3 Shall Overcome

The Script have just incurred the wrath of the Irish Federation of Chambermaids by ending their Hot Press photo-shoot with a paper, food and phone fight. As a result, the previously pristine Morrison Hotel penthouse is now littered with ripped-up press releases, half-eaten sandwiches and upended telecommunications equipment. It’s not exactly Keith Moon driving a Rolls-Royce into a swimming pool or Led Zep pleasuring a young lady with a red snapper (allegedly), but it shows how giddily excited Danny O’Donoghue, Mark Sheehan and Glen Power are about the release of their new #3 album.

The big deal of it hitting the racks this week has been made even bigger by its lead single, ‘Hall Of Fame’, featuring Danny’s fellow The Voice UK judge will.i.am.
“I still can’t believe will.i.am is on our record!” Danny beams with that Ultrabrite smile of his. “Towards the end of The Voice, I played him three or four songs we’d been mixing and when it got to ‘Hall Of Fame’ he was like, ‘Play it again!’ So I did and at the end he said, ‘Can I have that song?’ I was like, ‘What do you mean? To play to other people?’ ‘No, I want it for myself.”
The polite answer, I presume, being, “Fuck off, write your own insanely catchy pop/hip hop crossover tune!”
“Yeah, exactly, ‘Fuck off, Will!’ No, I was there in the polite Irish way going, ‘Yeah, we’ll think about it.’ As soon as he left I called Mark and said, ‘We can’t give him the song, but let’s get him on it.’ will.i.am was cool with that so we got the drinks in and arranged studio time and, bang, he stood us up! I’m like, ‘What a bugger!’ The next day I asked him, ‘What happened last night?’ and he was like, ‘I was at this dinner.’ ‘You blew me off for a dinner?’ ‘Yeah, with Bill Clinton.’ So, I went, ‘Okay, fair enough. Just this once…’ It kind of turned into the will.i.won’t.show!”
Boom and indeed boom! How did The Script finally get their man?
“Will calls me up and says, ‘What are you doing tonight?’ and I go, ‘Here’s what you’re doing tonight – I’m coming round to collect you in a taxi and you’re recording the fucking song!’”
So they stalked him?
“Basically, yeah,” Danny laughs. “He was one step away from taking out a barring order! We’re nobodies compared to will.i.am who, another night, was off seeing Eva Mendes. Hollywood actresses, a President of the United States… trying to prioritise recording a duet with us in amongst all that stuff was quite difficult. It ended up being recorded in his hotel room where he had a whole studio laid out!”
“Dan rang up all breathless saying, ‘We’re doing it right now, cool?’” Mark recalls. “I broke the speed-limit to get over there and we just shot the shit over the music.”
will.i.am did what the lads have never done on a Script record, which is use Auto-Tune. Asking him about said warbling chipmunk audio processor™ in 2009, Danny proffered: “The problem is that it doesn’t give you the natural timbre of a voice, which means kids who have the Chris Browns and Rihannas of this world as their role models are singing in Auto-Tune. That’s the exact opposite of what music should be.”
Is it one rule for TV talent show contestants and another for the Black Eyed Pea judging them?
“Well, he enjoys Auto-Tune,” Mark neatly side-steps. “He uses it as an instrument – Will really enjoys using technology. But if you think of the songs he’s written for other artists – ‘Ordinary People’ which
he gave to John Legend for instance – it’s
completely organic.”
What was it like producing a producer?
“He said to me, ‘Look after them vocals, won’t you?’” Mark continues. “I did it in as natural a way as possible, so that you’re not noticing it’s will.i.am after Danny comes in…
“Well, until it gets to the chorus and then it’s, ‘Wooooargh, will.i.am!’ It’s a throwback to the old days when Tom Jones and Van Morrison would meet, have a few pints and get to know each other before going into the studio. Too often now with the internet you have someone doing it in Botswana, someone doing it in the Himalayan mountains – the parts are phoned in.”
Yes, if I hear another collaborative Botswanan/Himalayan pop song clogging up the charts I won’t be responsible for my actions. THE BASTARDS!!! As well as being the first Script album to feature a collaboration – and an Auto-Tuned one at that! – #3 was also assembled differently to its predecessors.
“We were three or four songs in when Danny got the offer to do The Voice,” Glen reflects. “It was a massive decision – we’ve only ever been together all the time in the studio. We write and produce absolutely everything and deliver the record to the label. We’d brought a mini-production case with us on the Science & Faith tour and were lashing ideas down the whole time. And suddenly it worked out that Dan was with the BBC most days, and then double-jobbing by coming in to us at night.”
There are kids in Indian sweat shops doing less hours than that.
“Ah, listen, no rest!” the downtrodden worker resumes. “I have to thank the lads for picking the slack up in the studio. Time-wise it was hard, but you get really fired up seeing all these amazing singers hanging with Tom Jones, Jesse and Will. By the end of my BBC day, I was going, ‘Right, it’s my turn in front of the microphone!’”
How long was it before Danny stopped going, “Jesus fucking Christ, I’m sat next to will.i.am!”?
“Eh, I’m still doing it! I really am. I can’t get over how cool the guy is, ‘cos a lot of your heroes you really shouldn’t meet. I loved the Black Eyed Peas even before Fergie joined. When we went to America first they were on the radio all the time – it was something to aspire to. Nothing else matters to him but music. We were sparring every day on lyrics. I’d sing Will a chorus and he’d go, ‘That’s dope man, that’s dope’ and come back with a rhyme. We’re very similar in that we both write and produce; only he’s a tad more successful than me!”
How does Danny reconcile his hatred of manufactured pop with appearing on a show – hello, Jaz Ellington and Max Milner! – where the contestants are more likely to end up in Butlin’s than the top 30?
“14 million check The Voice out, so it’s one hell of a shop window,” he counters. “I thought it was important to have somebody on the show representing bands and explaining how if you want a sustainable career in music you have to work your socks off. Tom, Jesse and me; none of us were selling the contestants false dreams. If anything we were giving them a reality check – ‘This is a tough fucking business, which will suck you in and spit you out if you let it.’
“As for Butlin’s – singing there’s probably better than being on the dole or doing a 9 to 5 you hate.”
Which is a pretty decent riposte to a cynical old bugger like me who’d rather wank pigs in hell
than spend a nanosecond in Tulisa, Louis and
Gary’s company.
One of #3’s many standouts – I’m not just being nice here, it’s an absolute humdinger of a pop record – is the song dealing with Danny’s split last year from long-time model girlfriend, Irma Mali. There’s no disguising his anguish in ‘Six Degrees Of Separation’ as he mournfully intones: ‘First you think the worst is a broken heart/What’s gonna kill you is the second part/And the third is when your world splits down the middle/Fourth, you’re gonna think that you fixed yourself/Fifth you see ‘em out with someone else/And the sixth is when you admit you may have fucked up a little.’
In another previous Hot Press interview, Danny had told me, “She’s an amazing person who, no matter what, is there for me. Since the start of The Script, she’s been in my life, so I don’t know any different. I can imagine if you weren’t so anchored, you could end up going off the rails.”
So, has he been derailed?
“Can I plead the fifth amendment?”
“Let’s just say he’s having loads of fun!”
Glen laughs.
“And being married I’m living vicariously through both of them!” Mark laughs mischievously.
Frippery aside, the break-up from both Irma and her daughter from a previous relationship, who Danny doted on, must hurt.
“It’s hard,” he nods, “but I’m kind of finding my feet now.”
Gary Lightbody told me it’s one thing writing a song about your ex- at three in the morning with a bottle of whiskey inside you, and quite another soberly hearing it on the radio and thinking, “Fuck, she’s at home listening to that!”
“Funnily enough, I never thought of it until today,” he says, a look of (hopefully) mock horror spreading across his face. “Now I’m sitting here thinking, ‘I need to call her!’ Anybody who’s around me knows that they’re probably going to end up in one of my songs. I’ve no shame in letting people know how I feel. Our albums are diaries – it’s things you can only deal with through music. I know it’s probably hard for people to listen to, but I had to get it out. I’d always go for truth and honesty over anything; you can’t think of the consequences at the end. I think that’s what’s endearing about this band.”
Another song that’s been on ‘repeat’ in Hot Press is ‘Good Ol’ Days’, a pissed-down-the-pub-with-your-mates singalong that’s hot favourite to be #3’s
second single.
“That’s exactly what it is – a Script song in a bar that you can sing loud,” Danny nods. “There’s a line in it – ‘Piercing through my skin like a heroin dart’ – which we’re probably going to have to edit out for radio. It’s a reference to joy being addictive – and what’s more addictive than heroin? – which I’m sure I’ll have to defend in the weeks to come.”
Given the shitstorm that’s arisen from Rihanna wearing a t-shirt with a picture of a joint being
rolled on it, I’m sure hysterical Joe Duffy Show over-reaction awaits.
“It’s a tip to the old days in Dublin when you’d grab your guitar, grab your tambourine and have a singsong,” Danny resumes. “Not just in the pub, but at home. I grew up in a household where Friday, Saturday and Sunday – perhaps Wednesday and Thursday as well! – there was music being sung, jokes cracked and people dancing.”
What were the O’Donoghue parlour favourites?
“‘Mise Eiré’ was massive. Elvis, Elton John, The Beatles, Neil Diamond. My dad played Roy Orbison and Fats Domino… anything pop that had some melody in it. One of my brothers was into Metallica’s Ride The Lightening and Black Sabbath, and another more mellow, bass-driven stuff. My sister Andrea liked Soundgarden and Ugly Kid Joe. It was a big mish-mash.”
Talking of Mr. O’Donoughue Sr., the loss of Danny and Mark’s dads is the inspiration for #3 weepie ‘If You Could See Me Now’.
“That’s the album’s whiskey song!” Mark laughs. “We’d been through so many bottles of wine on this album that I thought I’d change it and bring some whiskey in. After a few we were looking at each other going, ‘Right, we’re ready for this song.’ But we did have to fuck off to opposite sides of the room. He did a verse, I did a verse. It was super-honest. It’s so emotionally-charged that I don’t know whether it’s a good song or not.”
It’s a good song!
“Thanks,” Danny chimes in. “Out of my whole career, that’s the song I’m most proud of. I’m not saying it’s the best song, but it’s the most truthful and gets some very complex emotions and thoughts into a few words. As long as I’ve known Mark I’ve never heard him speak about his dad like that. I know for a few days before that I was going off the fucking rails. There was a massive sense of, ‘There’s something here that has to be massaged out.’ I was crying when I was recording it. I couldn’t look at Mark because I knew what he was doing and what I was doing. The hairs on the back of my neck and arms were standing up for that whole session and I was like, ‘Fuck this, who cares if it doesn’t end up a good song? We’re dealing with stuff that needs to be dealt with.’ The song itself isn’t saying, ‘Look at me now, I’m a success.’ It’s saying your parents are the ones who give you the clip round the ear – ‘You’re fucking smoking too much, you’re drinking too much.’ They wouldn’t say, ‘Well done with The Script!’ And the thing is… you miss it. You even miss the slaps. You miss all of it.”
Whom amongst their fellow Irish songwriters do they rate?
“Bono is one of the best,” Danny says before I’ve even finished the question. “The reason being his endless pursuit of the truth. He’s willing to stand on stage and bare all, good or bad. He’ll say, ‘I’m being an arsehole, please forgive me.’ That’s the kind of level we’d love to go to as a band. You’d hope to write a song like ‘One’ where you get shivers thinking of it line by line. He’s not Irish, but Chris Martin would have a similar effect on me.”
“Imelda May really focuses on lyrics,” Mark ventures. “Danny from The Coronas is doing
well melodically.”
“Christy Moore,” Glen adds. “People in Ireland like to think he’s this traditional folk artist, when in America they’d almost see him as fucking hip-hop. I’m not kidding, his rhythm and flow…”
“Maverick Sabre’s brilliant,” Danny adds. “Our paths always cross. Like us he’s taken off the
shackles and done what’s in his heart musically, and it sounds amazing.”
I know they sent The Script a crate of champagne and Guinness for Black Velvet-making purposes when they supported Paul McCartney in Shea Stadium, but have U2 imparted any fatherly advice to them?
“We’ve toured and played with them but we’ve never really sat down… it would be great to shoot the shit with U2. I had a bizarre experience before The Script when Danny and I were signed [as boyband My Town] to Principle Management,” Mark reminisces. “It was at this Christmas party and they sat me opposite The Edge who I bombarded with every recording question I could. I was asking him about microphones, where he places his amps. I’m sure he was pissed off and wanting to get the egg nog into him, but he sat there politely answering everything I asked.”
Few bands have clocked up as much mileage in recent years as The Script, with several runs round the States, similarly extensive European jaunts and sell-out dates everywhere from Dubai, Jakarta and Muscat to Johannesburg, Sinagpore and Cozumel. Have the lads learned anything from their globetrotting?
“Yeah, I only realised when I travelled that we’re the only country that has a musical instrument on our passports,” Danny enthuses. “That’s how much it means to us as a nation. It’s our weapon and our shield. I fucking love it!”
The Script’s good friend Niall Breslin reckons that as a nation we’re too passive and need to grow a collective pair of balls. Fair comment?
“This political correctness annoys me,” Mark ventures. “I probably piss a lot of people off with my brutal honesty. What I say to them is, ‘I didn’t give you fucking cancer, I just told you how it is. You’re not walking away with a disease, get fucking over it!’ We’re only trying to better things by speaking out against them. I really am not politically correct, which is probably why I’m not on The Voice and he is!”
“The Mouth, he’d be on The Mouth!” Danny shrieks with delight.
“I do agree with Bressie,” Mark elaborates. “We had the Bonos and the Geldofs out there taking chances when they were young, but it’s all got a little bit safe. People are frightened to ruffle feathers, which is a shame because well-travelled Irish people are articulate, fair and have really strong opinions. We need to raise our voices.”

Will.i.am isn’t the only guest on #3 with ‘No Words’ featuring a Ms. A. Banshee on backing vocals.
“We had a friend of ours research tons of old recordings that had gone out of copyright,” Mark explains, “and they found this yelping banshee from years and years ago. We thought, ‘Wicked, that’s a chorus!’ It sounds fucking great – Dan’s rapping in the middle-eight and we brought in a 26-piece orchestra.”
Just because they could?
“Yeah, kinda!” he grins. “It’s at the other end of the budgetary scale to the first album when to get a certain guitar sound I used a Roland Cube and an AKD mic stuck in a toilet-roll holder! I thought, ‘Fuck that, orchestra in!’”
“Yeah,” Danny continues, “it was chorus first and then the verses – ‘I can talk all day long about life/After so many wars how we’re all still alive/I could speak all night long about the world/How it took me thirty years just to find one girl/I could shoot shit for days all about guitars/A Gibson or a Fender, it depends on who you are/But when I try to say something that you never heard/There are no words.’ It all came flooding out.”
Glen Hansard spoke recently of feeling guilty about celebrating his Oscar win in Los Angeles while mates of his back home were struggling to make ends meet.
“I can relate to that,” Danny nods. “You’ve friends who were buying you pints and driving you to rehearsals when you were broke and now the tables have turned. You’re suddenly doing something that in their eyes is a huge success. It’s hard to keep the relationship going because we’re constantly on tour. Everybody else’s perception of who we are changes, but in our eyes we’re still the same; we haven’t changed. We check each other all the time, you know? Maybe if I was in another band and they praise you, praise you, praise you you’d get a big fucking head, but these people are salt of the earth. They hold a mirror up to me every day and go, ‘Right, are you in check?’ I don’t know why, but being from Dublin we almost feel like we’re not entitled to it
or something.”
Are there proportionally more dickeads in the music and TV industries than there are in civilian life?
“Fame is a magnifying glass. If you were an asshole to start with you’ll be a very big asshole at the end. I blame the parents – ‘You should have just smacked the fucking head off him/her as a kid.’
There’s a tendency to indulge people in a way that wouldn’t happen if they were working in a bank. ‘I’m the world’s best at handing out money.’ ‘Fuck off!’”
The last time I met the chaps they were psyching themselves up for their July 2011 homecoming in the Aviva, a celebratory affair that attracted 50,000 rabid fans who clapped, sung, cheered, squealed and generally orgasm-ed their way through the show.
“When we left the hotel I was shitting it,” Danny confesses, “but it was one of those gigs where everything came together. Walking out I didn’t want to look up because I was too scared. It’s quite a thing when that many people have come to see you. I remember supporting U2 and thinking, ‘God, wouldn’t it be amazing if one day we were able to do a stadium show of our own?’
“The best part of that day was that we caught it on DVD. We only had one shot to get it right but the stars aligned – the weather was great, the audience was up for it and we all played well. There’s a point in the show – it gets me every time – when you can see me mouthing at the lads, ‘Take it all fucking in!’ You have to savour those moments because they may never happen again.”
Somehow I suspect they will!

#3 is out now on Sony.