The Script write off their critics
DANNY O’Donoghue’s celebrated quiff is flapping up and down furiously. Backstage at the Button Factory Dublin, The Script frontman has been growing increasingly agitated for several minutes. “I was reading a review of our new album in a British newspaper. The journalist gave it two stars. Then I remembered — on our last record she gave us two stars as well. And it sold four million copies. If that’s what two stars means, I’ll take them every time.”
Seated next to him, drummer Glen Power chips in. “We don’t care what the critics say,” he says. “We make our music for the fans. They’re the ones who matter. There was a review of us in another English paper. They said we played such and such songs — and they weren’t even on the setlist. The journalist hadn’t bothered to go to the gig. We don’t pay any attention to it.”
O’Donoghue hunches forward. “It’s an old rule: if you get five star reviews as a band you know you’re in trouble,” he says. “The critics love you — and nobody is going to buy your records. You have your five stars and you’ll sell 10,000 records. We’d rather sell millions. That’s how it is.”
Something funny is going on here. The Script have been explaining why they don’t care what music journalists think (which, to surmise, is that the Dubliners are purveyors of bland soft pop in the tradition of Coldplay and Keane). The more we talk the greater their indignation. They are, you suspect, not quite as immune to criticism as they would like you to believe.
“When you start poking your head up you become a target,” says guitarist Mark Sheehan. “One of the criticisms is that we are ‘slick’ . Well, excuse us for learning to be good producers. Would you rather our records sounded terrible? The clue is in the word. We ‘produce’ — we don’t ‘reduce’.”
If The Script seem a little sensitive perhaps it’s because they’ve been under a great deal of pressure. Their new record — #3 — was recorded in difficult circumstances. Shortly before they were due to go into the studio, O’Donoghue landed a gig judging the UK edition of The Voice. There was a dilemma: would they continue with the sessions or put everything on hold? “We decided it [The Voice] was an opportunity to put a ‘face’ to what we are doing. We’ve always let the music speak for us. Maybe it was time we put ourselves out there,” says Sheehan.
So O’Donoghue would film all day, then go to the studio at night and lay down his vocals (initially The Voice was pre-recorded during office hours). It wasn’t an enjoyable process, exactly. However, the straitened environment brought out the best in The Script.
“On this record we’re reconnecting to where we have come from,” says Sheehan. “Our last album was written off the back of touring arenas and stadia and you can hear that in the sound. We wanted to get back to the music we fell in love with and enjoy playing: hip-hop, r’n’b. We took a look at the stuff we’d been doing on our first record and tried to go from there.”
A stand-out track is ‘Hall of Fame’, which features a cameo from will.i.am, one of O’Donoghue’s co-judges on The Voice. “We played it to him and he said ‘I want that song’. Your first instinct is to say ‘no way’. How do you say ‘no’ to will.i.am? So we said, ‘okay. you can have it, but it has to be with us. And it’s going to be on our record’. In the end we did it in his mobile studio,”
In places #3 is incredibly raw. One of the most powerful moments is ‘If You Could See Me Now’, where all three members rap about their departed parents (they’ve each lost a mother or father since the band began). The idea came about after a night drinking whiskey in the studio.
“We went into different corners and wrote our verses. It was very emotional,” says Sheehan. As tends to be the case when you drink whiskey. It is a portal into what you are feeling deep down.”
They have come a long way since the days O’Donoghue and Sheehan sang in a short-lived boy-band, My Town. Signed at the height of the late ’90s boyband boom, they had the bad luck to release their first single just as the bubble popped. The album they made never saw the light of day.
With drummer Power on board, they moved to America and hung around the studio owned by super-producer Pharrell Williams. There, they got some experience as engineers. But when their money ran out it was back to Ireland and a rehearsal space in a shed near where Sheehan grew up on St James’ Street.
They released their debut album as The Script in 2008. It was an immediate hit. Last year their stadium status, in Ireland at least, was confirmed when they played to 50,000 at the Aviva.
“It was nerve-wracking in the weeks leading up,” says Power. “It was the biggest thing we’d done. We didn’t want to leave people down. It’s funny though. About half an hour before, our gig legs kicked in. You play so many gigs and eventually you can sort of do it from instinct. It was nerve-wracking. We didn’t let that get in the way.”
#3 can, among other things, be read as a break-up record. Over the summer O’Donoghue split with Lithuanian model Irma Mali. Several months on he is clearly still hurting and not keen to open up. Sheehan steps into the breach.
“It was tough for us, seeing our friend going through so much pain,” he says. “What made it harder to deal with was the media, of course. Things got exaggerated. The press jumped on us. That was fine. The more pressure we are under the harder we fight back. That’s the thing that has always defined this band.”
