INTERVIEW: Don Broco

“Stranger Sings” DJ Maggie Leone sat down with drummer Matt Donnelly and bassist Tom Doyle of Don Broco on their tour bus Wednesday night after their show at the House of Blues in Boston.  The Bedford, England-based band is currently on tour with Mike Shinoda (of Linkin Park) on the Monster Energy Outbreak Tour Presents: Mike Shinoda North America.

[Photo gallery of the show can be found here.]

Maggie Leone: So my first question: Bedford…where’s Bedford? (NOTE: refer to Don Broco song “Pretty” to understand this reference.)

Matt Donnelly: Oh, exactly! I’ve had it all my life. I was actually born in Bedford; I grew up there. Tommy grew up about an hour south of there–by American terms, very, very close.  All of our lives we’ve sort of had to say to people asking that, especially touring overseas, “Oh, it’s close to London. Don’t worry about it.” Actually, it’s remarkable even in the UK how few people have heard of our small town.   think it’s because it’s kind of in that no man’s land–not quite the midlands where you’ve got the big cities like Birmingham and it’s not the southeast where you’ve got London, so it kind of gets forgotten a bit. It hasn’t got a football team or anything like that–well, it does, but not one to speak of. Yeah, it sort of became an in-joke amongst us that no one had ever heard of it. And then when Lars from Metallica played one of our songs on his radio show, he actually said, “Bedford? Where’s Bedford?” and we just couldn’t believe it because it’s been going on for like 20 years, this in-joke, and we were just laughing, like rolling on the floor laughing.

Tom Doyle: But the short answer is that it’s about an hour north of London.

MD: Yeah!

ML: I wasn’t actually even expecting you to answer it, so thank you!

MD: Yeah! It’s a subject close to my heart.

ML: How did you guys meet and how did Don Broco come to be?

MD: We met in Bedford actually. [Laughs] No, Simon, Rob, and I went to school together from quite a young age. Simon and I went to school together since we were about four years old. But Rob joined our school when we were about 12? Early teens? Our original bass player, Luke, also went to our school, but having written and recorded our first album together in 2012, he decided he didn’t want to tour, didn’t want to be away from home, so he went to do some accountancy work and Tommy came in. Tommy stepped in because Tom was the bass player in the first band we’d ever toured with.

TD: So we’d kind of played loads of gigs together.  

MD: We’d played loads of gigs together, we’d toured together, and it was just a very natural fit.  And then Don Broco, that was it.

TD: And that was nearly seven years ago now.

ML: What’s your favorite song on “Technology” to perform live?

MD: I mean, it does change sometimes from tour to tour. There’s also, as with any band, there are songs that we still have yet to actually throw into a set. This year’s been incredibly busy for us touring wise, but we’ve done a fair amount of support shows and Warped Tour all summer where you get half an hour, so you’ve got to kind of pick and choose; you can’t play everything.  For me, “Come out to LA” I get to sing a lot, I’ve got a lot to do, so I do kind of like that song. It’s a challenge; it’s always been a challenge for me and I feel like it’s constantly improving, so I feel like that’s mine.

TD: There’s always a bit of a buzz when he starts that song, so I think that’s one of my favorites as well because, suddenly everyone knows what song it is and they sing along.

ML: The energy of Don Broco, especially on Technology, is unlike anything I’d ever seen. And it comes through on each and every song on the album, so where does that energy come from and how do you maintain it?

MD: This is something we’ve kind of made a conscious effort toward, very early on in the band’s career. On our first album, we struggled. Well, struggled is probably the wrong word, but we didn’t have the easiest path in terms of radio and press support, things like that. And that became compounded on on our second record, back in the UK. Although the band was always growing, it felt like it was growing more through word of mouth and just playing live, relentlessly touring. It was obvious to us that live is where people could finally “get” the band, I suppose, to use that term. And so, from that point onwards, it’s been constantly reinforced. We’ve started writing songs more with live in mind, rather than anything like radio–you don’t want to fall into the trap of trying to write for that. We just think the live show has to draw you in. It has to be engaging. It has to be interactive. So, we feel like the energy we give out is the energy we get back. That’s the number one thing for us in terms of building a show that people are going to remember.

ML:  What inspires the album art?  Especially Technology, because that album art is crazy.

MD: Well I think what inspires the album art has been different for every album, of course. This time around, I feel like we had the greatest sense of what the album was about ourselves. With our previous record Automatic, we were signed to a major label and there was a little bit more to-ing and fro-ing. There were more people involved, more people giving opinions.  I do love that cover, but you know, there were still people–outsiders–putting their two cents in and this time around, we had total creative control and we knew the theme of the album. Technology kept coming up in the songs, just aspects of technology and how it’s so symbiotic with our everyday life. It just kept coming up in the lyrical content, so we wanted to represent that. But we didn’t want to represent it so directly, we didn’t want it to be obvious. We didn’t want to ram it down people’s throats, so we just sort of picked on the aspects of how technology makes you feel, how it can be sort of incredible and inspiring, but dangerous and kind of scary. And we just tried to pull in images in a collage sense that represented all those things. It’s a bit scary, but it’s a bit like whoa. It’s almost futuristic and feels powerful and has this incredible power to it, but it has a dark side. So all those things were represented in different aspects of the sort of collage art we built together.

ML: So, the music video trilogy, for “Everybody,” “Come out to LA,” and “Greatness,” is interesting, to say the least.  Where did that inspiration come from and was the choreography hard to learn?

TD:  I’ll answer that second question first, because yes, it was! And the thing is, as well, it was right at the end of a tour we were doing when we had to learn it. So Rob and I were just kind of doing it in the corridor of the bus we were on, which was probably smaller and narrower than this one here. Just trying to practice these moves, shaking the bus around as we jumped around on the suspension.

MD: It’s also–I’ll never forget–we were in the airport flying to shoot the video and in one of the airport lounges, Rob was just practicing.  

TD: People were just looking at him very strangely.

MD: He’s got his headphones in and he’s got this tutorial video we’d been sent by the director on his phone, but no one else can hear what he’s doing. He’s just sort of dancing away and everyone’s sort of like “I want a bit of what this guy is taking.”

ML: The “Greatness” music video is so fun to watch.

TD: It was fun to shoot, as well, to be fair. It was really fun. But yeah, it was difficult to learn.  Very difficult.

ML: So did you guys come up with the cowboy thing?

MD: The first video we did from this sort of world we created was “Everybody,” and we have to be completely honest, all creative credit goes to the director, Ben. A guy called Ben Roberts from Dominar Films in Athens, Georgia. We’d never met him, he’d just submitted an idea for this video and it was pretty much as it turns out. It was written down shot for shot, and we were like “It’s so crazy, we have to try it and we have to meet this guy.” We just got on so well and he had such a great vision that we just kept on working together through this whole album campaign.  Every time, we’ve just been taking a journey of twists and turns. It’s been a lot of fun, to say the least, because there’s no rules in this sort of world we’ve created with the characters we have.

TD:  It’s been fun watching fans trying to work out how it all intertwines and whether this is a sequel to that one or that one’s a–you know.

ML: That’s true. I watched them out of order at first and–

TD: There’s no order anyway, to be frank…not that we know of anyway.

MD: I’m still trying to figure it out.

ML: Because I think I watched “Everybody” last, and then I finally watched it and I was like “Oh, that’s the same guy that’s in the ‘Greatness’ video.”

MD: That’s right.

TD:  The cowboy and the bride appear in all of them in various different guises.

ML: How do you think your sound/style has evolved from Priorities to now?

MD: I think, touching slightly on something I said earlier, we’ve continually sort of been writing songs more toward a live environment. On Automatic, it was our first time in a proper studio and it was our first time with a major label–like we had access to proper studios, exciting equipment we’d never had access to before. Because of that, we embraced our ability to create a more polished sound on that album and we tried to embrace our poppier side. And I love that record. It was our second album cycle of touring, and it really taught us that we were actually changing arrangements of the songs and the way they were being performed slightly live, just to make it hit a bit harder for the audience. So it really did drill home that live is our priority. I think that’s really how we’ve evolved. Now when we write songs, it’s almost a liberating experience to say “Does that feel good? Does that feel good? Is that gonna make you feel good in the live moment?” If you were watching this band, would you want to nod your head if it’s a noddy bit, or jump if it’s a jumping bit? So I think that’s all it is. It’s really kind of freeing in a sense to be able to think that way.

Me: So Rob was throwing the bucket hats–would you ever consider making a Don Broco bucket hat for merch?

MD: I think we’ve got to at some point, because Rob’s made it now part of his signature look.

ML: I ask because it is part of his signature look, but also I would buy one.

MD: Yeah, he has the hot dog hat that he wore all Warped Tour. I think it’s got to happen at some point.

TD: He’s got several now. Did he bring them home after America or has he left them in our lock-up storeroom in America?  

MD: I honestly don’t know.

TD: Because he did mention that maybe it would be an American thing, that the bucket hat would only be when he was in America.

MD: I think the bucket hat is due for a huge revival. And I think we’re gonna be at the forefront of that.

ML: I back that. I am behind that. What’s your go-to karaoke song and why?

MD: I have one, but, I’m not sure. It’s quite a deep cut. I’m not sure if you’d even ever heard it.  Do you know the band Mystique?

ML: No.

MD: Well then, it was a–when would you say they were in their pomp?

TD: That was early 2000s.

MD: Early 2000s. R&B. Girl group. Mystique. A song called “Scandalous.” It was just because a friend of mine did it once at a party and we had so much fun and it went down so well that we then just kept doing it. Then we’d go out to a karaoke bar and it’d be our song. Me and one of my buddies, just a good memory between us. So Mystique “Scandalous,” look it up on YouTube.

TD:  When was the German TV show we did with the afterparty with the karaoke? Was that May of this year?

MD: Oh yeah, not long ago.

TD: Something like May of this year, we ended up doing karaoke–

MD: “Backstreet’s Back.”

TD: We did “Backstreet’s Back,” we did Spice Girls “Wannabe” as well.

MD: And we did one of our own songs–

TD: And we ended up doing one of our own, which was kind of bizarre, but–

MD: We were sort of forced into it by the people around. It was peer pressure!