A sort of homecoming

It’s two o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon and Danny O’Donoghue sounds like he might have had a few too many pints of foamy last night.

“Was I on the piss?” he croaks down the trans-Atlantic blower from Boston. “I wish! We did such an energetic gig in Central Park – there was something like 7,500 people there – that I ended up doing damage to my voice. When you’re playing somewhere like that you have to go hell for leather – and damn the consequences!
“We’ve had to cancel a couple of gigs and chill out a bit, which is weird after all the frantic racing around the place we’ve been doing.”
The last time I got to indulge in social intercourse with The Script’s 30-year-old lead singer was last October when he was worrying about how the band’s then soon-to-be-released second album, Science & Faith, would be received.
“There are a lot of bands who’ve had big-ish first albums and then disappeared,” Danny says, mindful of the ‘now you see them/now you don’t’ fate that’s befallen the likes of Duffy, Toploader and fellow Dubs The Thrills, all of whom received unwelcome crash-courses in the fickleness of the record-buying public.
His concerns proved to be unwarranted, with Science & Faith debuting at No. 1 in Ireland, 4 in the UK and, perhaps even more importantly in terms of their globe-conquering ambitions, No. 5 in America where they’ve been touring their pert asses off this year.
“We’ve been doing as much promo as possible in support of the album and ‘For The First Time’, which has been on the pop chart for 19 weeks. As well as an hour-and-forty minutes pretty much every night, we’ve being doing lounge gigs during the day where you head off to a local bar and play a few songs acoustically, radio sessions, soundcheck parties, meet ‘n’ greets and pretty much anything that helps get the word out there. When you’re spinning plates over here, you want to make sure they’re all still up in the air!”
While some bands take degree courses in false modesty, Danny seems genuinely gobsmacked that they’re currently rubbing radio station playlists with the likes of Lady Gaga, Adele, Rihanna and Beyoncé.
“To be honest, we’re still trying to justify it in our minds. Do we deserve this? Is it coincidence? Is it luck? Are we on to something? There are a lot of questions that come with success. It also answers the people who’ve slung mud at you from the peanut gallery. We’re too busy to wave two fingers and say ‘fuck you!’ to our critics, but if our sales figures can do it for us, great!”
Did Louis Walsh FedEx over a congratulatory bottle of Champagne when The Script scored the US Top 5 album hit that has eluded all of his acts?
“Hahahahahahahaha! No, we don’t have any interaction with Louis Walsh at all.”
Did Danny find a bar in which to patriotically watch Jedward do their Eurovision thing?
“Would you believe it, no!” he chuckles. “I did find a bar to watch Man United V Barcelona in the Champions’ League. That’s what ‘Breakeven’ – “They say bad things happen for a reason/But no wise words is gonna stop the bleeding” – is about. It’s a football song! No, we got into Vegas pretty early in the morning; I crashed on the tour bus until two and then found somewhere that had the game on. It was men against boys, wasn’t it?”
Yes, and for an ABU, the funniest thing I’ve seen since Michael Carrick set up Man City’s FA Cup semi-final winner. As chuffed as Danny is with The Script’s Stateside success, it must be a pain in the nuts – sometimes literally! – being away from his Lithuanian model girlfriend Irma Mali for months at a time.
“You should see some of our Skype dates!” he laughs. “All the newspapers will be trying to hack into my computer now! No, you do what you can to make it work. Anybody who’s in an industry where they’re away from their loved ones a lot knows that you have to keep it interesting and at all times be contactable. I talk to me missus two or three times a day about the same mundane things everybody else talks about – what’s in the fridge, what needs to be fixed around the house.
“She’s an amazing person who. no matter what. is there for me. I’m blessed to have someone in my life like that.”
I imagine that if he didn’t have a wife or girlfriend at home, it’d be very easy for him to succumb to the fleshly temptations of the road.
“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 that you could end up going off the rails. I come across bands all the time who’ve been around for a bit and regret certain things they’ve done. We’re lucky to have people who really care about us, and push us forward for the right reasons.”
You may have seen Danny’s missus on the telly recently without knowing – Irma Mali being one of the models that took to the catwalk at the National Convention Centre last month, in honour of Her Maj.
“That’s right, man, she sent me a text and picture of her on the catwalk. I was like, ‘That’s cool, but you do that every day’. She said, ‘Look behind at the crowd!’ and when I did there was the Queen on one side and Prince Phillip on the other. I went: ‘That’s fucking brilliant!’”
As a proud inner-city Dub, what did Danny make of Mrs. Windsor – bet you wish you’d been there now, Gerry! – bowing her head in respect to the 1916 dead?
“Being on the road we only saw little bits of it, but yeah, we couldn’t believe how historic it was. We’d love to have been involved in some way, but this insane touring schedule of ours didn’t allow it.”
We’d only just said, “Goodbye, please come again” to the Queen when Obamamania kicked in.
“You know what the most impressive thing about President Obama’s visit was? Him drinking his pint of Guinness down to the last drop! It’s been great for us over here because people finally know where Dublin is! We were at the Billboard Awards last month presenting ‘Best New Band’ and when we went out we had a line each…”
A line each? In front of 5,000 people? I can feel a “Danny O’Donoghue: ‘My Cocaine Shame!’” headline coming on.
“Hahahahaha! Yeah, you can if you like! ‘Danny, Mark and Glen did a line each at the Billboard Awards’. There’s the piece! Classic. No, we did our bit and afterwards our Twitter lit up with people going, ‘We had no idea you guys were Irish’ and ‘Where did you get the accents from?’ There’s still a massive part of the world that doesn’t actually know we’re Irish. I can say it as much as I want from the stage and get the tricolour sewn into the lining of my leather jacket, but it doesn’t even have one percent of the effect of Barack Obama rocking up in Dublin.”
While his usual impeccably friendly and polite self, Danny seems a lot more guarded than he was when we chinwagged with him last October. Gary Lightbody – a man who’d previously been only too happy to discuss his disastrous love life and Bacchanalian excess – became similarly reticent when Snow Patrol started selling serious numbers
of records.
“One of the things that happens when you start to get a little bit bigger is that something throwaway you say – ‘We might work with this person or that person’ – ends up as a ‘The Script are definitely going to…’ story on TMZ or 98fm at home.”
This seems an appropriate time to discuss – excuse me while I adopt my porcine tabloid voice – Danny O’Donoghue’s extraordinary “I’ll give Jarvis Cocker a clatter if I see him!” outburst.
Talking to Scotland’s The Daily Record about The Script appearing alongside Pulp at next month’s T In The Park festival, Danny is purported to have said: “I am not a big Pulp fan. Jarvis Cocky. I’m not into him at all. The audacity of Jarvis Cocker to think he is important enough for people to give a damn what he thinks. I don’t like his style. I don’t like his music. I won’t be steering clear of him, but he should be steering clear of me.”
Celebrity Deathmatch or what?
“When you heard it, what did you think?”
Danny asks.
That you couldn’t really argue with the
smartarse bit.
“Hahahahaha! Look, there’s been a lot of hoo-ha over that these past few months. I’d gotten into a conversation with the journalist about Pulp and Jarvis’ Michael Jackson protest at the Brits. I jokingly said, ‘There’s no way he’d have ended up on stage with us because Mark would probably have smashed him in the head with a guitar’. It was talking about something that happened ten years ago and which I haven’t thought about for that same amount of time. Anyway, it gets spun and spun and spun into me threatening Jarvis Cocker that if he gets on stage at any of our shows I’m going to do this and that to him.
“Honestly, how funny is that? Think about the two biggest nerds in your school having a fight and that’s what it would be like! We’re not talking about (well tasty pro-boxers) Shane Mosley/Manny Pacquiao here, it’s fucking Danny O’Donoghue/Jarvis Cocker!”
Well, if it does happen I’m putting my tenner on the Liberties Lamper! Or would the James’ Street Jackhammer be a better nom de ring? I’ll let Danny decide. Threat to beat the living daylights out of Jarvis officially rescinded, let us turn our attention to the news that The Script have joined Usher and Pharrell Williams on the list of people Tinie Tempah – another man who’s gone supernova recently in the States – wants on his new album.
“Pharrell Williams is doing it too, is he? I didn’t know that. That’s cool! Before The Script had even started, a friend got me an invite to the party PlayStation were putting on for Pharrell’s birthday. I ended up getting a bit drunk and boogying on down in front of Snoop Dogg, Seth Green and Mark Wahlberg. Everybody there had a name or a brand… except us two!”
Talking last week to Moby – okay, okay, I know how wankily name-dropping that sounds – he told me, “I don’t like celebrity, but I do like the doors it opens for you.” This being in relation to people like Bono, Michael Stipe, Lou Reed and Britney Spears that he wouldn’t have got to work with if Play hadn’t gone multi, multi, multi-platinum.
“What Moby was saying is very true,” Danny agrees. “I can take or leave celebrity, but the opportunities it provides you with are immense. I’ve been able to present songs and suggest collaborations to people that never in my wildest dreams did I ever think I’d have access to. Forget about The Script for a minute – we’re writers and producers too, and people are knocking on our door for songs. We’re mostly greedy though and keep them for ourselves.”
Come on O’Donoghue, name some of these
A-List names!
“No, no, I can’t! If it was a case of just ringing an artist up and saying, ‘Let’s do it!’, fair enough but there are managers and record labels and lawyers and publishers who all have to be consulted before you can make it happen.”

At this point the phone clicks and we’re joined on the line by The Script’s guitarist, techie-in-chief and ponderer of all things music industry, Mark Sheehan, for what now becomes a tag-team interview. Is he as excited about working with Mr. Tempah as his bandmate is?
“Tinie kind of kicked it off for us in the press,” Mark enthuses. “He kept mentioning us, saying if there’s anyone he’d work with it’d be The Script. That kind of pricked our ears up because we’ve always loved hip-hop. I remember us covering ‘Written In The Stars’ for BBC Radio One’s Live Lounge and the reaction being: ‘The fucking Script and Tinie Tempah? Let me hear that!’ He loved it and called us up saying, ‘Look, I’m trying to break Australia. What’s the deal with you guys out there? Can I support you?’ We thought it would be a great thing for our fans to be exposed to somebody like him, so said, ‘Absolutely!’ People went fucking nuts for him when he came out on stage, so it was great.
“Now and then you tour with an artist that you don’t click with, but we clicked with him. He’s over in the States too and everywhere he goes he’s texting me, ‘Are you in LA yet? We’ll hang out’ or ‘Let’s get together in Vegas’. We eventually managed to be in the same city as each other last week in New York. We just started writing a couple of songs together and he’s coming to the Aviva with us as well.”
Okay, techie-nerd time. The impending launch of the iCloud has reignited the monetisation of music debate, with the latest Apple gizmo allowing people to take the entire contents of their computer with them wherever they go – including any library of tracks they might have amassed – for a flat fee of $25 and access them via their iPhone or iPad. Once installed, iCloud identifies the tracks stored on a computer, whether or not they were paid for in the first place. The record company people I've been speaking to aren't impressed, and not just because it lets internet service providers off scott free. Apple are now, they suggest, making themselves accessories to the original illegal use of music. Plus, of course, there’s the issue of whether or not Apple will be passing on any of the $25 to the copyright owners.
“The whole downloading thing is incredibly hard,” Mark reflects. “The networks are the ones who supply the internet in the first place, therefore they are the people who should be charged for it (the music). They’re the ones allowing people to have it in their homes. It’s like saying, ‘We’re going to put a beer tap in every home, but you’re not allowed to fucking use it, okay? It’s free but you’re not allowed to put your mouth under the tap or pour yourselves a Guinness’. People are just going to pour themselves a fucking beer and drink it!
“What’s happened is that a culture’s been built up whereby people now believe music should be free," Mark ventures. "Music used to say something about you as a person. You used to look at somebody and how they dress and say, ‘Well, he’s into rock or he’s into punk or he’s into hip hop’. Nowadays it doesn’t work like that. Apple’s iCloud is great for the people who’ve been using Apple products for a few years – research has shown they’re the people who will use it, but they’re not the ones who’ve been illegally downloading. Unlike someone who’s been Windows-based for the last decade.”
One thing is for sure: the little guys are going to continue to get squeezed. Still, with an audience of 140,000 to play to back at home base within the next few weeks, in a double-whammy that takes in The Aviva Stadium and Oxegen, The Script hardly fit into that category any more. At this stage they’re old Punchestown hands, but playing ‘The Venue Formerly Known As Lansdowne Road’ as headliners must be a huge fucking deal for them.
“It’s constantly at the forefront of our minds because, you know, it’s back home,” Mark proffers. “These are the shows that define you as a band. We’re going to have to take on the massive buzz of a stadium and step it up, but hopefully without losing the intimacy. We just have to do what we do – y’know, we can’t change our music. All we can do
is hope that the vibe’s there on the day. They gave Glen a little tour of the place – he says it’s awesome – but me and Danny have never been there since it was rebuilt.”
Is there a temptation to go mental à la U2 and get a robotic octopus or something?
“No,” he chuckles, “The Script doing that just wouldn’t be believable. With us the music comes first and there’s nothing that really matches the music. I don’t think descending on to the stage in a giant lemon would work for us!”
Has Mr. O’Donoghue got his head round the enormity of the event?
“I have and I haven’t,” he resumes. “A lot of things can start to prey on your mind ­– your family, the guest-list, the set-list, us playing well, all those type of things. It’s a frightening fucking time I have to say! It’s like an 18th or a 21st or a wedding party multiplied by the number of people in The Aviva. That’s what it’s going to feel like.
“I just want to know that as a day it’s going to go down in Script history as a genuine moment. We’re going to be putting everything into that show – emotionally, monetarily. Sparks have to fly because it was a spark at a U2 show that made us think, ‘These guys drink the same Dublin water as us. If they can do it, so fucking can we!’ Fingers crossed we’re going to start fires in young kids, who in ten or 15 years time when they’re playing the Aviva are going to say, ‘It was seeing The Script on Saturday July 2, 2011 that made us want to be in a band’. It’s going to be a great day for people to go out, forget what’s going on with the recession, have a good old singalong and celebrate Irish music because, y’know, this country has got it all going on.”

The Script play The Aviva, Dublin (July 2); Oxegen, Punchestown (8); and Tennent’s Vital, Ward Park, Bangor (August 23).