QR Music Interview - Don Broco: 'Creatively, we’ve always been allowed to do exactly what we want'

Earlier in April, we caught up with Rob Damiani, lead vocalist of Don Broco, to discuss touring, their newest record ‘Technology’, and chilli con carne.

Thank you so much for agreeing to speak to me today. This isn’t your first time in Belfast, but it’s your first time headlining Belfast, is that right?

Yeah. So the first time, I guess we kind of [headlined] on the Kerrang tour but it’s very much like all of these bands getting together, and, we only really played Belfast once before that supporting You Me At Six - which must have been about 4 or 5 years ago now. We don’t get to come back as much as we’d like, and it’s always a gig to look forward to, because it must be really annoying living in Ireland or Northern Ireland! It is hard for bands to get over; they don’t get to come as much as they want to, because of the logistics of getting over on the ferry and all that. So when we found out we could make it work on this tour, we were really stoked!

I was going to say that the tour that you’re on right now is kind of like an extended tour from the sold out UK tour. Was it important for you to come to different places that you haven’t really played before? Was that intentional?

That was the idea. Whenever you do a main tour supporting an album, you’re advised to hit all the major cities and places that you’re used to playing. Within the UK it’s Manchester, Leeds and the big places like that. You get a lot of annoyed people, and you can’t go everywhere obviously, but there’s some incredible places that are just a little too close to play. For example, you wouldn’t play Liverpool when you’re playing Manchester, or Sheffield when you’re playing Leeds and Manchester in the same tour. You know when you’re a smaller band, you can play everywhere all the time and it’s great, but you have to be a bit more careful when you’re plotting bigger UK headline tours. So when we got the chance to do that, and managed to work in these Irish shows and coming to Belfast, we were really happy. We didn’t want to leave it too much longer, we knew we wanted to come out during this album, but we didn’t know when, so it just made a lot of sense to come back now.

I think I’ve been following you on Instagram for around two years now and every time I look, you are somewhere different, and it’s like this really intensive touring schedule. Do you plan your tours so they are as intense as possible, so it’s almost like playing everywhere at once?

It’s a lot of what happens to work in your diaries so, we do like being and staying busy. A lot of the time, and in an ideal world, you’d love a few weeks off between tours just to recuperate, it doesn’t always happen. We were lucky here this last tour to have a week off between our US tour and coming back here, and a week’s just enough to at least recuperate to a degree, but in the same time we worked pretty hard this week, it wasn’t like a chill week because we want to learn new songs. We’ve been so busy since the album came out, actually since we finished the album, we actually haven’t had the chance to trial out the songs in a band environment. Some of the songs you write in the studio, you know, we were writing them on laptops and recording them straight in, and it’s the first time we’ve actually played some of these songs today in sound check, with all band members there! So, ideally you want to have a few run throughs and get to grips with them first before trying them out for the first time ever, or they can go very, very wrong. So this last week we’ve just been learning the new songs from the album that we actually haven’t been allowed to play yet.

The newest record, Technology, was the first one released through an independent record label, did that allow you a bit more independence about you created, and how you produced this album rather than the last album?

Creatively, we’ve always been allowed to do exactly what we want, so that’s been cool. You do hear about some labels stepping in and getting into the minutiae, cutting songs down or saying, “this needs a different chorus” or something like that. We’ve never had any of that luckily because I don’t think we’d take it very well if someone came in and told us what to do. In regards to the actual release of music that’s been the most exciting and different change for us. Being able to have music ready and just being able to put it out rather than wait and hold it back for an opportune moment or waiting until the entire album’s mixed and mastered, which was our biggest frustration with our last album. We had all these songs ready to go, we were playing them live, we wanted to play them and we just had to sit on them. That’s the hardest thing, when you’ve created this body of work and it’s your baby and you want to show it to everyone and you’re proud of what you’ve done so you want to get it out there! But you just have to wait which was hard, so this album was really cool. Within weeks of us finishing a song in the studio, we’d have it out and have a video done for it which was awesome to move that quickly on stuff.

Are there songs in particular you’re the happiest or proudest of? Songs that when you were writing this album just kind of clicked and came together?

I guess ‘Everybody’ was the start of that, so that will always have a real special place in our hearts. I guess it kind of started the whole new outlook to this album that was, ‘as soon as you got something, just put it out and don’t think about it and not worry about it timing’. I mean there’s so many things to contend with you just got to be on your own groove, on your own time schedule and if that works for you then great! I guess that ‘Pretty’ came along quickly after that, which we did the same thing for, and again that was really fun to do. It was just a song that we wrote relatively quickly, didn’t really change that much from the demo to us actually recording it, and it was really fun. The video for [Pretty] is probably one of my favourite videos we did, and just putting that out while we were on a tour, not really thinking too much about it and it worked out really, really well.

I’ll just ask the final question now since we’re running out of time. It came out in the news recently that Lorde had a secret account where she would Instagram photos of onion rings. So, if you had a secret Instagram account what would you dedicate it to?

Oh wow, really? So she just dedicated it to onion rings?

Yeah, she would rate them and then people found out about it and it got deleted because of her label, I think?

Why would you get in trouble for that? Ok, if I could rate anything…I mean, there’s a song on the album called, ‘Good Listener’ which is about your iPhones or Androids, and the way that adverts can listen into what you’re talking about on your phone, or what you’re searching. It kind of creeped me out how you could be having a conversation with your phone just in the room and then it’ll recommend something to you. One of the lines in the song is about me talking to my mum and we would be talking about what we would have for tea which was chilli con carne. Then the next line is, “I really don’t like it”, which is in reference to my phone listening in on me, but a lot of people just think that I don’t like chilli con carne. I love chilli con carne! I could eat it every day, and a lot of the time I do eat it every day when I’m at home just because I cook up a big batch of it and freeze it, and I will just have it pretty much five to six days a week sometimes, so I’m a big chilli fan. So I would be more than up for dedicating an Instagram to just chilli con carne recipes, hitting up different establishments, rating them, and I get to eat it all hopefully.

You can check out Don Broco's latest record 'Technology' on Spotify. Make sure to keep up to date on their newest releases and tours by following them on Facebook, Twitter andInstagram. 

By Jessica Lawrence