INTERVIEW:As they prepare to release their latest album, Dublin band The Script are enjoying their runaway success, but they've worked hard to get there, and they aren't taking anything for granted, they tell BRIAN BOYD
YOU WOULD THINK that a multimillion selling rock/pop band ensconced in the embracing sumptuousness of the penthouse suite of a top Dublin hotel would be eyeing up television-throwing-out-of-windows possibilities and snorting white powder off the naval of a supermodel while mainlining Jack Daniels.
But not when it’s a temporary home to the three members of The Script. A global sales phenomenon fronted by a lead singer who’s is regularly voted “most shaggable rock star” in teen magazines, the band have been around the block enough times (there was the failed boy band career and the many years working as the assistant tea-maker in recording studios) to know that today is a work day. Promotional duties for their upcoming third album have just got under way and later this afternoon there’s the small matter of a group interview with 30-odd music media. Triple Pellegrinos all round.
Singer Danny O’Donoghue (from Ballinteer, looks like an Italian footballer, is dressed like he’s just been mugged by an All Saints shop) is bouncing around excitedly and continually smacking his hands off his legs. Keyboardist/guitarist Mark Sheehan (from the Liberties, used to be a hip-hop dance instructor in Digges Lane, looks like a roadie) is the big brother figure and a tad more circumspect in conversation than O’Donoghue.
Drummer Glen Power (from Stillorgan, has been a well-regarded session musician since his early teens) looks like he’s at a tennis match as his head moves to the left or right depending on who is speaking. A friendly and sincere type, he’s happy for the two original members of the band to do most of the talking.
If The Script’s first two albums sold in multi-platinum quantities, made them front-cover stars and got them noticed by Jennifer Aniston (a big fan), Paul McCartney and Beyoncé, and saw them touring the world with U2, then their profile has been considerably ramped up of late (on this side of the Atlantic at least) by Danny being a judge on BBC’s The Voice.
“It used to be girls hanging around outside my house, but now it’s guys in trench coats – the paparazzi,” says O’Donoghue. “That’s the big change in doing a big prime-time TV show. Sure, I got recognised before, but now it’s just insane. The other night in London we all went out for drinks together – myself, Mark and Glen. The story the next day in the papers was ‘Danny goes drinking with his two bodyguards’.”
For Sheehan, allowing O’Donoghue to take time off from the band to do The Voice was a “no-brainer”.
“People knew who The Script were but we wanted a ‘face’ for the band, and Danny being on TV gave us that,” he says. “When he went on the first episode it was all ‘Who is that guy?’, but now everyone knows him and, by extension, everyone knows The Script. I know there will be people saying real musicians shouldn’t be doing TV judging competitions but I’ve been around the music industry almost 20 years now and with the state the business is in now if you don’t take these opportunities to promote your band you will starve to death.
“We were all for Danny doing the show. I’ve done all the years of making tea for a living, trying to get a bit of session work here and there. Over in the US, I was living in places infested with cockroaches and hearing gunshots down the road.
“Myself and Danny were over in the States for years after the boy band didn’t take off and it was hard. We felt like giving up more than once but then we’d get a chance to remix a Justin Timberlake track or something and we’d keep on hanging on in there. I know exactly what Danny doing The Voice has done for this band’s profile”.
“To give you an example,” says O’Donoghue, “when we arrived back into Dublin airport we were all starving and all we wanted was Burger King. Now, I know we can use the airport lounges and all of that but we were determined to go to Burger King. We knew what it would mean – people asking for autographs and stopping to talk about a particular song and what it means to them – and that did happen but that’s fine. You won’t hear us complaining about fame after what we’ve been through on the way up.”
The Script began when a broke 15-year-old Mark Sheehan put an ad in the paper to sell off some of his instruments. Danny O’Donoghue answered the ad and found himself in Mark’s shed in James’s Street.
“That shed was where we first got talking and realised we had a lot in common about what we wanted to do musically,” says O’Donoghue. “I think of that first meeting in the Liberties whenever I meet one of my heroes – and at this stage I’ve been privileged enough to meet my entire record collection. There’s been times at shows when I look out and the front row looks like my iTunes page!”
Even as teenagers the two were thinking big. They blagged their way into a meeting with U2’s manager Paul McGuinness and played him some of their newly composed songs on their acoustic guitars. McGuinness was impressed by the fact that, although still in the boy band vein, they wrote and produced all their own material. He gave them some contacts in the US music studio world and when MyTown (their boy band) fell at the first hurdle – “it was a horrible failure” notes O’Donoghue – they moved to the US to learn how a music studio works.
“It was real bottom-up stuff – assistant to the tea maker and all of that,” says O’Donoghue. “I remember once sitting on a couch for three days in a row trying to come up with a top line melody for a big producer. If you left that couch someone else would take your place. All those broke years in the US were like what that book says [Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success] about having to put in the 10,000 hours work at something before you can be successful at it. So when I found myself waking up one day to find I was in New Zealand and someone was telling me we were number one in the charts I knew we had worked hard to get to that moment.”
There’s something refreshingly real and honest about The Script. Ignored or sneered at by the Dublin indie music community for being a “pop” band that have more in common with Coldplay and A-ha than with the bespoke leather-jacket angst of The Strokes (a “credible” band whose members went to a Swiss finishing school, lest we forget), the band have a shrug-of-the-shoulders response.
“We’re a band who had to record our guitars through toilet rolls to get a certain studio effect because we had no money,” says Sheehan. “We’re determined and resourceful – we’re not looking for music press credibility.”
“I remember the editor of [a certain well known music magazine] who had slated us in print coming over to me after a gig and looking for autographs for all of his family,” says Danny. “That made me laugh.”
In a few hours’ time they are due at Windmill Lane recording studios for a playback of the new album and a group interview with a small army of music journalists.
“Promo is such a big deal now,” says Sheehan. “We don’t just show up and answer questions: we understand how the whole process works. We’re not clueless rock/pop stars – those types get swallowed alive in this industry. We know all about management fees, about getting the right crew, about merchandising sales. We understand what it means for The Script to have been the last act signed by Sony Music who didn’t do a 360 degree deal. We’ve seen how the music world works from a few different angles. We can look after ourselves.”
Later on at Windmill Lane, Sheehan comes up to me to say that he had arrived a few hours before anyone else. “When you’ve spent as much time working in recording studios as I have, you know how important it is to get the sound right for a big media album playback. I came in early to fiddle around with a few knobs and change a few levels on the sound. You have to get these things right.”
The new Script album, #3, is released next Friday
Everything but the girl
Earlier this year Danny O’Donoghue broke up with his girlfriend, the Lithuanian model Irma Mail, after a four-year relationship. A song on the new album, Six Degrees of Separation, addresses the split, with O’Donoghue saying: “What I’m trying to say in that song is that there really should be a 12-step type group for people coming out of a serious relationship. There are so many feelings and emotions you have to deal with.”
Speculation as to what prompted the split, and whether O’Donoghue is seeing someone now, has bled all over the tabloids. The singer knows such attention comes with the territory but goes into Leveson Inquiry mode when he talks about the tactics used by some newspapers in trying to elicit information about his love life from members of his family.
“My sister, who has a small business, has a Facebook page,” he says. “She told me that she received a message from a certain media outlet saying that they would happily give her space if she wanted to talk about ‘Danny’s side of the love split story’.”
“But what really got to her, and me, was the offer of money to her if she talked, and also the knowledge they had about her business – the paper said they would promote it in their pages if she talked to them.”
