HALL OF FAMERS

The Script’s lead singer is talking sollox. Mr. Billy Sollox, to be precise. In an age when everything is heading straight down the middle, would that more famous local-lads-done-good and pop pin-ups developed a boozy, carefree alter-ego. Turns out Danny, champion of young, gifted warblers on The Voice UK and one important point of Dublin’s hip-pop, high-charting musical triangle, has his own indiscreet, late night hotel hallway stumbler that he isn’t meant to be telling me about.

But O’Donoghue’s in flying form this afternoon, in the middle of a “week of great news”, and fresh from banging out an Ellie Goulding cover and new single ‘Six Degrees Of Separation’ live on BBC Radio 1.
He’s giddy from the get-go – upon hearing that this feature falls under the banner of ‘Band of the Year’ he yells “GET IN!” then apologises to my inner ear – and eager to open up.
“I don’t even know if I can tell you, let me think...” he hesitates, “Anyway. Obviously we have pseudonyms in the band for when we check into hotels but we’ve come up with some brilliant ones. I’ll have to change it now, but it’s pretty hilarious. So Billy Sollocks is my one. Change the first letters around... There’s four or five of these names floating around, we’re trying to get them all famous. To the extent that, when we wrote the single ‘Live Like We’re Dying’ for Kris Allen, the winner of American Idol three years ago, Billy Sollox was credited as doing backgrounds on it.”
This revelation arrives when I ask him to verify some throwaway tabloid story suggesting that the 32-year-old insists on the same hotel room number everywhere he goes so he can find his way back to bed after a heavy night out.
“Fuck off, did that actually come out?! People might know that number...”
The tidy-up from this interview might take the singer time he simply doesn’t have. If Danny reckons that “‘rags to riches doesn’t come close to trying to describe” their story over the past four years, the last 12 months could be summed up as ‘hectic’. They’ve charted new territory, touring far beyond the Western world (“places where they don’t speak the same language but are singing along, knowing every lyric of every song”), scoring their first UK No. 1 with ‘Hall Of Fame’ (“We’ve always lost out to those ‘phenomenon’ songs like ‘I Kissed A Girl’ before”), and expanding their sound on #3 (“we didn’t want to change too much before we got that massive shot at the goals”).
There’s also becoming a star of the small screen, sitting alongside Jessie J, will.i.am and Tom Jones. Envision the travel schedule, and rock ‘n’ roll trappings for a second and sleep-deprived, Billy Sollox japery suddenly makes sense. Is there the danger that you go from plane to studio to show to hotel bar and endlessly back again?
“We definitely learnt the hard way,” he admits. “You think you have everything under control for a while and then, bang, you hit a brick wall. Normally that brick wall is on a TV show in front of millions of people! It’s everything in moderation, that’s what you’ve got to learn.”
Life lessons have been self-taught, but also come from illustrious places.
We’ve heard about the will.i.am hook-ups before. Big deal. We want to hear that he’s gone on the lash with a Welsh knight of the realm.
“That’s the only thing we do together really!” he laughs. “The coaches all went out and had a few drinks when we first met. Jessie and Will left first, about 11 o’clock. But me and Tom were sitting there till the wee hours. I was just listening to all his stories. You can’t go in as deep as he does when you’re sitting around a table having a few drinks. You’re just: ‘Fucking hell, I’m so lucky to be here right now. This is my window to the past. My window to the era I love, what I grew up listening to.’
“I made a fatal mistake though. My da loved Roy Orbison and he used to tell me about the boys and that you never leave the table before finishing a bottle. And what did I do? Fucking sham here gets up in the middle of it and walks off. Tom just clicks his fingers and is like, ‘Down. You never leave before we finish the bottle’. He said it in that old-school way too. ‘Sit down, it’s still showtime’. One of those moments when you realise you do have a lot to learn.”
Conversely, he’s fast becoming accustomed to the mentor role that comes with success and a seat on The Voice UK.
“It’s still a bit strange. Now I’m like velcro for demo tapes. But I have a genuine thirst for music, so it’s really nice that people think if they talk to me or give me their demo, I might actually do something with it. As opposed to fucking binning it when I get home.”
One fresh face that approached him was more famous than the others.
“We haven’t really been around to see One Direction’s rise to fame but I was at the BRITS last year and Niall Horan walked up to me and said, ‘Just wanted to say, we really, really look up to you, we listen to your albums all the time’. Fair balls to him. It’s very easy to throw mud at pop acts but he’s a good kid. He’s having the time of his life!”
Would similar success have gone to Danny’s head had he achieved it at the same tender age as the 19-year-old Mullingar star?
“Of course it would have! God has a plan for everybody, there’s a reason why it hit me later in life. Let me get all the nasty shit out of the way of the papers first, y’know?”
If there’s one band that’s all about overcoming the nastiness to keep the show going long after bus pass age, it’s popular Dartford beat combo The Rolling Stones. We can attribute some of Danny’s chirpiness to the fact that, having pestered his manager about tickets, our man recently caught Mick, Keith and the rest in London. Always eager to take a tip or two from other acts, Danny was particularly impressed by the stripped-back opening, as the band launched into a no-frills ‘Sympathy For The Devil’.
“Sometimes less is more,” he notes. “You just wanted to be like, ‘Fucking hell, that’s actually Keith Richards playing!’ It made me think. You might come out to The Script next time and there’ll be nothing on stage. Or it might be the ‘Million Light Bulbs’ tour!”
It wasn’t just the veteran performers catching his eye that night. The audience were pretty intriguing to boot.
“There’s Adam Clayton, Paul McGuinness, Noel Gallagher, John Squire all in this one box. Looking at all the characters, how witty, charismatic and knowledgeable they are, I’m like, ‘Why the feck are you guys not entertaining us on television every week?’ We’re starved of those people right now.”
Is he part of the ‘let them have their privacy’ brigade or does he barrel in and start hobnobbing?
“Listen, I get in where I fit in. I didn’t get to where I am because I’m a good singer! It’s because I’ve got the gift of the gab, dude! I love it, I’ll get straight over there! Going, ‘Listen, love your music, I know you’ve heard it a billion times, but I’m a big fan!’
“I remember a few Christmases ago, Coldplay were playing the O2 and ‘We Cry’ had just come out. I ended up having a few drinks with the lads from Coldplay and U2 in this private bar. I remember Chris was sitting in a corner and the lads were out the back. So I wandered out. I was so hyped from the gig that I walked over and went, ‘WHAT’S WRONG WITH YIS ALL? YOU’RE COLDPLAY FOR FUCK’S SAKE! GET UP AND HAVE THE CRAIC!’ They were like, ‘Fucking hell, you’re right! We just rocked to 16,000 people!’ How do you deal with that, though?”
One way is to stay grounded. Make sure you give a bit back. Acting as cheerleader for Coldplay is one thing. Coming to the aid of Long Islanders stuck by Hurricane Sandy is another.
Scheduled to play the New York enclave, home to members of drummer Glen Power’s family, Mother Nature intervened and the show was cancelled. Rather than take deserved time off, they scrambled to put together a benefit gig for those affected on their rest day.
“We could either drive on to the next venue or detour, try and put on a show. The three of us were on the phone on the coach the whole way there, pulling in favours. We ended up raising a lot of money. Half the people at the show now didn’t have homes. So in the middle of that craziness, they got to forget about it for awhile. Not forget, but be enhanced by the fact that everyone was going through the same thing and there for the right reasons. We donated every penny to the local Red Cross. They were in dire need. Try and turn every negative into a positive.”
It’s the business The Script are in. And business is good.