large, the songs are more upfront than anything the band’s done previously.
“I think with this particular album we’ve actually finally found our sound,” Morgan says. “Our first album that we released, we didn’t really know what it was and it didn’t really have cohesion to it. We didn’t know exactly the style of music that we wanted to play. Our second album, at the time we were happy with it and we’re still proud of what we created, but the sound as a whole wasn’t quite what we were after. [With this one] we’ve found a direction that we really want to go, that’s more cohesive.”
While Bonjah is at last comfortable in its own skin, the stylistic transition didn’t occur at a simple click of the fingers. Rather, following 2011’s Go Go Chaos, the band dived into a lengthy stint of songwriting. After experimenting with some less satisfying options, Morgan says the move towards a rock-heavy sound was unanimously supported.
“I remember when we first jammed Evolution. We just jammed it in a rehearsal room and after it we all just started cracking up laughing. We were so stoked on jamming some rad rock song. We were just like ‘Yeah, this is what we want to do. This is the road that we want to head down.’”
To properly capture the enhanced gusto on tape, Bonjah enlisted the services of local production wiz Jan Skubiszewski (Way of the Eagle). Morgan explains how integral Skubiszewski’s input was was for fleshing out their overarching vision.
“The good thing about working with a producer is that they bring to the table an outsider’s perspective… It was great with Jan; he helped us a lot with steering it all in the right direction. He just had that fine balance of knowing when to fuck with a song and when to just let it be what it is.”
So, with the band now inhabiting ideal stylistic surroundings, a successful album under their belts and ever-growing crowd numbers, it looks like Morgan and Lethbridge’s management is serving Bonjah exceedingly well. However, it’s not always easy to cast aside managerial concerns and simply enjoy being a rock’n’roll animal.
“You get so involved in the operations and strategies and direction and ‘What’s next? What’s next?’” says Morgan. “You do have to force yourself to switch all of that off and just go, ‘look we’re in the moment right now to play music, let’s just bloody enjoy it.’”
Despite this, he assures that taking care of business isn’t going to stamp out his passion for the music.
“I don’t think that would ever happen. We love playing in a band and love creating music. And we enjoy the management stuff as well. It’s not like it’s actual work. It’s fun.”
BY AUGUSTUS WELBY
