Between rock and a hard place

The Dublin trio who make up million-selling pop-rock band The Script aren't worried about being snubbed by polite indie society - they're too busy making state-of-the-art chart-friendly tunes, as they tell Brian Boydahead of the release of their second album.

ON AUGUST 8th, 2008, a small party was held in the Liberties in Dublin to mark the release of an album by a local band. The record company did its best to whip up a bit of interest, but polite Dublin indie society declined. Two band members with a murky past in a failed boy band; the other, a journeyman drummer. And it was that dreaded “pop-rock”, with a contemporary r’n’b sheen. Eyes were averted.

Two years later, The Script's debut has sold more than two million copies and gone eight times platinum in Ireland and three times in the UK. A total of 2.2 million singles have been sold in the US; awards have been received; Jennifer Aniston, John Mayer and Josh Groban are signed-up fans. Shoulders have been rubbed with Beyoncé; Glastonbury loved them, as did the World Music Awards in Monte Carlo. U2 put them on in Croke Park as support. On US network TV, they're all over 90210, The Hillsand Sober House. With a new album out next week, the wheels of a massive international marketing campaign are in motion. All are confident The Script can go higher, faster and further.

“We started The Script from a shed in James’s Street,” says singer Danny O’Donoghue. “And there have been times over the last two years when I’ve been literally stopped in my tracks by what has happened to us. I’ve met my entire CD collection. All of them. Sometimes we’d be playing a big awards show, and you look out at the front row and it’s like my iTunes page come to life.

“When we played the Sugar Club way back, I used to hide behind the microphone stand I was so scared – and you’re thinking of this when David Letterman is introducing you on his show. You’re going to yourself, ‘Jaysus, we’re just three lads from Dublin, we shouldn’t really be here’.”

You’d have to go a long way back to find a similar Irish music success story. And you won’t find one as musically different as The Script – a rare instance of an Irish rock/pop group engaging with the sleek, contemporary soul, hip-hop and r’n’b sound that is currently the dominant means of musical expression. While band members may be happy sipping pints of Guinness in their local in the Liberties, there is nothing remotely Irish about the sound. This is state-of-the-art, slickly produced, narrative-based, chart-friendly music.

Refreshingly, there's no hand-wringing here about credibility, no indie introspection or attempts to present themselves as anything other than they really are. "We are a mass-market band," says O'Donoghue. " NMEreviewed our album and gave us 3/10 – no surprise there; we're hardly a shoe-gazing band, are we? We exist in that grey area of pop, that sort of rock/pop divide and we know we are marketed as a pop act. Our heroes are U2 and Coldplay. We like A-Ha. We can't spell it out much more for people."

The Script were formed when guitarist Mark Sheehan (absent today because his wife is giving birth) set up his keyboards in a shed in the back of his Liberties home. He was 16 and needed some money, so he put an ad in the paper to sell some of his gear. A 14-year-old O’Donoghue called around to have a look. They got talking and decided to form a band.

Through a friend of a friend of a friend they met Paul McGuinness. They went to his office and played some of their songs on acoustic guitars for him. McGuinness pointed them towards a few publishing contacts in the US, where they based themselves for the next few years. When the boy-band career fell at the first hurdle, they got work making cups of tea in recording studios for giants such as Teddy Riley and The Neptunes. Soon they found themselves at the control desk, learning what button does what.

A drummer friend from Dublin came out to join them. “I had played with just about everyone on the Irish circuit,” says Glen Power. “I did all the toilet venues, played in places where people tried to rob the gear as you were loading into the van, played at a place once where, just before the gig, a guy had come up and poured a pint of Guinness into a bag full of leads and said: ‘What are you going to do about that?’ I’ve had knives pulled on me.

“I also played in the only venue in Dublin that hasn’t got any windows, but let’s not go there. That sort of jobbing musician life in Dublin puts an extra skin on you, so when things did take off for us I knew not to throw it away. You see so many acts who don’t come up the hard way getting that golden chalice of fame and success thrust into their hands and they drink just a bit too deep from it. Danny and Mark had very lean years in the US with no work, so we’re grounded and very appreciative of what has come our way. And yes, people do have a go at us for being pop-rock but, as the saying goes, when you’re on top and doing well, you’ll hear a whole lot of noise from people at the bottom.”

"Having had the lean times, I'm not going to start complaining that I haven't had a day off in eight months," says O'Donoghue. "I woke up the other month and it was my birthday and I was in New Zealand and I was just thinking, 'this is mad'. And then weird stuff happens – you hear that 28 radio stations in the US have banned your single Breakevenbecause it contains the line 'I just prayed to a God I don't believe in', and you wonder if you should worry about that or just leave it.

“The only thing that has annoyed me is a certain Irish daily paper that swept through where we are from in Dublin – stopping old friends, knocking on neighbours’ doors, even talking to the window-cleaning man – trying to get stories about us. They even somehow blagged their way into a neighbour’s house, leant over the wall and took a picture of ‘the shed where it all started for The Script’.

“But for every time something like that happens, something better happens. I was in my local a while back watching a Champions League game. I had just come to the end of my pint of Guinness and was about to order another one when a full one was plonked down in front of me. I turned around and there was this middle-aged man who said to me: ‘I just wanted to get you that to thank you for giving me such a great send-off.’ It turned out he had just been made redundant and with his last pay-cheque he had gone for a big night out, come to see us at The Olympia and had loved it. That just choked me up.”

The Script’s

Science and Faith

is out now