With a music video released for their new single “Pretty” earlier this month and just finishing up their first U.S. tour opening up for State Champs, Rob, Matt, Simon and Tom, better known as Don Broco, are ready to take on the this side of the globe! During their shows here in NYC we got a chance to sit and speak with the band about new music, tour life, and how the band got its name.
How does it feel to be touring in the US for the first time?
Drummer, Matt McDonnell: Absolutely amazing. It’s something we’ve been looking forward to doing for a couple of years at least now. Our album Automatic came out at the end of 2015 in the UK but it took until the end of last year for it to come out in the states. We managed to sign to an American label [SharpTone Records] last summer, and that’s what kind of set the ball rolling over here.
So we’ve been looking forward to it for a long time, and it’s kind of lived up to every expectation, maybe surpassed them. We honestly didn’t know if anyone at the shows would know who we were, you expect maybe the odd person, but we’ve been really, pleasantly surprised. Even those people who haven’t heard the band before are coming up and meeting us after the shows and saying how much they enjoyed it. Which is all you can ever ask for.
How are the fans in the UK different from the fans in the US?
Frontman, Rob Damiani: I think they’re pretty similar, to be fair. I think the UK and the US have so much in common culturally, especially when it comes to music and rock music especially. I’d say for our experience this tour, it’s definitely been way better then when we were back in the UK opening shows for the first time.
I mean, you’d be lucky if you’ve got 10 people in the room sometimes. A lot of the time you really have to work for people to pay attention, and even if they do dig it, a lot of people in the UK are more than happy to stand around in the back, have a beer, maybe nod their head, maybe have a clap if you’re lucky.
I don’t know if it’s the American fans or State Champs fans, but they just seem really up for the show. They’re up for a party, and they want to get down. They want to get involved, jumping around and actually getting into the show, which is amazing.
Don Broco has had the opportunity to support numerous famous acts throughout the UK and Europe including Bring Me The Horizon and 5 Seconds of Summer. Unfortunately not too many of Don Broco’s fans were too happy with them supporting 5SoS since the fanbase was completely different then their previous demographic.
Matt: As a band I think most bands would probably take the same approach as we did. We love all genres and we have so many different sounds in what we play and so many different influences. You know the guys in 5SoS are great guys and write good tunes. We knew it would be a different audience, but that was kind of the exact point.
We wanted to go out there and reach new people who might not have heard of our band before and it was amazing fun. We saw some incredible places, and the State Champs guys toured with 5sos and I think they were in the same position.
Since the guys have toured with a bunch of famous acts, we even asked who their dream tour mates would be. Each member a bit of a different response. Matt wants to tour with Biffy Clyro and Incubus while Rob said he’d love to do a show with Paramore one day.
“I’d love to play with Prince, that’d be my ultimate dream. I mean that’s never going to happen, even if he was still with us, I’d doubt that would ever happen in a million years. In terms of the ideal, that would have been it for me,” said the band’s guitarist Simon Delaney.
Even Tom Doyle, the bassist said he also wished he could tour with Prince or Michael Jackson. But their favorite part about being able to tour the world? The food.
Simon: Probably our favorite thing about getting to tour in different countries is seeing a bunch of stuff that you don’t get to see normally. And you get to see a lot of it in a short space of time. So rather than go on a holiday where you might get to see a city, you get to spend a week in like seven cities and all the coolest stuff in them.
But also the food. We love food. It’s amazing that we get to go to a bunch of different places, all of which normally have a local specialty of some kind and just get to try everything.
“Food tourism,” joked Rob.
“Yeah. We’re more of a traveling kind of food blog than an actual band these days,” added Simon.
Matt joked and said, “the reason we decided to start the band was for food tourism. It’s just a vehicle to the food.”
After their tour with State Champs and the festivals they’re scheduled to play this summer, the band plans to work on their upcoming album! Matt noted that before they started off for this tour they began to work on a whole batch of new material inducing their new single “Pretty”.
“The rest of the album we’ll be finishing and getting back on it as soon as we get home and there should definitely be more music before the end of the year. And an album probably early 2018.” he added.
Until then, their “Pretty” is worth taking a listen to. But their video for the single NEEDS to be watched, especially if you’re a fan of some good old fashion weird yet surprisingly awesome videos.
“We can’t take any credit for that,” said Simon. “We worked with the director last year for our video called “Everybody” and we really hit it off with this guy, Ben Roberts and we loved that video so much that we wanted to work with him again. So we asked him to pitch a treatment for the song “Pretty” and the first thing he came back with was this idea of cutting people’s faces off and we loved it.”
Oh! And if you’re wondering how the band got the name Don Broco we’ve got the scoop for you!
Rob: It’s a terrible story because we basically couldn’t think of a name, and we had some shows booked, and we were panicking because we needed a name. We had somehow come across this name “Don Loco” which we read somewhere, and we kind of liked the sound of it but a German rapper already had it.
Then Simon somehow got side tackled in a football match and broke his wrist. And as a really terrible joke one day, I called him “Don Broco” [Broke-o] instead of Don Loco because he had a broken wrist.
“It was a really good joke at the time,” said Simon
“Yeah we all laughed out loud and because of that we were kind of stuck,” added Rob.
Even though autocorrect changes it to Don Bronco, everyone needs to drill into their heads that it’s actual Don Broco!
Matt: Once you get that it’s Don Broco in your head, and you Google it, nothing else comes up. It’s one of those band names where you’re not just going to get a bunch of results for something using the same words. It’s kind of cool and unique but it might take a couple of times for it to sink in.
Though a funny story, what was even better was learning about the weird gifts the band gets from fans, especially Rob.
Rob: The weirdest gift I got was… Well on the first opening of the gift it was kind of weird but quite nice. It was a bottle perfume, like an au de toilette for men, called Duke. And I thought oh wow this is pretty nice, I mean maybe they were trying to say I stink, I don’t know what they were going for but I thought was pretty cool.
And then inside the box once I removed the perfume, at the bottom was one lone condom… Still in it’s wrapper thank god. But I never knew what that was about. Don’t really want to know.
Simon: I can tell you what it was about. She was just trying to get you laid.
If you plan on giving the band a gift at their next show, please stay away from condoms, especially used ones please! You can catch them on the UK playing their biggest show yet in November at the Alexandria Palace in London. But until you get to see Don Broco rock out live you can check out their single “Pretty” below!
