Danny O'Donoghue (25): Raven haired, handsome, sensitive
keyboard player with the vocal flexibility and technical range of an American
soul legend. "The truth is, I spent a lot of my childhood singing when the
other kids were outside playing football and getting into trouble."
Mark Sheehan (27): Shaven headed production whizz and guitarist. "I'm not
trying to romanticise it, where we grew up was a shit hole, it was stealing
cars, all the usual bollocks, but music gave me a sense that I could break
away. I know it sounds like a cliche, but to me, as a kid, that was my way
out."
Glen Power (28): Taciturn drummer and multi-instrumentalist, the funkiest white
man in Dublin. "My mother always said to find one thing in life that
you're good at and the day I picked up the sticks I found it."
The Script are an Irish trio whose music boasts the kind of artful twists sure
to turn all preconceptions on their head. This is a whole new brand of Celtic
Soul, blending hip hop lyrical flow with pop melodiousness, state-of-the-art
R'n'B production with anthemic rock dynamics, classic song construction with
gritty contemporary narratives. It's got all the emotion and passion you would
expect from across the Irish sea, but it is glittering in its modernity,
universal in its singalong addictiveness and global in its syncopation, music
for the feet, heart and head. Think U2 versus Timbaland, Van Morrison remixed
by Teddy Riley. "Irish people have soul," according to Danny.
"It comes from generations of pain, and generations of understanding
emotion to be able to physically get that in a solid sound."
"Soul is not a black thing or a white thing, it's a human thing,"
insists Mark.
"The true vision is to hit people in the heart," declares Glen.
Danny and Mark met in their early teens in the run down James Street area of
Dublin, near the Guinness brewery, gravitating to each other through a shared
obsession with music, and in particular a love of American black music.
"At that time, MTV only came on in Dublin after midnight, it was the fuzzy
channel, and for my generation black culture was just a wave through us
all," explains Mark. "It wasn't about gangs and guns; it was fashion
and fun, singing and dancing."
"One day I heard Stevie Wonder singing and the hairs on the back of my
neck went up," says Danny. "I didn't even know people could sing like
that, I'd never heard the acrobatics of it before." He spent years in his
bedroom, practising vocal licks. "I'd try and emulate all those records,
even down to string arrangements. Some of the best singers have emulated a
musical instrument - Amy Winehouse is a saxophone - but the violin is the one
for me, the vibrato, you can bring so much heartfelt emotion in."
"There is something about the way a voice encapsulates a person,"
says Mark. "The way Danny sings, the raw emotion, when you hear it in
front of you, you cannot deny the power."
Striking up a songwriting and production partnership, Danny and Mark's
exceptional talent was recognised early, and, to their astonishment, they found
themselves invited to the States to collaborate with some of their production
heroes, including such legends of modern R'n'B as Dallas Austin, Teddy Riley,
The Neptunes and Rodney Jerkins. "It was a wonderful opportunity to see
how these guys build songs," admits Mark, who always carried a little
computer drive around and charmed his heroes into swapping libraries of sounds
and samples.
Danny and Mark started as a backroom team, making demos for other artists, but
when they met fellow Dublin drummer Glen, the dynamic shifted. Although they
had never actually heard him play, such was the connection they made that Mark
invited Glen on a working holiday to LA. "He just whipped the ass off all
these LA session musos," enthuses Mark. "He is the funkiest drummer
around with real energy and swing but Glen is also a fantastic guitarist, a
fantastic keyboard player and he sings his ass off too."
Something of a prodigy on the Dublin scene, Glen had been playing sessions from
fifteen years old, using the money to work on a solo project in his home
studio. But that went on hold when his collaboration with Mark and Danny
produced three songs in one week. "It was like I found my home playing
with these guys," says Glen. "I had never had a chance with any other
band to express myself with such freedom."
"Individually, we all had our own talents, but together it just went to
another level," according to Danny.
And so The Script went into production. But it has not all been happy ever
after. When Mark's mother became terminally ill, the trio returned to Dublin so
that he could spend time with her, recording in his old home studio in James
Street. "That was pulling on my heart strings in a big way," admits
Danny. "Lyrically it was pouring out of me." After ten months, Mark's
mother passed away. Four months later, Danny's father, also a professional musician,
died unexpectedly of a heart attack. "I came home so that Mark could spend
time with his mum, little did I know that I was actually getting to spend that
precious time with my dad," reveals Danny. "But then amidst all this
travesty and disaster, these songs have risen out of it. That was the time when
it finally came home to me how important music was to me, cos in my darkest
moments that's what got me through."
The trio's debut single, We Cry, was released by Phonogenic / SonyBMG in
April 2008 and reached #9 in the Irish charts the following month. And it is
something special, a soulful anthem of everyday struggle that manages to be
simultaneously bleak and uplifting. "There is not a lot of hope in the
song, cause not everybody's life is full of hope," explains Danny.
"There's not always roses at the end. But out of all these things that
have gone wrong in our lives and everybody else's lives, the message is
'together we cry'. Because as long as we're here together then we can find a
way to share the burden."
"The Man Who Can't Be Moved" was released in July and this time
they broke the top 2 of the Irish Chart. As Mark comments, "I had an idea
of a guy who'd broke up with his girl and lost total contact with her. What
would he do? I thought he would just go back to the corner where they first met
and wait till she returned. The rest just flowed as a story and we made a song
from it".
Their debut album The Script, was released on August 8th, it too promising
to be something really special. "There is a whole lifetime in these
songs," says Mark. "We don't write them in ten minutes. A song takes
nurturing, it is an evolving thing. This is a journey, we are in constant
change, constant motion. I can't ever put my finger on what exactly The Script
is, I don't even think I should, all I know is that it is something that
touches me deep inside, and seems to touch other people when we play."
The album spent five weeks at the Number One spot in Ireland upon it's release.
