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.
- The Script Official Website