Jon Stevens-fronted supergroup The Dead Daisies, will perform at the Rosemount Hotel on Thursday, December 4. SHANE PINNEGAR chats with bass player, Marco Mendoza.
A veteran of recording and touring with a host of big names from Blue Murder to Right Said Fred, Cranberries singer Dolores O’Riordan to Thin Lizzy and their spin-off incarnation Black Star Riders, Whitesnake and Ted Nugent to his own Latin jazz funk trio, Marco Mendoza positively bubbles down the phoneline with positive enthusiasm about his new band.
Mendoza has toured here before, with Lynch Mob in 2008, and again with Thin Lizzy in support of KISS and Motley Crue in early 2013.
“That was a great line-up – it just worked really well,” he reminisces. “We had a blast. As a matter of fact, that’s how I met the boys. That’s how I met (guitarist) David Lowy and Jon Stevens, and David Edwards, the manager. We’ve got him managing us now.
“I do remember travelling forever and getting to Sydney, and then we had a two-to-three-hour layover to Perth, and that was another five-hour flight. We got there, and they had all these interviews lined up for me, and I’m like, ‘wooh, baby, let’s go!’
“I do remember having a blast, and I definitely remember all the fans. They were just really cool, really real fans, and really passionate about the music and rock’n’roll and music in general. They were very happening. They were very well-educated and very up-to-date on what everybody was doing, so we had a blast.
“The music was kicking,” he recalls about first hooking up with the rest of the Dead Daisies, “and one thing led to the other, and before you know it, I was in Australia. We’ve been around, all of us, from management to PR, everything – the band members, we’ve been around for a few years. We’ve experienced quite a lot. We kind of understand how to handle it.”
Since then The Dead Daisies have had a killer run, with a lap of Eastern Australia, the Uproar Festival tour through America, and supporting the KISS & Def Leppard tour in the States as well as appearing on the KISS Kruise.
“Yeah, you know, it helps when you have a line-up like we have,” Mendoza concurs, “and then also great management, and then we have the resources to put it in the right place on the business side. That’s so important. That’s just not happening in a lot of instances with a lot of new projects and new bands. I see a lot of new talent that don’t get a break, don’t make it through first base or second base, but I think a lot of the attention that we’re getting is the fact that we have a couple of guys from Guns n’ Roses. We have Brian Tichy (also ex-Whitesnake) on the drums, myself. David Lowy, of course, was heading this whole thing and supporting it whenever he can financially, and then Jon Stevens.”
Mendoza says he’s been writing with the band as they’ve coalesced into a slightly more stable line-up than the rotating, amorphous thing it was to start with.
“That was one of the understandings from the beginning. I’m at the point in my career where if I’m going to be involved with a project, a band, I really kind of make it very clear that I want to be involved in the writing,” he declares. “In my opinion, a real band is a real band, you know what I mean? Everybody puts their input in, and that’s what makes it so special, when you have four, five, six different cats putting their input in, and it was flawless for us.”
