Jade's Music Blog

Despite the mockney accent, Donny and guitarist brother Dirk (real names Patrick and Francis Brannan) hail from Bootle, and are proud Everton fans.

“We’re really looking forward to the gig in Liverpool - we’ve played there before, with Babyshambles. Coming to Liverpool feels like coming home,” says Donny, 25. Away from the cameras he is quiet, calm and polite, a nicely brought up lad with impeccable manners. Not the bad boy rocker the tabloids had led me to believe at all.

“I was born in Fazakerley Hospital and we lived in Bootle until I was about six or seven.

“We’ve still got loads of family up here. My cousins and aunties and uncles all still live in Bootle, and it feels like home. I’m looking forward to going out for a few drinks. Some places on tour you hardly get to see anything other than the venue and the hotel, but we’re going to make time to actually do something in Liverpool.”

Donny shot to fame when he joined Celebrity Big Brother 5, making his entrance by swearing at the crowd until he was ushered along the red carpet by security guards.

“I can’t remember it,” he admits. “People said ‘why were you such a nasty b*****d when you went in?’ but I can’t remember the first night at all, I’d drunk too much. Then I had a big hangover the next day and then I went over the wall. I was hardly there at all really – just a weekend break. I wouldn’t say I had a game plan – well, who would plan that?”

Donny cut short his stay after just 48 hours by scaling a wall to escape working as a servant for Jade Goody and her family. As he climbed over the garden wall, unwittingly helped by Ian “H” Watkins, he shouted down “I'm not waiting hand on foot, on some f*****g moron and her family”.

“I don’t regret it,” he says, of his decision to go into the house. “I don’t know if I’d do it again, maybe, but only if Tara Reid was in there. That was the only thing that made me go in this time, and look at who was really in there.

“I liked Jermaine, Cleo and Ken Russell, but not the rest of them. Jo was a d**k. And that H, he was a d**k too. Leo was hanging about somewhere in the middle.”

Donny, who has claimed to have bedded more than 300 fans and has now set his sights on Princess Beatrice, suddenly turns coy and grunts noncommittally when asked about rumours that he had drunken sex with Leo Sayer’s wife Donatella four years ago. What was that Donny?

“Next question,” he replies, clearly embarrassed.

He has previously said: “I was never going to talk about Donatella. She obviously doesn't know me very well if she thought I'd speak out first – I have too much integrity and too much respect for her and Leo.

“When I saw Leo in the house, I didn't suspect that Big Brother had set me up because I knew I hadn't told anyone about me and Donatella – just my brother and really close mates.”

Another reported conquest of his is 17-year-old Peaches Geldof. “It was never anything – she’s one of my best mates,” he says. “She’s a great girl, and she got a lot of stick that she didn’t deserve. People can say what they like about me, but it winds me up when they keep going on about her, because it’s not even true.”

Donny’s staggering entrance into the Big Brother house may have been the first most people knew of the Towers of London, but the bouffant five-piece have been building their fanbase by playing dates all over the country for the last two years.

Last year they supported two of their favourite bands – Guns N' Roses and New York Dolls – as well as playing the main stages at Reading and Leeds Festivals.

Fans have been flocking to see the hedonistic charm and '80s hair metal sound of Donny and the rest of the band – guitarist Dirk Tourette, lead guitarist the Rev, bassist Tommy Brunette, and drummer Snell. Their debut album Blood, Sweat and Towers gave us On A Noose, How Rude She Was, Air Guitar and great new single I'm A Rat.

But despite their obvious musical talent, it is often their off-stage antics rather than their on-stage prowess which have hit the headlines.

Donny was brought before Cambridge Magistrates Court in 2005 for criminal damage during a show at Cambridge Anglia Ruskin University. He had been swinging from an overhead cable which pulled down a canopy and broke scaffolding and was ordered to pay £775 in compensation, court costs and fines.

Not exactly throwing televisions through hotel windows but that has been enough to get him a reputation as a rock’n’roll hellraiser.

“We seem to make people angry,” says Donny. “So what can you do? I laugh at it all. You can’t take yourself too seriously. People are going to say what they want and I’m not bothered.

“I just hope they listen to the music and make their decisions based on that. If they’ve heard the band and they still think we’re s**t, then that’s fine, that’s their opinion.

“I can respect that.”

Donny says that music inspires him, particularly the songs he first heard as a boy in Liverpool.

“I spent the first six years of my life in Liverpool, and you hear those Beatles melodies so much it soaks into the way you write,” he says.

“Strawberry Fields (Forever) is still the best song I’ve ever heard. I can remember my mum playing it in our kitchen when we lived in Liverpool, she loved it and it reminds me of her.

“Cigarettes and Alcohol by Oasis is just a great rock and roll song. The same with Satisfaction by the Stones. I never get tired of listening to them.

“When my brother and I were kids it was Oasis that inspired us. It was back in the glory days when they got every 12-year-old wanting to be them.

“We even went to Noel Gallagher’s house and played him a tune.

“Pretty Vacant was the first Pistols tune I heard, so that’s one of my favourites, and Tiny Dancer by Elton John – that’s a great tour bus anthem. The driver loves it, so we hear it a lot.”

Towers of London are at the Carling Academy Liverpool on July 22.