Hot Press meets Mark Sheehan from The Script

The backstage environs of the world’s EnormoDomes are fast becoming the natural habitat of Ireland’s latest team of world-conquering superstars, The Script. So much so that they’ve decided it’s best to get productive in the twilight zone that exists between arriving at a venue and plugging in onstage, as thousands roar along to ‘Breakeven’.

“We’ve just set up a mobile studio,” explains Mark Sheehan, evidently excited by his band’s new toy. “So in every venue we go into we can have a full room for recording. We call it the Madhouse Mobile and it comes with us everywhere on the road. Rather than poking around in the venue doing fuck-all, we can be in a room – writing.”
Alternatively, mind, they can be shooting the breeze with their favourite publication, taking stock of what’s been happening on the promotional trail they’ve been blazing across the seven seas. It’s all to promote their third album (you’ll know the Twitter-nodding Ronseal title by now), which hit No.1 in the Irish album charts, No.2 in the UK, and went top 10 in a plethora of other territories. It is a record which finds the band in a reflective, emotionally raw mood. ‘The End Where I Begin’ deals with the loss of both lead singer Danny O’Donoghue’s father and Sheehan’s mother. ‘If You Could See Me Now’ is a toast to absent friends and family. Sheehan, in particular, has been getting a lot off his chest.
Right now, though, he’s in ebullient form. With a massive fanbase snapping up tickets in whatever continent they swoop down on, they’re entering that Coldplay realm where there’s an air of invincibility surrounding them through dint of sheer numbers. By way of illustration, The Script are just back from playing to 14,000 people at a festival in Dubai, where they outsold the likes of The Stone Roses and Deep Purple. “It’s a bizarre place to be,” Sheehan marvels, “Everything’s completely ‘made up’, in the middle of the desert. Not an ounce of trash or dirt on the ground. I felt like I was in the Truman Show!”
Not that surreal scenes are unusual for the Dublin lads these days. Since The Script ascended to pop’s high-charting table, they have rubbed shoulders with some of their own heroes. Without a doubt,
however, meeting Paul McCartney is the one that meant the most.
“Paul McCartney was just amazing,” Mark recalls. “I have this one memory in particular. I’d talked to him and hung out with him – that was all fine and I had those surreal moments I’d never question again. I remember being in the dressing-room. One of my favourite songs is ‘Hey Jude’ and suddenly ‘Hey Jude’ is playing. I’m thinking, ‘Fucking hell, I love that song, is he going to play that tonight?’ I opened the dressing-room door and there he was right outside, sitting on the back of a golf cart that was about to take him off. Just him and an acoustic guitar, playing ‘Hey Jude’. It was like an audience of one. I was just thinking, ‘Fucking awesome! Nice one Paul!’ He winked at me and went, ‘Alright?’ and when I turned around there were 12 people watching him as well. It ruined the whole moment: everyone had the exact same idea. He must have that the whole time. And you think you’re the only one! Still, it was magic. Amazing.”
At times like that, the wide-eyed music obsessive breaks through. Sheehan’s been in this game for a long time now, however, having been signed originally a well before The Script were even a glimmer in his or anyone else’s eye. Maybe not an elder statesman yet, he is still in a position to impart wisdom, share his knowledge of the business. As a band they’re keen to do that, as evidenced by the way they’ve taken another Dublin three-piece, The Original Rudeboys, under their wing. They see a lot of their young selves in the fledging group.
“Yeah we do,” he nods. “We just feel a responsibility to channel Irish music out there as much as we can. The problem for Ireland is that a lot of times, internationally, they’ll say, ‘Ah, well they don’t have a story’. Well how are they going to get a fucking story if you don’t help them?! We just felt that we could give them a little bit of clout. I’m not saying this to be pretentious, but we’d sold out all these shows and so we didn’t need to bring in an act that was already established. The audience have already bought the tickets to see us – so why not put something new in front of them? We’re vindicated from watching them go down to non-English speaking countries who don’t know their music. By the end of their set people are loving them, so I just felt great about taking them on tour."
The big question is whether The Rudeboys can keep up with The Script’s extracurricular activities on the road.
“They seem to be doing okay! We’ve had a
few incidents, but they’ve been doing good,”
he laughs.
Any particularly mad moments?
“When we were in Amsterdam, one of the roadies decided he was going to walk across a lake of ice! Of course, as he was walking down the side of the bank he slipped and went straight through the ice! Hahaha. We tried for ages to fish him out. Everyone was using belts, coats, everything...”
Luckily, the roadie lived to tell the tale and lug another guitar case from the tour bus.
When we caught up with lead singer Danny O’Donoghue before Christmas, he spoke about fact that The Original Rudeboys rejected the offer of a support slot with Chris Brown. Danny’s view was that they were right to stand by their principles – and in any event, the publicity from it benefited them more than playing. As ever with The Script, they’re refreshingly not all ‘on message’ – opinions will differ, in the studio and in public. Mark, for example, has a decidely more pragmatic view on the issue.
“I’m a weird one on that, even though I don’t agree with what Chris Brown did at all. If it ever happened to any of my sisters, I’d be the first man down at his door smacking the fucking fella around the face. I really would. I would never have that. But... there’s a joining word after ‘music’ that you decided to get involved with and it’s ‘business’.
“When you step into this industry to try to sell records, it’s a cut-throat game. It’s a dirty game. I think you have to stand up and play the gig. Put your music in front of fans. Let them decide about you and then get the fuck out of there. You don’t have to talk to Chris Brown. You don’t have to be mates with him, you don’t have to drink with him. Get in and out. If it was my sister I would go to town on him. I wouldn’t want to look the man in the eye, I wouldn’t like to drink with him or be his best mate, but at the same time it’s got nothing to do with me.”
Their thinking was that, because they have a song that deals with domestic violence, they’d feel like hypocrites singing it at the O2 and then watching Chris Brown come on to big cheers.
“Nah, sing it,” Mark argues. “Get up there and sing it to those very people. And hope that fuck is backstage listening to it!”
Then you have people saying that Rihanna is a poor role model to young women for taking him back.
“If I knew my audience were out there and quite young, I wouldn’t be an advocate of that at all. Also, I think there’s a point as an artist where you stand up, look at your audience and go, ‘Holy fuck, she’s 14 years old, should I be jumping around in my thong right now’. You have a certain responsibility at the end of the day. I enjoy a few drinks, for example, but I wouldn’t be out there telling young kids to drink. I think you should drink responsibly.”
Is that the only thing holding you back from going onstage in a thong then, Mark?
“Yeah, otherwise I’d be... Haha! No, you do think about that responsibility a little bit. You have to curb some things you get up to. You’re not there to show the dirty laundry off. At the same time, she is being an artist and I find it hard to judge any artist. Because art is the only justification for pain. Sometimes people are going through stuff. She’s public, so that’s probably why she’s doing what she’s doing, letting her hair down with the press surrounding her. That’s what’s really difficult as well, having people watching you the whole time. You can disagree with someone but when you’re in it too, you kinda go, ‘She is an artist’.
I subscribe to being an artist – I’m not a marketing character.”
He is a much-loved character though, judging by his online presence. Googling his name before the interview, I stumble upon the slightly disconcerting site called fuckyeahmarksheehan.tumblr.com. There’s pages and pages of pictures, some of them animated...
“Jesus Christ! Hahaha! I quite enjoy the animated ones to be honest. I get a little personal kick out of them!”
There’s also an Instagram snap of Mark going at drummer Glen Power with a shears – suggesting he could make quite the hairstylist if the music career ever nosedives. Glen must be quite a trusting mate.
“He is. He had a mad idea that he wanted to have his head shaved. So, of course, he looks to a man who shaves his head every day. I’m the only man with no hair in the band, so I was the best man for the job. He wanted to be in a position where he had no hair on the
sides of his head. So, yes: I thought he was quite brave!”
Do you enjoy having a close connection with the fans or can it be a little too close for comfort at times?
“I understand how people who haven’t grown up with it might feel that way – but I’ve grown up with the internet around me. I’ve literally been on computers since I was a kid in school. I love computers, love everything about digital media in general. Love the connection it gives you. Love everything it’s done for the music industry. I think even right now, it’s creating so many brilliant opportunities for boutique businesses, breaking bands that never would have been seen before. So I’m really excited by it. I really enjoy that person-to-person nature of the internet. Where if you have a song or a piece of art that you’d love a reaction on, you can put it out there – and have thousands of people comment on it and provide really
decent feedback.”
It means artists can bypass the old channels to get their stuff out there. Did that play a part in the demise of HMV?
“The delivery of music is what is in question,” Sheehan muses. “That’s the only problem. But music is still wallpaper in people’s lives, it’s there all the time. Without Spotify, The Script would not exist in Scandinavia, for example. We’re No. 1 on Spotify there and have been for the past couple of months. Now you think of what that has done for us as a band. It means people are streaming our albums, listening to our music all the time. Then when we go there, it means our tours are completely sold out. You look at your record sales and maybe they’re not as big – but it’s building confidence in people. Spotify enables you to listen to an album ten times and then when you get into your car, you realise you don’t have it. So eventually they go buy it: they’re just not running out to buy it straight away!
Or that’s the theory. What was your take on HMV’s closure? There was huge public uproar – but a lot of the people mourning it probably hadn’t been in there to buy an album for
five years.
“I know, I know. Any business like HMV saw the curve coming. It wasn’t like someone coming out of the blue and going, ‘Record sales are down! You have to close!’ – that didn’t happen. It was a slow decline in sales, so it’s important to note with HMV that they didn’t adapt. That’s the bottom line. Music did not shut them down. What shut them down is that they decided to buy the high street corner and decided to make HMV into a fucking mall. No one wanted to go into the store to buy music because you had to bypass all the other bullshit to get into the music section. It was annoying. The traditional model failed and that was just retail, it was nothing to do with music.”
Recently The Script sent out an ‘ask
us anything’ tweet. Any particularly
strange questions?
“Well, people kept asking us what we’re doing on Paddy’s night! In fact, we’re playing Manchester that night. My answer to them was, ‘We’re trying to stream the gig to as many Irish bars around the world as we can!’ We thought that’d be a laugh, so that’ll be a big thing for us. But yeah, there’s always randoms. The strangest one was ‘Is Danny awake right now?’ I don’t know if he’s awake. I’m in my hotel room. He’s not here!”
The interactive Q&A was to coincide with the release of the video for ‘If You Could See Me Now’. It must have been tough to put the
promo together for what is an incredibly personal song.
“It was,” he confides. “We had a guy for the past three years on the road with us, just shooting footage and we asked him to do the video. He was like, ‘I don’t make videos, that’s not what I do’. We told him we wanted a video of memories that we would hand our parents. If we could do that – what would we hand them to show them what their child has been doing over the past while? He went away with that in his mind. He knows us really well, so he edited up a cracker of a video. What’s mad is that we put it up last week and it already has over 800,000 views. It just seems like people are running to that song for therapy right now.”
There’s a telling few lines in ‘If You Could See Me Now’ that run: “I wish I could hear you say I drink too much, and I smoke too much dutch, but if you can’t see me now that shit’s a must.” Has the working cycle of a touring band worn The Script down physically and mentally over the last couple of years?
“It’s taxing in some ways,” Mark reflects. “You get sick of being the ‘subject’, because the arrow’s always pointing at you. I enjoy talking to people, I feed off other people’s stories. I get bored of our own. So that becomes taxing after a while. It is a pitfall you get into. But you can catch a groove as well, man. I’ve caught one at the moment. I feel we’re really plain-sailing. Enjoying ourselves. It doesn’t seem like it’s hard work anymore. It seems like we’re
settling into it.”
As for the drinking and smoking, Danny reckons the mantra is ‘everything in moderation’. Does Mark feel the same?
“Yeah man,” he says, with slight hesitation. “Look.... I say ‘moderation’ but moderation is quite a lot different for me than it is for most people! The problem is you’re going to someone else’s town and they want to make you feel welcome. So it’s rude not to partake.”
You join in out of politeness?
“Exactly. We’re nice people (laughs)”
Lyrically, it seems like they wanted to lay everything out on the table with #3. Was that always the intention?
“It’s a bit more natural than that,” Sheehan counters. “There’s no science to it. You can’t think up the maths. I felt musically there’s something missing right now. It’s all been dance, dance, dance. We can’t subscribe to that at all. Let’s just make something that sits against the backdrop of that and sticks out. We wanted to tip our hat to old-school hip hop and R&B. All the stuff we love and felt wasn’t in music anymore. That meant going back to rhythm and blues. It was all introspective. You were supposed to stand there and sing the blues back in the day. And that was actually a release for you. That was the whole point of the blues. Blues wasn’t dark, it was about people venting and feeling good about themselves because of it. That’s what the album was all about. Not that it sounds like a ‘blues’ record, but it has that mindset. It’s very introspective. One of those things that I suppose we have to look back on, to delve into that pool of emotion that will not go away. That’s what art is. As I say, it’s the only justification for pain.”
Irish artists have traditionally been very wary of rapping.
“For me, I don’t think rapping is a thing The Script does. I’d call it more story-telling folk. I don’t really equate it to rap, though we did spend 10 years in the States hanging with freestyle rappers. I needed to get a load of words into a verse, really explain myself. Be a wordsmith and be able to spin that verse in a way that allows you to get more and more out of it every time you read it. That took a bit of artistry. I didn’t think, ‘I’m going to rap’, I just talked the words. The only way to do it was slow down my voice and be rhythmic with it. Of course, I do love rap records but I try my best to steer away from what people think hip hop currently is. Hip hop needs a hug, in my opinion. That’s the problem with it for me, so I go for a different style.”
Machine Gun Kelly, among other big names in hip hop, has embraced The Script.
“I love to see what spin any artist has on our music. Machine Gun Kelly’s take on it was interesting. But there’s been quite a few over the last while that have made us go ‘what?’. We heard a Ja Rule one a while ago and that was terrible. It was unbelievably bad. But then you hear someone like Machine Gun Kelly rocking a version of ‘For The First Time’ and I quite like it. That was cool.”
Do you keep an ear out for upcoming Irish acts?
“I really am too busy but I’ve always been very into the Irish hip hop scene over the years. We’re talking 15 years since I’ve poked my head in that door! I don’t know what’s going on at the moment – but I’d love to get caught up in it and see what’s going down in that world. If I could ever lend a hand in a chorus or hook or something.”

Right now, however, Mark Sheehan & Co. are too caught up with improving their own sound, making this Script thing even bigger than it already is, to do anything else. Their globe-trotting will continue for the foreseeable future. And as he reels off their post-Irish stops (“England, then straight through to Asia, Australia. Africa. Then all around America, and then we’ll be back again for the festivals!”), it’s apparent that, while it’s good to have these homecomings, he truly is in a world of his own. Forget about current affairs or the vital intricacies of whether Trapattoni should stay or go.
“Nah, I can’t keep up,” he states. “I’m in a bubble. I’m not afraid to say it – my head’s up my arse and I’m in a bubble!”
By the way, the pope resigned.
“I did hear that! I’m a news freak but it’s more world news.”
Whatever passes those long hours backstage. Even if it means talking to journalists. With that, we’re informed that time is up.
“Ha,” he sighs, “I can actually hear them playing away onstage without me!”
An outrage. It’s not The Script without Mark Sheehan to keep them in check. We let him away. He’s got a gig to play.

#3 is out now on Phonogenic Records.