Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
The wonderful and booming journey of local rock legends WONDERboom
TOUR DATES
IT’S BEEN seven years since the release of The Automatic Shuffle, so it’s only right WONDERboom are on a national tour to promote their new album, Rising Sun.
The Joburg-based rockers don’t come to Cape Town nearly enough, in my opinion.
With 21 years in the industry, eight albums, five Sama (SA Music Awards) nominations, headlining at festivals, and and and… WONDERboom are legendary.
Their current tour included China, where they represented South Africa at the Silk Road Indie Music Festival and beat bands from 14 countries to win the gold award.
Cito (vocalist), Martin Schofield (guitar) and Wade Williams (bass), the founding members of the band, have been writing songs and performing together for more than two decades.
In 2013, they lost drummer Garth McLeod in a motorcycle accident. Enter Jonathan
Bell, and a new relationship began.
I interviewed Cito: Going to China to represent South Africa was an unbelievable experience. In many ways, it was typical WONDERboom. Not just taking part in an international competition and winning it, but also the opportunity and the adventures combined.
Chengdu blew us all away! The people are beautiful and gentle. The city itself: modern, clean and massive!
For me, it was a humbling experience. I haven’t felt that much appreciation and love from a community in a very long time. I love the culture and the food too. A music industry acquaintance, Adrian Skirrow, has been promoting SA music through his colleague in China for the past year and was approached to recommend a band from here.
As the negotiations developed, it turned out to be a competition and Adrian thought we’d be the best live act to represent South African
rock music. The Chinese audience loved us! I don’t know if they’ve seen much live rock ‘n’ roll, but they were very connected with us. I think they dug the attitude and “sexy dancing”, as one of the officials told us. We played the classics and one of our new songs. Jono had big shoes to fill, but surprised us with his ownership of the drumming. We really are on the same wavelength and feel like one cohesive rock ‘n’ roll organism. With this new album, there was lots of back and forth and pre-production. Looking back, we feel it was one of our bad habits – not being meticulous. We would usually leave it to the producer or engineer to work with what we’ve recorded and just release it.
Now that we’ve produced it ourselves, we really had no excuses of studio time, deadlines or limited budgets. We figured we’ve waited so long to release a new album that we might as well work it until we were satisfied with the results. Lots of scrutiny, creativity and honesty. Definitely an evolutionary thing. The album feels like a story or movie of one particular character, that would be the cumulative embodiment of the band. Rising Sun, the title track, is a crazy, pseudo-reallife story of someone waking up on the streets, outside the Roxy Rhythm Bar in Joburg after a night of debauchery, a fist-fight and being mugged. Then waking up with the sun, dusting himself off and rising above. Humans is a social
22 December – Cheers Pub, Kimberley 23 December – The C Club, Chintsa (with Prime Circle)
24 December – Knysna Yacht Club, Knysna (unplugged)
25 December – Music Kitchen, Port Elizabeth (unplugged)
26 December – Vinyl On Main, Knysna 27 December – Gecko Bar, Hermanus 28 December – Brass Bell, Cape Town 29 December – Quay Four, Cape Town 30 December – Bertie’s Mooring, Gordon’s Bay
31 December – Rumours Rock City, Joburg
commentary about civilisation losing its humanity, destroying the planet and actually revealing our identity as aliens to earth.
Southern Light is about the wanderlust we experience when looking for beauty or love.
The album certainly feels like a new chapter, or book for that matter, in our lives. Cape Town audiences should expect a pure physical and emotional rock ‘n’ roll roller-coaster ride with lots of climactic and sweaty moments.