Chad Driscoll

One band's departure is one band's arrival.
Sex Bomb "officially" moves into the Red Dog this weekend as the regular Saturday night house band, taking the stage following the hasty departure of longtime Saturday night regulars Jericho's Wall. That band is now playing Saturday nights at the Black Horse Pub.
Led by frontman Chad Driscoll, Sex Bomb is no stranger to the Red Dog stage, having played at the Hunter Street West pub off-and-on for the past year or so.
Driscoll, a top 100 finalist on Canadian Idol, is backed by Michael Hurcomb (guitar), Tom Hughes (guitar) and Chris Wade (bass) -- all of whom have worked with local musicians for a number of years at Bud Monhan's. Drummer Derek Driscoll, meanwhile, has been banging the skins for some 10 years, both live and in studio.
Sex Bomb will take to the stage at 10 p.m. - Peterborough This Week

Coming Soon. - The Peterborough Examiner

Unreliable Instincts released last summer


ORONO -- Singer/songwriter Chad Driscoll released his first disc, Unreliable Instincts, last year and has begun working on a second. Supplied photo CLARINGTON -- In a cover band for several years, Chad Driscoll always planned on playing his own original music.
“The cover band kind of came about as a way to play every week and make some money, but I was always writing,” says the Orono singer/songwriter. “It’s great to get up there and sing Sweet Home Alabama, but you can only do that so many times.”
So, after roughly three years of work, he sings his own songs on his first disc, Unreliable Instincts, released last summer. Driscoll says the songs come from life and things he’s read while others have nothing to do with what he’s been through.
“It’s kind of like adult contemporary; it’s rock music, but for an older generation,” he says. “I always thought it had a Blue Rodeo feel on a couple of the tracks.”
He’d had four of the songs for a long time, with the oldest, Raining in February, written years ago. Others were written on the GO train on his way to his day job at the LCBO in Toronto.
As for his writing style, Driscoll says his approach is to avoid “reinventing the wheel,” keeping it fairly basic with some nice verses and a chorus. He likes Eddie Vedder’s solo acoustic stuff and how Brandon Flowers from The Killers writes.
His cover band mates play on the disc and they had a CD release party at the Gordon Best Theatre in Peterborough. Driscoll says he hadn’t been there in around 15 years and was amazed to find the same sound person he’d remembered.
“It was a lot of fun,” he says. “We got to play all of the songs live for the first time. I got to see a lot of people I hadn’t seen in a while. Sold a lot of CDs, which was good.”
He also notes that Chris Wade plays cello on the disc, describing him as “probably the most talented musician I’ve ever met. He can play anything.”
Driscoll says he’s been singing since he was a boy growing up in Peterborough, no doubt influenced by his dad, a musician.
“He was always listening to classic rock so I was listening to Beatles music when I was a kid,” he says.
He started as a drummer but laughs that he “got sick of never being noticed at the end of the night” so he switched to guitar and vocals.
The cover band, Sexbomb, has been around for six or seven years, playing older music such as The Beatles and newer music by bands such as The Killers, Green Day and Our Lady Peace.
Driscoll reasons that it’s easier for cover bands to play bars -- at least it used to be. He notes that it’s been tough in the last year or so to get gigs.
“We were playing every weekend and it just kind of dried up,” he says, adding “music isn’t sheltered from recessions.”
Driscoll and his songwriting partner on the first album got together recently to begin planning the songs for the next disc. He plans on writing less direct, broader lyrics and more upbeat songs this time around.
“Just throwing ideas out there, nothing written down,” he explains. “That’s how it starts.”
Unreliable Instincts is available on iTunes and on Driscoll’s website, www.chad-driscoll.com.
Listen to him playing Raining in February.
- Durham Region News - Mike Ruta

Local musician Chad Driscoll discovered his singing voice at the age of 10. But it took another couple of decades, and a string of talent contests, to uncover it.

As the frontman of SexBomb, a cover band that made its name playing the Peterborough bar circuit, Driscoll has paid his dues, singing the hits of popular rock bands from The Beatles to The Killers to Our Lady Peace.

SexBomb (named after the Tom Jones song) played “almost every bar in Peterborough,” says Driscoll, including a one-year stint as the house band at the Red Dog tavern in 2007, and performances at the Kawartha Lakes Wakeboard Open for two years in a row.

Now, after taking three years to write and record, Driscoll has released Unreliable Instincts, an album of eight songs, original compositions which prove he is more than just a pretty voice. Initially recorded at home with just an acoustic guitar, Driscoll emailed the songs to his bandmates in SexBomb and, after they learned them, the tracks were laid down one at a time, he says.

Along with Driscoll’s lead vocals and guitar, the album features Rod Darling (guitar), Chris Wade (bass, cello), Derek Driscoll (drums), and Mike Hurcomb (guitar) – all from SexBomb – as well as Barry Haggarty (guitar, vocals). The songs were recorded and mixed by Haggarty at his Peterborough studio.

“All the songs are original. I wrote the lyrics and the songs are my compositions. Rod Darling helped me write some of the music; he co-wrote three of the songs,” says Driscoll. Unreliable Instincts was completed in February of this year and released on June 24th, with a CD-release gig at The Gordon Best Theatre in Peterborough.

The 30-year-old Driscoll was born and raised in Peterborough, but moved to Orono with his wife, Melissa, in 2009. His father is also a singer and musician, who played in bands in the ‘70s and ‘80s. “He is a huge influence on me and my love of writing songs and singing,” says Driscoll.

Inspired at a young age to follow in his dad’s footsteps, he started singing and by the age of 10, he entered the Nintendo Search for the Stars singing contest, in which he finished second. At 13, he started to play the drums on his father’s drum kit, and in his high school years he joined his first band, playing drums before also learning guitar.

In 2003, Driscoll entered the competition for the first season of CTV’s Canadian Idol, after his sister let him cut in line at the Toronto audition. Performing in front of two separate judges in the initial, non-filmed portion of the tryouts with an estimated 10,000 other hopefuls, Driscoll was given the green light to proceed to the filmed segment.

“They chose 250 people to audition in front of the real judges, the four you see on TV,” he explains. “It was at the Royal York in Toronto, just like you see on the show. I sang ‘House of the Rising Sun’ and I got four yeses across the board from the judges, and I got my gold ticket [to go to the final Toronto audition]. They take 100 people from across the country to Toronto, and then they narrow it down to 30.”

Driscoll made it into the top 100 before getting cut. “I didn’t really take it as seriously as I should have. I have friends in Toronto, and we went out at night. On day three or four, I got cut. I had to check out of my free hotel room,” he recalls, adding that he has no regrets.

“It was good. It gives you good insight into that business. I would say singing is about 70 percent, looks is 30 percent – maybe even 60/40. It actually motivated me. I made up my mind 100 percent that I wanted to be a songwriter and performer, not just a performer,” he says.

“I love writing lyrics. You just get a better feeling when you’re singing your own lyrics. Everything else just feels like karaoke,” he notes.

Not completely averse to Idol-type competitions, Driscoll could not resist the Peterborough Examiner’s Song Contest in 2009. He was one of five finalists with his song, “It’s Not Me,” which is also on his album.

“Lyrically, I have always admired Raine Maida [vocalist for Our Lady Peace] for his writing style, and I find Eddie Vedder [lead singer of Pearl Jam] to be an amazing songwriter. He always inspires me to write when I hear his solo work,” he says, also citing The Beatles and Blue Rodeo as influences.

He calls his original songs “more mellow” than the typical fare he played with his cover band. With a singing voice that is capable of channeling Bryan Adams and Jon Bon Jovi, Driscoll is in his element with the rock ballads that dominate Unreliable Instincts.

Strongest amongst those offered is “Home,” a song he admits is “probably my favourite.” It nostalgically recalls, “…Late night drives/ down roads we didn’t know/ singing at the top of our lungs/ along with the radio/ So before you go/ and leave me here alone/ I want you to know/ that wherever you are/ I’m home.”

The album’s lead track, “First to Know,” and its closing song, “Raining in February,” also stand out. According to Driscoll, the latter is the most popular of his creations, outselling his other songs on iTunes, “It’s weird because I wasn’t even going to put ‘Raining in February’ on the album. It’s just an acoustic song, but I guess it strikes a chord with people.”

The album is available for purchase online on CD through his website www.chad-driscoll.com (local readers can also contact Chad by email through the site to buy a CD in person), and as a digital download on Amazon.com, iTunes, and Napster.

- Stories from a Small Town/ Orono Weekly Times