Music
We meet Don Broco ahead of the Kerrang! Tour 2015
Don Broco are back, and with a new album in the bag, they’re preparing to hit the road to headline the Kerrang! Tour 2015 in the UK this month.
Frontman Rob Damiani took time out of packing his suitcase to talk to us about the new record, studio antics and touring with We Are The In Crowd, Bury Tomorrow, Beartooth AND a special guest.
Read the full interview below…
Hi Rob, tell us, what have you been up to since your last headline tour?
Studio, studio and more studio. We’ve been writing and recording our second album which I am very happy to say we signed off on today!
Amazing! Now how’re you feeling about heading back out on the road next month?
Very excited indeed. Last year we did a couple of weeks of touring with the You Me At Six guys, Reading and Leeds in the summer and that was it. Playing shows is the thing we love most about being in a band so it was very hard for us keeping away for so long. We’ve been looking forward to this tour for a long time so it couldn’t come any sooner.
It’s a packed line-up, what can you tell us about the other bands on the tour?
We actually met Bury Tomorrow at the first show we ever played outside our local area. About five years ago now we’d trekked it down to Plymouth from Bedford to play a one off show they were also on, and they absolutely blew us away. Since then we’ve been trying to sort something out with them so it’s great this tour has finally brought us together. We Are The In Crowd we’ve got to see a couple of times at festivals as they played the main stage with us at Reading and Leeds the year before last and Hit The Deck, but Beartooth we’ve never met before so it’ll be great to properly check them out. There’s also another band joining us but I’m not sure if I’m allowed to say who just yet… They’re one of our favourite UK bands and we went to Europe with them a couple of years ago so will be a nice little reunion.
How much new material can fans expect to hear, and are you nervous to debut the new songs?
We’re going to be playing four new songs in total, two of them people would have heard before; being Money Power Fame, which we shot a video for last year, and the other Fire, which we put online last week. The other two nobody will have heard before so I guess those are the ones we should be nervous about in case people use them as an opportunity to go the bar, or go for a wee, or something. I think the impatience we’re feeling to get this new music out there overrides any potential nerves!
What’s your favourite track from the new record?
It’s a song called Keep On Pushing. It was the first song we wrote for the album that gave me that songwriting buzz and somehow that feeling still hasn’t worn off. When I first heard the riff I knew it was something special and it’s totally lived up to all my expectations .
How have you been keeping busy between festival season and the K! tour?
We’d gotten pretty much all our writing done by the end of the festivals so September to December was spent between recording in Oxford and London. It was great to cut ourselves off from the rest of the world at Angelic Studios in Banbury, in the middle of the countryside with nothing to do but focus on the record and play with the studio dog, Bear. We got all the instruments finished there then recorded any leftover vocals back in London. All of January we’ve pretty much spent trying to learn how to play these new songs!
For anyone going to the K! tour, what’re the three essentials they need to bring with them?
Water (already in their bodies) as I passed out at a gig once from being dehydrated and it wasn’t fun. Comfy but old trainers, because when you’re jumping around like an idiot all night you’re going to need that support, and will not want to get home to find your new white Converse now new-but-old-looking grey Converse. And a camera or camera phone as we’re going ask everyone to film one song in the set which we’ll mash together to make a video from all the footage at the end of tour. You have been prepped!
The Kerrang! Tour kicks off in Norwich on 6 February, get full dates and ticket info today.
Will you be there?
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