The Script 'We left cool behind long ago'

From the archives..
Back to 3 September 2010..

What next after a two-million-selling debut from Ireland's unlikely boyband, asks Craig McLean

It's back-to-school time, and there have been tears for the Script. Not because the two-million-selling Dublin trio are poised at that difficult Second Album Moment and wondering how they might go from being a curious kind of boy band (a soulboy band? A boy band you'd never recognise?) to a serious, world-beating act.

No, as it transpires during a conversation with rattlingly enthusiastic frontman Danny O'Donoghue, the Script don't do doubt or fears. Transatlantic pop-soul hits such as We Cry and Breakeven can bring cast-iron confidence, as can ten years' pre-fame slog as producers and writers for other artists. But they do do bad fashion choices.

"We've just taken my girlfriend's daughter to school," says the gregarious, darkly handsome singer and songwriter, 28 next month and fresh off an early morning flight from Dublin to London. "That was fine, but there was crying over the weekend when they sent me out to get some of the clothes! A pair of shoes that maybe didn't fit so well ... " he adds with rueful smile.

The Script aren't overly obsessed with image, neither their children's, nor their own. The guitarist and co-writer Mark Sheehan, 30, is absent today, as his wife is having their second child; drummer Glen Power, 30, is absent, as he seemingly doesn't say much They don't care if they're seen, in some circles, as rather naff. "To be honest we don't really care what anybody thinks of us. We left cool behind a long f***ing time ago. We did! To give honest and heartfelt music, you have to."

And as O'Donoghue says, being faceless has its advantages. "Especially in this day and age!" he says in the impassioned, let's-get-a-round-of-Guinness-in! way he says everything. "The industry is like, 'Let's blow this face up as big as it possibly can get ... ' Then, bang! - it blows up! But that's what we're so proud of. We don't like the way we look. We're not an imagedriven band, we never have been. We're not a self-gratifying band either. We don't put our own image on our own albums just so people know it."

For the Script, the music is everything. Or, "The song is king. If you look after your song, it'll look after you."

You can hear as much in Science & Faith: the band's self-produced second album, the follow-up to the self-titled debut in 2008, is a briskly convincing, efficient and potentially world-beating pop album.

O'Donoghue's rich, soulful voice makes the Coldplay-go-pop lead single For the First Time feel like a hit the first time you hear it. Nothing will impress the band's one-time mentor, the U2 manager Paul McGuinness, with its twinkly, widescreen balladry. Walk Away is a stadium hip-hop song that should do great business in the US. The band who pioneered product-placement e-commerce on the video for Breakeven - click on Mark's jacket to buy it now! - know how to maximise their chances, in every sense.

It's been a defining quality from the off. "The reason we initially got out of Ireland was the amount of other talent trying to make it," O'Donoghue recalls. "You throw a pound in Ireland, you're gonna hit a musician. Or you'll have ten musicians fighting over it!" He and Sheehan, both the youngest of six, met as teenagers in Dublin when they bonded over a love of Boyz II Men and the producer Babyface. They wanted to evoke such huge-selling American R&B artists in their own music. "But in Dublin, if you weren't playing the Irish card - if you didn't have a fiddle, or if you weren't like the Corrs - you didn't get a look-in."

They formed a boy band, Mytown, and came to the attention of McGuinness, who "liked our drive". He helped them secure a record deal in the US, and the pair jumped at chance to decamp Stateside. When Mytown fell apart, they stayed on, "hustling" for jobs as writers and producers. They f lew to Virginia Beach, to doorstep the TLC producer Teddy Riley at his studio. The two white Irish guys "blagged" their way inside, and one busked audition later had been invited to help Riley with vocals and use the studio facilities.

In the close-knit, fiercely competitive US R&B world, word spread. They were in turn doorstepped at their Virginia Beach hotel by a guy "dressed all in denim. He was like, 'Yo, you those Irish guys working with Teddy? Check out my tape, I've got some beats if you wanna write some stuff over it.' " O'Donoghue, bristling with Tigger-ish enthusiasm, is bouncing on the sofa in his publicist's London office as he recounts the tale. "Dude!" he beams, "It was Pharrell Williams of the Neptunes. And he was giving us a cassette to write on!" A decade ago, the fashion-forward producer was some way off being the hitmaker for Justin Timberlake and Kelis. "This was when he was charging three grand for a track. Now he's, like, 200 grand a track! And that tape, it was so far ahead of its time."

For O'Donoghue and Sheehan, it was another lesson learnt, another experience filed away. When, after half-a-dozen years working in studios in the States - a Timberlake remix here, a session guitarist gig with TLC there, a bit of Britney Spears and Backstreet Boys - they decided to make music for themselves as the Script, they had a matchless understanding of the nuts and bolts of crafting airwave-friendly pop songs.

So, second album time: O'Donoghue and Sheehan were a boyband once; the Script were more about songs than looks last time. How are they being marketed this time? A man-band? "Look, we are what everybody wants us to be," he grins. "If you want us to be that, we'll be that. If you want us to be the Beatles, we'll be that for you too."

But just in case ... next week, the Script are launching Science & Faith with a showcase gig for 300 of the world's "tastemaker" media. It's being held in the Guinness brewery in Dublin, just along the road from Sheehan's family home and the shed in the back garden where they recorded their first album.

"We'll play them some of the old stuff, some the new stuff, and get them all so pissed they'll hopefully like what they hear!" Science & Faith is released by RCA on September 13.

Source: The Times, Londen / 3 September 2010