The Script on the tragedy and illness surrounding their hit album

When it rains, it pours, and Dublin band The Script know too well how that feels, following the loss of two band members' parents and an injury that threatened the life of another member. And did we mention lead singer Danny's spontaneous lung collapse? Well, it's been that kind of year...

When The Script began recording We Cry in LA, Sheehan got the news that his mother was terminally ill and so he came home straight away.

To keep close to his mother as she was in hospital, he built a recording studio in his back garden so that the band to continue working and he could see his mum during her last days.

Four months after the death of Sheehan’s mother, O’Donoghue’s father died unexpectedly. The loss of a parent is a harrowing experience, yet The Script kept working as a means of going through the grieving process.

And events took a more tragic turn as their drummer, Glen Power, had to undergo an emergency operation after he cracked his skull on a toilet basin.

“I’d fractured my head in two places, which caused the blood vessels underneath the skull to burst and caused hematoma," he says. "I was nine days in hospital and I was dizzy when I came out; I couldn’t walk in a straight line.”

But all this has only made them stronger, Danny says:
"After all the things that have gone on, there’s not one thing that can stop this band."

"People ask, ‘Do you fight in the band?’ That doesn’t even come into it when you’ve been through the stuff we’ve been through together. It’s been destiny, but it hasn’t been handed to us – we’ve clawed our way to every bit of the success that we’ve had. It’s quite easy on a first listen to dismiss what this band is. You can presume that we didn’t produce it; you can presume that we didn’t write it; you can presume that we were put together by a record company. You can presume all these things. None of that is true."

Find out the whole truth – including inside info on the band's genesis, how they feel about their media coverage, and more on the ups and downs of success – in the newHot Press, out now.