Dellacoma Rio was the singer of Melbourne band Sunset Riot who disbanded in 2013. After some soul searching Dellacoma decided to continue to follow his musical ambitions and formed a new band. Now performing under the name Dellacoma, the energetic front man and diverse vocalist, has unleashed ten tracks of raw, blues based rock n roll with a stellar band of rock n roll outlaws.

 

By keeping things realistic and aiming to build a career through hard work and improving with each successive release, Dellacoma Rio has a smart and well thought out business model for building his band’s career. Never expecting anything to be handed to him, this band is set for a periodic rise into future greatness.

 

On the eve of heading out for a two week tour of America, Dellacoma took some time out of his busy schedule to chat with me about his new album, South of Everything, his career thus far, the music scenes both here and abroad, and maintaining a balance between being a working musician and a family man.

 

So mate, after seven years, three bands, five EPs, you’ve finally got your first full length album in

your hand. How does that feel?

 

Ah mate! Pretty Cool! I was pretty chuffed. (Laughs) It’s one of those things, you know, cause especially

with Sunset Riot we’d been talking about doing a full length album and we’d written about eighteen songs

or so for that album when we broke up so it’s been something that’s been in my mind and in my thought

process and something that I’ve been really seriously looking forward to since 2012.

 

Long time coming.

 

Yeah.

 

I’m kind of new to the party, why did Sunset Riot disband?

 

It was a fairly amicable dissolution. I think the main reason was it sort of got to that point where everyone was on different pages. We put in five years of hard work and were just starting to get somewhere overseas, but a couple of members were just at that point where they were like ‘this is where the real work begins’ even though you’ve worked so hard for five years, you can sort of get on festivals, you can get shows in other countries but you got to start from the ground up. Just like we’d done over here. I think that was a bit daunting maybe for a couple of the guys. One of the blokes just wasn’t into rock n roll anymore. He actually does country now. Country acoustic. Very, very different. He’d been feeling that for the last year and a half. He really wanted to go in a different direction. A couple of guys in the band were sort of on the fence about that direction. Myself, and one of the other blokes were not into that direction at all. We were just in a spot where on many different levels we were in completely different places.

 

 

                                                                                   Did you ever feel like you were back to square one, and how’d you go about

                                                                                   putting a band together again?

 

                                                                                   Oh absolutely man, I think… I’d sort of seen it coming, and then I felt like during 

                                                                                   that last US tour I felt like we’d sort of come to a bit of an agreement where

                                                                                   everyone was sort of back on board with what was going on and giving it a good push

                                                                                   and then seeing where we were at at Christmas. We took a break for about six weeks

                                                                                   after the tour, then got around a table and that’s when we came to a point where we

                                                                                   disbanded. I sat on a couch and was sort of like ‘what do I do? I’m not an eighteen year

                                                                                   old just bashing away at a guitar in my garage anymore.’ It’s one of those things where,

                                                                                   initially I felt like ‘damn, I got to start from scratch – again? Do I have the energy for

                                                                                   that?’ Then it sort of dawned on me, I really had two choices. It becomes a hobby, if

                                                                                   you will. I don’t know if you know the band Tonk? From Canberra.

 

Yep. You covered one of their songs on your EP.

 

I did, I did. They’re good mates of mine. Amazing musicians. They’ve had their music on How I Met Your Mother. Their album came out in 2005 and they’ve just released their second one. They all work jobs, and they love to do it, but it’s a labour of love. They just do it when they can. I felt like I had those two choices, either I go that way, or if I didn’t want to do it that way, if I still want to do it full time I’d really have to take the bull by the horns and that was the decision that I came to, me and my wife. We were like, ‘You know what? If we’re gonna do this we’re gonna do it right. It’s got to be a mindset of this is what I’m gonna do. And really going full on.’ That’s where the song, Dead Will Rise, sort of came from. Cause I felt like, whether it was true or not is irrelevant, a lot of people felt like ‘of course Sunset Riot broke up, Del got married and he had a kid so he needed to move on with his life.’ And I felt like a lot of people would have thought form the outset that that was where the break came from. So I had a bit of a burning itch, I guess, in me to show that that wasn’t it. I still have a lot left inside of me. The reasoning behind going to America is really simple, and it’s purely a numbers game. I learnt through Sunset Riot that anything that you do in Australia, any accolade you get in Australia – you could even headline Soundwave – it’ll make news for you here and it’ll do great things for you but as soon as you’re in Europe or America it doesn’t mean anything. You could be on all the radio stations here and you go over there and it doesn’t matter to them. Whereas, if you do the reverse, if you play a festival in America you can come back to Australia an you can go ‘I played a festival over there’ and it actually means something, and you have a bit or currency. So I chose to do it that way. I rang up a mate of mine from Melbourne, I’d been in a side project with him we just did a couple one off shows back in the day and he had since moved to the US to join a band and then the singer quit. So I auditioned for that band. It’s sort of similar sort of style but at the time I wasn’t really interested in it. I went over there and I rang him up and said if you’re still interested I’d love to try and put something together and have you a part of it. Cause I want it to be Australian, but it would help if you’ve got a green card you know, cause I wanna kick it off in the US it would help if you could be based in the US and be able to come and go with work visa and whatever. And I ended up auditioning two or three different sets of musicians that I knew and then he goes ‘my old drummer and guitarist are really really good you should give them a go.’ So I did and the rest is sort of history. We piled in a van, wrote some songs along the way, recorded along the way and here we are almost a year later.

 

You’ve recently signed with Shock Records, which is some awesome news. What does that mean to you and how did that come about?

 

That was actually when I came back from the US tour in November and I have a few friends here in Australia who run clubs, one of them being Back In The Day. I’ve known Dean for years. The other being Frankie’s Pizza up in Sydney. And they both noticed in Facebook that I was coming back to town and they were like ‘hey we’d like to get you back in to play if you’re going to do some shows here in Australia.’ and my band wasn’t with me so I thought it would be really good to play back in Australia and reconnect with Australian audiences so I just called up a few mates from different bands and said ‘hey I’m thinking of putting together a sort of solo band, just play a couple of one off shows’ so I put that together and it was at the first one of those, it was at Back In The Day the Royalty Manager at Shock Records – she manages all the royalties for all the bands who are on the roster. She just happened to be out with her husband and happened to see the solo band play. We got chatting afterwards and she said ‘I wanna talk to my boss cause I really, really enjoyed that.’ Next thing I know I’ve got the label director of Shock on the phone. Had a meeting and he said ‘what are you looking to do?’ I told him what I wanted to do. He said ‘Look we’d like to help out and put this record out.’ Having them on board is pretty huge cause even though it’s not a big deal, in terms of monetary or anything and it’s just in Australia it gives us a bit of credibility, and I think especially from the outside people take you a little bit more seriously when you’ve got that name on there and you’ve got a bit of backing behind you.

 

It’s one of those old school stories you don’t think happens anymore.

 

No. And the whole process from when I was sitting on that couch and my wife was like ‘what are you gonna do?’ and I was like ‘I don’t know, I’m gonna take a couple of days to figure it out’ Back in October of 2013. Looking at everything that’s going on and looking at all the work that we’ve done and a lot of the advice that I’ve received, and I guess the reason for why I did music, myself, looking at all of that. I’ve had a very old school approach to it in that I think a lot of bands, modern bands, will take three four years between records because they’ll pour all this money in to it to try and make it to compete with your Avenge Sevenfolds and your Metallicas and whoever’s big at the time, they try and do it independently on that big a scale and I think that hurts the band cause you don’t obtain your grass roots following cause people are going to stop going cause you’ve only got one album’s worth to go off.

 

My mind set was let’s go in there and let’s write songs on the road and road test them on tour. In a way this is a concept album cause it’s ten songs written, three of them I had written with other people. Musician friends of mine, one of them being a guy here who has an album who plays in my Melbourne solo band. We’d play fifty shows and get these songs in front of people and then after fifty shows go into the studio. That was my plan and we got to about fifty four before we went into the studio and we recorded the drums and the bass all on tape. Which was something I wanted to do cause it puts a little more pressure on you, I think in a good way cause if you stuff up it it’s a little more harder to redo it. There was very little tinkering with things. There’s not a whole lot of backing vocals on there. There’s not a whole lot of second guitar cause we’re a one guitar band. And the concept is to have a record and then go and hear it live and it’s pretty much exactly the same as what you have live. My hope is that I can do a simple model to what Aerosmith did in the seventies where they had ten years with about seven records out. I found in Sunset Riot we run for five years and we brought out a demo and two EPs and some of the songs form the demo were re-recorded so you’re looking at a total of about thirteen or fourteen songs that had been recorded over about five years. I want to actually, after five years, have more like forty songs in the bank. And again that’s just because in today’s age as well I think in a lot of ways even though so much has changed we’re back to a similar landscape as the seventies cause bands like Aerosmith they’d go out and they’d put out a record and they’d tour and then as soon as there’s no demand for them to tour anymore they’d go back into the studio and they’d record more songs and then they’d put that out and then they’d tour as long as they can on that record and then once clubs stop calling them to have them in they’d go back in and they’d record again. I think we’ve lost that somewhere along the way and I think having more songs out, it does mean you have to work harder, obviously, to produce quality music, but if you can get more songs out you can have more songs on people’s iPods and you’ve got more opportunities to get a song on the radio and you’ve got more material to choose from for a show which then opens up the opportunity to play multiple shows in the same town and do a different set list each night.

 

Do you have any favourite songs on the album?

 

I think My Kinda Woman is a favourite for the fact that I’ve very proud of that song cause it’s the first time I’ve written a guitar riff that’s been on an album, on a recording. So from that perceptive I’ve very proud of that song. I think Time Falls Away for me is a bit of a landmark because it’s the highest I’ve ever sung on a recording, the notes that I hit on that, and Under My Skin is always a lot of fun live.

 

Was there a reason to rerecord Under My Skin and Change for the album as opposed to just taking

them from the EP?

 

The reasoning behind that is because when I first went over there I was looking for a band. I made a

Soundcloud link with Change, Under My Skin and a couple of other songs; a few Sunset Riot songs and a

couple of covers. So it was ten songs in total and I sent it out to a couple of people and I was like ‘learn these

songs, come in and we'll have a rehearsal and see how it goes.’ And then once those guys jumped on board

that became our set for the first couple of shows - Change, Under my Skin and probably five Sunset Riot

songs and then two or three covers. And Change and Under my Skin, I guess on the EP it’s only got so much

reach. I think I only sold about 500 copies of that so in the scheme of things there’s not a whole lot of people

who have those songs and I also felt like they worked really well in the set. The concept of the album is to be

playing it before you record it. So to speak. And the guys really enjoyed those tracks as well and they didn’t

play on the EP so it’s a combination of those factors.

 

Modern technology now gives bands a chance to self-record, self-produce and get their music out into the world. But it seems if they want to get things to the next level they still need to get a record company behind them. Do you think an independent band will ever be able to reach the same level of success that say Aerosmith or Gins N Roses did?

 

That’s a good question. To be honest I wonder if any band will reach that level and part of the reason was those bands ... had a lot of mystery and a lot of folklore. There’s a lot of stories about what happened that could have been exaggerated, probably was exaggerated. These days with the internet and mobile phones and YouTube, you go to a concert you know and if Slash is too drunk to solo and you’re out in the audience and you’re drunk as well you think it’s hilarious and it becomes part of the thing. But if you’re recording on your mobile phone and you chuck it up on YouTube on Saturday morning and you're totally sober you’re watching that and you’re like ‘Slash sucks.’ In my opinion I think the landscape for that kind of thing has completely changed.

As far as being able to reach, like selling out stadiums and all that sort of stuff, yes I think it’s definitely achievable. That sort of cult legendary folklore status of your Led Zeppelins and Guns N Roses and Aerosmith I think that’s a lot harder cause it’s not just about numbers it’s about perception. The Rolling Stones, the same thing, there’s a perception. It’s very hard to create that cause we live in a world where anything you do can be put up on the internet. I do think that if you're smart about it, independent bands can go out and hire the same people that a recording label would hire and you can do the same job. The main issue becomes funds. A record label is essentially a bank who has a team that says we'll loan you this money to hire this person so you can make more money and then pay us more money. That’s essentially how that works. But you’ve got to have somebody with pretty deep pockets that’s invested in you enough to hire those people for you.

 

Yeah. It’s a tough game.

 

Very tough game. Only the crazy survive.

 

You're married and you have a little girl. How do you maintain a steady balance between you family life and your career?

 

Ha-ha. I ask myself the same question every day. I think it just boils down to priorities man. I’m very fortunate to have an incredibly supportive wife. We sort of fall a little outside of the quote unquote norm. On many fronts of the rock n roll world as well as renting in a suburb of Melbourne world as well. But we make it work for us. It’s the little things. For instants I’m heading over the US to play south by southwest and this came up after id already planned for the year that I wasn’t going to be over there till April. So it kind of threw a spanner in the works. So I thought if I’m going over now is there any point going back in April. So we decided to go ahead and make it a short trip so that I could get to see them. It’s little things like that where you weigh it up and you go, ‘well, it’s more expensive this way, yeah but it’s harder on me, but that’s the sacrifice I’m willing to make so that we can keep the family balance going. It is a constant struggle cause on any given day you could be driving somewhere, or time could run over you could get stuff, or a festival or something could pop up, an opportunity to get another show so it could be a matter of hours before you speak to your spouse or it could be a couple of days so there’s got to be a lot of communication and a lot of trust there as well.

 

I noticed on Facebook you recently posted that you were looking for a couple of dates to fill in your tour. How effective is this method, and how important is social media to you?

 

Social media is incredibly important to me. I generally by this point, this would be my sixth American tour, so I sort of have my contacts and all that but every now and then something will pop up where I just can’t fill in a date. I am fortunate enough to have met a lot of people throughout the years and sometimes I just don’t remember who I’ve met but they’re on my friends list or whatever, You know somebody by name but you can’t remember if they live in Kanas City or New York. I found that, you have to shift through a lot of stuff… like if I’m saying ‘do you know of any gigs in Melbourne?’ you’ll get somebody who’s never seen you before who thinks you’re amazing, that you’re this massive band, they’ll be like ‘you should play at Etihad Stadium – that’s where I saw my favourite band.’ And you go, yeah yeah, that’d be cool and we’ll get there. But in your head you’re going ‘well, not really what I was looking for. I was looking for like your Cherry Bars and your Espy sort of thing. You do get some, you never really know who’s on there. It could be a fan who might have a connection. I’ve had moments when someone will private message me and go ‘I own a club and I’ve either just happened to meet them at some point not knowing this, or they’ve brought it more recently or they’ll tag somebody in the status, and go ‘my friend owns a club’ or ‘my friend is a booking agent’ or ‘my friend’s band just had to pull out of a show and we’re looking for a replacement’  so you just never know and in this scenario that I posted I’m looking for a show it’s actually for a week from Wednesday, just cause it was getting too close. The ones that I wanted to book they were booked out a long time ago, and because this was sort of a last minute tour I just wasn’t able to get that date filled and nothing has come through from this one, but in the past I have had some pretty decent success from that sort of stuff.

 

What’s the best thing about being up on stage and performing your music to

a live audience?

 

I’d probably say the connection, you know? I struggle some times in the studio cause

it’s just me and a microphone and an engineer or a producer, and band mate. But

when you’re live you can really tell if you’re connecting with somebody. They always

say that kids are the best critics. I tell you what, when you’re up on stage and you’re

playing a song and you’re looking out at the people who have never heard you before.

That’s your best critic as well cause when you start a new song and someone leaves

to go to the bar, you go ‘ok well, that person just decided right away that they weren’t

really into this song.’ Which is fine, not everybody is going to be into every song, but

then you get some people who when you start a new song they go ‘well I don’t know

this song,’ and they’ll start to go to the bar and they’ll stop and they’ll turn around and

come back and you’ll go ‘I’ve hooked that person.’ There’s something about this song

that’s drawn them in. For me, it’s a bit of a game in a way, how can I get on that stage in front of, it may be fifty people it might be five thousand people, how can I get on that stage and individually connect with each person who are all there for different reasons. And meet them where they’re at and tell a story from my heart in a way that makes sense to them with where they’re at in their life. I think when you see that connection in people’s faces, there reactions that for me is pretty cool.

 

Are there any noticeable differences between audiences in America compared to audiences in Australia?

 

I would say, it is a numbers game so, America has many more people than Australia does so because of that you can find quite a few different places that for whatever reason you go and play on a Tuesday night or a Wednesday night. In Australia it can be hard to find mid-week places that you can play, well A, even get a show and B, have a decent audience. Again that’s just because as I said there’s more people, as far as the actual audiences goes I think that the only real differences is Americans seem to be a lot more extreme about most things that they do so if they really get into your band, they go really nuts. Whereas Australians are a little bit more conservative. They might really really dig what you do but they’re not going to be like jumping and screaming and all that sort of stuff. That’s really the only, well I guess American’s are a bit more obsessed too about autographs and all that sort of stuff so you can play a bit more of the fame game over there. Which is why it’s nice to come back to Australia you can just hang out and do what you do.

 

A lot of our local bands are making the permanent move overseas to take themselves to the next level, can you see a permanent move happening any time in the future?

 

No. I love Australia. I went to University in America and I spent about six years over there, I did university and then I moved to LA for a couple of years to try and make it as an actor, which obviously wasn’t very successful. But yeah, I love Australia. I could see myself, if there was a situation where I needed to be somewhere like over in the US or Europe for nine months maybe bringing the family over and spending a year abroad, kind of like what I did last year. But I don’t see a permanent move because I see myself as Australian and I’ve really come to appreciate what a local scene is, and what it can do having gone internationally, cause it’s really cool to be able to go on tour and be playing in a different town every night and then be able to come home and go ‘let’s ring up, so and so and organise a gig down at Cherry.’ Let’s grab a couple of different mates from a couple of different bands and do like a one off, like Aerosmith tribute night or something like that. And that stuff only happens in a local scene and when you go abroad you’ve got to become a part of a local scene again. I think financially, it could be a better move in some ways, but only if you’re able to go and get a job somewhere or you’re able to play all the time. At the stage that I’m at I’m really looking to play bigger shows and really maximise my time when I’m away because I am a family man as well and I’d much prefer to have my family’s home in Australia.

 

Do you think our local scene is getting bigger, do you think there’s more people going out to see live music?

 

Another tough question, I don’t know it seems. It’s hard to say, I think the Sydney scene is recovering, I think it went through a period there, towards the end of my time in Sydney, a lot of the bigger bands didn’t want to play together cause they all wanted to headline their own shows and I think that really sort of split up the scene, without it being intentional. But since then I think the Sydney scene has really started to recover. I think the Adelaide scene, despite what A.J Maddah says, is quite decent. The Melbourne scene to me, seems probably about the same as what it did when we used to drive down here and play shows from Sydney. I think a big difference that I’ve noticed in the local scene, having living down here, is I think the Melbourne scene seems to be really good at being connected with one another. For instance, with Dead City Ruins, as soon as the Deep End broke up Nic and Burg moved across. You know, you always have that in any scene, but I think the Melbourne scene seems to be very um, the bad word for it is incestuous, but the good word for it is connected. I think the musicians down here seem to be pretty clued into each other, and keeping tabs on what’s going on.

 

Who were some of the first bands who discovered as a kid, and what was that special band that make you want to pursue music as a career?

 

I actually grew up listening to my dad’s music which was like James Taylor and Carol King and the Bee Gee’s and Chicago, Johnny Frahman. That’s what I grew up on, and then when I was in my early to mid-teens I discovered what you’d call your pop rock, or whatever, bands like Matchbox Twenty, Fuel. One of my early loves, Oasis. I think a band that, to me personally, really inspired me to really take that plunge is probably Bon Jovi, in a roundabout way. I’m a massive history buff. I love documentaries, I love history in general; that flows through into music as well. I’ve read up a lot about the way that they formed and the way that they did what they did. And U2, not really super rock n roll but the way that they were always innovating and Aerosmith for the fact that they just really never gave up. They were done and dusted in the eighties, and then they came back, and then they came back, and then they came back (laughs) you know what I mean? I guess those three bands, I model a lot of what I do more from a business stand point and how I go about things. Musically speaking, I like varying degrees of their music, of those three Aerosmith is probably my favourite. Just inspiration wise, I would have to go back to Matchbox Twenty for the fact that I remember hearing that first album, Yourself or Someone Like You, and I remember thinking that I believed every word that Rob Thomas was singing. I’ve always loved storytelling, I’ve always been a writer, and done a lot of theatre which is telling stories well and it just really resinated with me that somebody could write songs and, I don’t know him, I don’t know where he’s been or what he’s done or where he’s coming from but hearing these songs as a fifteen year old kid and I’m believing what he’s singing about and that feeling has always stuck with me even though I don’t listen to them much anymore. I’ve always remembered that feeling of being able to connect, that raw honesty that I think he has vocally.

 

What advice would you give to a bunch of kids who are jamming their favourite songs in a garage and are thinking of taking the plunge into a music career?

 

I would say… keep doing it, and keep doing it no matter how bad you are. (Laughs) And I would also say if you’re really serious about it being a career, you probably have to throw away about everything you think you know about what career means because if you truly want to be a career musician and a career artist you have to look at the music that you’re playing and you have to look at it from a very long term perspective, which I think is hard when you’re young depending on who your parents are and what type of upbringing you have, but I think it can be very difficult to go ‘I’m sixteen and when I’m twenty six I want to have put out four or five records. I’ve got some really good friends out in America upstate New York who are in a band called Nasty Habit. They’re phenomenal man, absolutely phenomenal. If I was to make a list of top five bands who most people had never heard of, they would be in the top two probably. The singer, there’s two brothers, one brother’s a signer and the other brother’s a guitarist. They write all the material and then they’ve got a bass player, a drummer. The brothers are twenty three and twenty one, and the bass player is twenty and the bass player is twenty three as well. They put out an album when the youngest one was sixteen and they put out an EP when the youngest one was eighteen and they put out an EP I think last year and they’re getting ready to put out another EP now, and I’ve said to them, as I’ve gotten to know them better, I really admire the way that, not only them but their mum she supports them, everything that they are doing with their lives sort of revolves around the fact that they’re planning on doing music for their entire life. I think it’s very rare when you’re young to have that sort of dedication to go ‘This is what I’m going to do, so if my job doesn’t fit in with that then the job has to go. You know, if it means that I have to get a job that I don’t like so that I can do this, ok cool. That’s what I’ve got to do. Younger musicians, I know I certainly didn’t have that dedication. I wish that I had that real drive when I was younger. I think Dave Grohl said it best when he said that being a musician has nothing to do with standing in a queue for eight hours and getting on Idol to have some judge tell you you suck. It has everything to do with getting an instrument and going out to the garage and sucking at it. Then getting on a stage and sucking more, until you get good.

 

So mate, in the long run, what would you like to achieve as a musician?

 

I think if I can stand here in twenty years and say that my full time profession is playing my music, that’s my goal. I want to be able to support my family doing something that I love, and there’s some minor things along with that, yeah I want to record seven albums in ten years. It seems monumental now considering it’s taken me seven years to get to the point where I’m recording my first, but I think it’s achievable, and I think that a life where I can share that music with the people who enjoy the kind of music that I make, the longer that I can do that the better.

 

 

More information on Dellacoma Rio can be found at the following sites

 

https://www.facebook.com/dellacoma

 

http://www.dellacoma.com/

 

http://www.shockrecords.com.au/cd/south-of-everything/11833.html

 

 

Information on Tonk can be found at the following sites

 

https://www.facebook.com/pages/TONK/12616642018

 

 

Information on Nasty Habit can be found at the following sites

 

https://www.facebook.com/NastyHabitKills

 

http://www.nastyhabitkills.com/the-band