Don Broco – ‘Priorities/Automatic’ tour 2016
Half way through their UK headline tour in support of both ‘Priorities’ and ‘Automatic’ albums, Don Broco took a moment to catch up with Soundcheck-Live to talk about touring with Bring Me The Horizon and 5 Seconds Of Summer, their storming new single ‘Everybody’, catching Pokemon, and much more….
First thing’s first, how’s tour and in particular, how is playing each venue twice?
Yeah, a lot of fun!
Strange playing both places twice?
Rob – It’s a real treat actually. First day you’ve got your standard load in it’s all a bit stressful and then you can actually chill out the next day. You’re staying in the same town the next day so you can have a few drinks, go out and not have to wake up at a ridiculous time because you have to go to somewhere miles away. And not have to lug everything down the stairs again the next day, wherever you’re going. So it’s a lot more relaxing than a standard tour, so it’s been a lot of fun.
With it being Priorities one night and Automatic the next. Is it satisfying to know that both are sold out? Does that validate both albums for you?
Simon – Yeah, really interesting to see which sold out first
Rob – It was a mix as well
Simon – Yeah, it’s not like we’ve got one dud record
So, next record you’ll do three nights – one for each record?
Collective agreement
Any fun/interesting stories from the last week or so?
Simon – We’ve been hunting a lot of Pokémon in all the different cities that’s the most fun thing about touring at the moment
Rob – I think probably one of the best things we’ve done this tour that was a little bit different – probably because of Pokémon. We went passed this castle Simon had been to when he was a young lad.
Simon – Pre-Pokémon
Rob – And then we thought ‘well this castle might have some rare Pokémon’ so we took a little detour and it so happened they were recreating the battle of Hastings. Which was incredible to see them all dressed up in full armour and horses and got to meet the knights etc. We just had this amazing day in Richmond Castle.
BMTH on tour and going again.
Rob- It was insane, it’s the first big tour we’ve done in Europe. We’ve been a couple of times before doing small club shows but these were mental sold out arena shows. It was awesome; it surprised us how many people knew about us and the new record. When you’re not in the country you can’t scale it. But yeah, Bring Me were legends. They killed it every night.
Getting to see so many places too and getting to go out. That’s the fun thing about being a support band, you have a lot more time to actually see the places you’re visiting. Did some of the tourist stuff in Milan and Barcelona and the weather was amazing.
Tom – Got super sunburnt
Simon – Barca took me down. Nothing worse than being sun burnt on a tour bus.
Rob – That’s the only down side. We underestimated the power of the sun.
Tell me something: you’re on tour with BMTH April 14th in Paris then the next day you’re in Cardiff with 5SOS. What are the contrasts between the two?
Rob – It’s stark. The scale of the BMTH shows along with the scale of the 5SOS arena shows in Europe, and two nights in a lot of the places was just insane. The main difference was doing a show that far away from the crowd. It’s a very different experience. You walk out on stage at the Bring Me ones and it’s like the shows we’re used to but bigger and crazier and then the 5SOS ones there’s so many people that you can’t contemplate how many people are there. We’re playing ‘Nerve’ and people get out their lighters and that’s the only point in the entire set that you can gauge how many people are out there.
Is that a bit overwhelming?
Rob – Yeah, definitely. The first few times we saw it we were like ‘this is crazy’ and you kind of had that ‘moment’.
Does that help?
Tom – It’s just a special moment
Rob – In a way. You can enjoy the smaller shows a bit more because you can get that connection with the crowd. For any band, once you get to that size venue it’s hard to recreate that up-close and personal feel. What you lose from that you gain from the huge scale of it.
If we can get a little candid for a moment: what is the biggest mistake you’ve made as a band?
Rob – Hopefully, I won’t get anyone in trouble here. I think our biggest regret is not standing up to our label when we recorded a load of songs from ‘Automatic’. We had ‘Money Power Fame’, ‘Fire’, ‘Automatic’ and ‘Superlove’ ready to go. They were the first songs recorded from the album. We just wanted to put music out and the label was a bit slow on the up take.
It’s not the olden days where people wait 5 years to put another album out. You want to keep things going and we were very aware of that. We’d recorded these songs to do that. Unfortunately it got put on the back burner they said, “No we’ve got to wait until the whole album is finished”. It was really frustrating, probably the most frustrating time of our career. The ‘Money Power Fame’ video was filmed and we still had to wait months. We learned from that. If we were in that situation again we’d probably just put our foot down and get the music out.
You have to deal with people. When it’s a business relationship you have to take on other people’s opinions.
And what is the best decision you’ve made?
Matt – I think buying our van. It’s not expensive, it’s not glamorous but it has lasted a long time – we bought it in 2009. It was old back then but we still have it and it still comes in handy. It’s saved us a lot of money.
Tom – I mean, the door is falling off and there’s a hole in the floor.
Rob – And it’s completely infested with mould
Matt – But it’s served us well
‘Everybody’ is out and about and people are reacting in a brilliant way – can you expect these things when putting a song record out or is that dangerous territory?
Simon – I had the feeling people were going to be like, “what the hell am I seeing?” When we read the treatment for the video we thought ‘what the hell are we reading?’ It was the brain child of a director from the States and he shot word for word what he told us in the first place. He nails the tone, humour and weirdness of what we wanted to achieve.
I think we knew with this video that no one would hate it but I think there will be a lot of people out there that don’t get it and want to watch it again – which is exactly what we wanted to achieve.
Tell us about the song itself.
Rob – It was written over the two tours we did with BMTH and 5SOS and any down time we had we were recording. We started recording the drums in Manchester arena. We then did more when we got back and finished it off on the BMTH tour. It’s never easy when you’re away as you don’t have a lot of time. We were really eager to write new songs and have something new for this tour.
It’s been the highlight of the set so far for this tour.
All of the world’s music has been removed from memory. Your band and 4 other acts are left to recreate the world’s music – who do you choose?
Simon – Prince. Easy.
Tom – Rolling Stones
Rob- MJ
Matt – Dolly Parton
Check out the Live review of the shows in Leeds (up Here very soon!), and Live photos from: Manchester, Glasgow, Newcastle and Leeds in our ‘Live in Photos’ section here!
