Interview: Bonjay

Bonjay vocalist Alanna Stuart is sitting on a park bench in Highbury Fields, London and waving her hands in an excited, preacher-like fashion. “Bonjay! Bonjay!” she cries in her Caribbean lilt at a schoolgirl who’s cautiously pushing her father on his bicycle. They pause for a brief second, then giggle at each other before carrying on as normal.

“Bonjay is Grenadian slang for ‘bon Dieu!’ — ‘good God!’,” she explains. “It’s something my family would say when they were excited, and it just seemed to fit.”

For all the hand-flapping and hyperbole, the Toronto-based electro-dancehall pop duo are genuinely worth getting excited about. With multi-instrumentalist Ian ‘Pho’ Swain at the production helm, the pair’s UK debut, double A-side single, ‘Stumble’/ ‘Creepin’’, takes their dancehall roots and firmly plants them in today’s bass-laden electronic scene.

The pair met in their hometown of Ottawa in 2005 at an open concept night Pho helped put together called Disorganised. Held in the loft of an Italian restaurant in the capital’s Chinatown, its eclectic mix of music and tempos brought together an equally all-embracing crowd.

“It was the perfect breeding ground for the Bonjay sound,” says Pho.

“It wasn’t the warmest of receptions, though,” adds Alanna of their introduction.

“Well, you did break the cardinal rule of DJing,” continues Pho, “and that’s not to interrupt the DJ while mixing.”

At the time, Alanna was making a fast exit from the commercial R&B world where she was tipped to become the new darling of the US urban airwaves. She explains: “I guess I wasn’t quite urban enough and my name wasn’t quite ‘black’ enough. I was driving home from school and heard my song on the radio. Then the announcer said: ‘That was ‘Ring, Ring Call Again’ by Donna Boogie.’ I was mortified, because who the fuck is Donna Boogie? The management and producers had changed everything about who I was.”

She left her label and the pair became intent upon making more forward-thinking, collaborative music, and Disorganised acted as an ideal playground for their formative steps. Party pieces included covers of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ ‘Maps’ and TV On The Radio’s ‘Staring At The Sun’, with Pho’s bionic dancehall riddims holding the dancefloor while Alanna’s almost St. Vincent-esque vocals captured hearts.

Their move to Toronto in the autumn of 2006 brought an end to the parties, but, says Pho, “Bonjay started to take on more of a life of its own.” Between work, studies, and their time at campus community radio stations, they went on to produce two EPs (2008’s ‘Gimmee Gimmee’ and 2010’s ‘Broughtupsy’).

“Toronto was a dull place until the immigration explosion in the sixties,” says Pho. “People were risking it all to move there and start their lives again. And we took inspiration from that.”

Alanna continues: “Because it is so new, there is room for you to create something for yourself and call it your own. It’s the perfect place for Bonjay and, as a place, it wants to support us.”

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Bonjay’s ‘Stumble’/ ‘Creepin’’ is out now via One Bird Records. You can hear their mixtape for The Stool Pigeon here.

 

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