Hi guys: first of all, why the name Black Bonzo ??
Well. there's not much of a story behind it, Jocke mentioned the cartoon character Bonzo, added some colour to it and there you go.

Can you tell me something about your beginning years and what's your musical background ?
We all come from different musical backgrounds as various as punkrock to death metal, as we grew a little bit older we drifted more towards rockmusic in general, and therefore we sound the way we do today.

Ok, let's talk about the album: is it simply entitled Black Bonzo or "Lady Of The Light"?
It's simply called Black Bonzo.

Both the cd cover and the sound have an irresistible and clear "seventies" taste. Does it mean that you refuse any kind of modernity ??
No we don't. When we write our music we write without boundaries, everything we come up with that sounds good we use, regardless of decade.

Even the lyrics seem so tuned with those years. For example, what's the message inside of "Brave Young Soldier" ?
They may and they may not, it's just the way we write our lyrics. The lyrics of Brave Young Soldier is about the battle between good and evil in its many forms.

I think your music is a clever balance of rock 'n' roll and classic progressive rock: I dare say you're more progressive than a rock'n roll band and more rock'n'roll than a progressive rock band. Do you agree ?
We couldn't agree more. The groove of rock n' roll is in our blood but at the same time we want to stretch our music abilities further and at the same time keeping the song itself in focus.

Do you identify yourself as a progressive rock band or not ?
As every other band we don't like to be categorized, if we would categorize ourselves we probably do it as an art-rock band.

I read many feedbacks around the web: what's your answer to people who said you're only Uriah Heep clones ?
Heep is one of our many influences, and to those people we can only say: buy the album and find out that there's a lot more to it. We've had a couple of good laughs about it.

I partially agreed with them but personally I'm a great "Vertigo years" fan (I mean Cressida, Beggars Opera and all the british bands of early seventies) and I found a lot of comparisons with that wonderful music scene. Besides, Magnus' voice in "Brave Young Soldier" is very similar to Cressida's singer. Am I a fool ??
Actually, none of us has heard of Cressida until now (better check them out), but you're probably right. The british scene of that period is the most interesting and you can clearly hear in the vocals that magnus choses to sound more british than american.

Currently, what are your favorite listenings ?
Currently I'm in a rock n' roll period and listens to bands like: Foreigner, Boston and other cheesy AOR bands. Jocke has been into CCR and the Police. Patrick is only listening to Styx at the moment. Magnus is digging in on George Harrison, Amazing Blondel, Aunt Mary, Bo Hansson and so forth. No one can really tell what Mike is currently into, but surely some spaced out wierd fusion music.