In December 2023 Danny O’Donoghue swore to his therapist that he’d stay sober for Christmas. Even as the words came out of his mouth the Script frontman knew he was lying. He started drinking as soon as he got on the plane back to Dublin. He didn’t stop for days and would spend much of Christmas uncomfortably numb, lost in a haze of booze and self-loathing.
“By the time I’d landed I was pissed. I was speed-dialling. I went straight into it,” O’Donoghue says over Zoom from the London home he shares with his wife of 15 months, Anaïs Niang, and from where he is hard at work promoting The Script’s latest helping of heart-on-sleeve pop-rock, The User’s Guide to Being Human.
He spent most of the holiday in an intoxicated funk, only coming up for air on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, so that he would be clear-headed for a visit to Temple Street children’s hospital in Dublin. “Other than that I spent the entirety of Christmas pissed. I never felt so hungover and bad and distraught.”
Booze was his way of processing the grief he felt over the death, in 2019, of his mother, Ailish, and, in April 2023, of his 46-year-old Script bandmate Mark Sheehan – an older-brother figure to O’Donoghue, whom he had met when he was a shy kid attending a youth club in Ballinteer, south Dublin.
[ Mark Sheehan obituary: A ‘gorgeous soul’ for whom music was an escapeOpens in new window ]
Sheehan’s death had opened a trap door that plunged O’Donoghue into an existential crisis. As both a friend and bandmate of Sheehan, O’Donoghue didn’t know how to carry on without him. The Script had, along with the band’s drummer, Glen Power, been their life’s work together. He felt the responsibility to keep The Script going rested entirely on his shoulders. Without Sheehan – a talented producer and arranger – could he carry that burden?
The Script, featuring Danny O’Donoghue, Mark Sheehan and Glen Power, performing at Dublin’s 3Arena in 2020. Photograph: Crispin Rodwell for the Irish Times
He also worried that the public did not see him as the voice of The Script so much as the face and the haircut – that they regarded Sheehan, the band’s guitarist, as the real talent. O’Donoghue had always written songs for the group, but he wasn’t sure people knew about his contribution. Would they accept The Script without Sheehan?
“Even after Mark passed there was a certain amount of, ‘Oh, does everybody think it was Mark that was the genius in the band?’” he says. “Does anyone know? Not to fight against it, but you want to show your worth. And you’re taking the memory along too.
“You’re taking the world on your shoulders and Mark as well. You want to do best by them, the family, and his memory. Also, don’t screw it up: we had a bloody great track record before then.”
As he got on that plane back to London, he was, he says, heading towards a very dark place. “Mark had just passed away. The emptiness of not having a family. Being in my 40s, thinking, what the f**k have I done all this for? Is there a legacy there?
“I was in therapy. Doing all the right things, saying all the right things. But also drinking at the weekends. I was talking to my therapist. But I could see he knew there was something I wasn’t telling him.”
As the pain of Christmas at home faded, he had another meeting with his therapist, at which he “ratted” on himself and admitted to having spent his time in Dublin staring through the bottom of a pint glass. That was when he stopped drinking and threw himself into The Script.
The album that came out of that process was Satellites, from 2024, a reminder to the world that The Script were still a functioning entity and a heartfelt homage to a fallen comrade. Now, with The User’s Guide to Being Human, comes a new chapter, both for The Script and O’Donoghue.
It’s the first Script album made completely without Sheehan or Power, and, even though he wrote it, O’Donoghue comes across as a bit mystified by the record. He isn’t quite sure if it’s a rebirth or a swansong. Maybe it’s both.
Whatever it is, The Script are playing to their strengths, just as they did when they broke through in 2008 with hits such as The Man Who Can’t Be Moved and Breakeven, their popularity bolstered by O’Donoghue’s stint, alongside Tom Jones and will.i.am, as a judge on the BBC talent show The Voice. Everything fans loved about The Script back then is present and correct on the new LP: the huge hooks, the pop-rock choruses, the earnest lyrics.
That bigger-is-better philosophy looms large on its very first track, Man in the Arena, where O’Donoghue sings passionately about his mission to give audiences a big, uplifting moment to light their way home. “If I stand or if I fall, I’m still giving it my all,” he sings. It’s The Script doing the only thing they really know how to: making anthem music filtered through O’Donoghue’s caring, sharing worldview.
“It’s a really honest album. It’s pop – unashamedly,” he says. “We try to get our music heard by the masses.”
He is well aware that his instinct to connect with the public comes at a cost. “We’ll never be that NME favourite, because we have these big glorious choruses that we want stadiums to sing. What you give up on one side you gain on another. We gained the popularity and the notoriety – you lose the credibility in certain corners. But we don’t give a shit. We’ve never given a shit what people think.”
The User’s Guide to Being Human is doing well: when we talk it’s in the running for UK number one. By week’s end it will have debuted at number three in Britain, behind Phoebe Bridgers and Katseye, and gone straight to number one in Ireland. He sees this as vindication that The Script still have something to say and an audience that wants to hear it.
“We’re up against one of the coolest records around [in Bridgers’s LP Lost Weekend]. You’ve got Katseye, the global phenomenon that they are. Here we are, a little old band from 18 years ago, still punching above our weight.”
O’Donoghue was putting the final touches to the album when he found out that Glen Hansard had died in a crash back in Dublin. He and Hansard had busked together at an annual Christmas Eve fundraiser on Grafton Street.
But the relationship goes back much farther than that, to the 1990s, when Hansard fronted The Frames and Danny’s brother Dara was a member of The Big Geraniums, a folk-punk band who became a big success on the college circuit in Ireland.
“When I was about 12 or 13, Glen and I were on tour with The Big Geraniums. The Geraniums had a number-one album. The Frames were supporting; we did a mini tour of Ireland.
“They had the Big Geraniums bus; it was like a school coach. They chucked out the last 16 seats and put mattresses on the ground. And both bands were staying in the bus.
“Sometimes we’d park outside a hostel, and then they’d play at the local bar, and they’d be paid in drinks. We were going around promoting the album. Some of my fondest memories were sitting in the back of the bus playing [the card game] shithead with Glen and Binzer,” he says, referring to The Frames’ drummer, Paul Brennan.
He and Hansard were in touch during the pandemic and collaborated remotely.
“We wrote together during lockdown because I was, like, I just f**ing love him to bits as a writer. So I contacted him. I said, ‘Look, we’ve never actually written something…’ So we went back and forth a little bit.
“He was working with Eddie Vedder at the time, and we went back and forth a little bit and wrote a few bits and pieces. We actually wrote a really beautiful song that I’m going to take another listen to and revisit.”
O’Donoghue has held off revisiting the track since Hansard’s death because he doesn’t want to be confronted by the sadness he feels about his friend’s death. He went through much the same experience when his father, the musician Shay O’Donoghue, died, in 2008, just as The Script were finally achieving success.
“I didn’t process it because I didn’t want to process it. It’s like if you don’t look at it, it didn’t happen.”
He wasn’t able to attend Hansard’s funeral, at St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, last month, but what he saw of the ceremony he found moving. He becomes emotional as he brings up the online backlash against Bono, who paid tribute to Hansard by quoting from U2’s song Beautiful Day.
“I loved the funeral. The thing I couldn’t believe was the armchair critics. Seeing it online, I actually thought, ‘Do I even want to be in this industry any more?’ You do something as beautiful as his family’s wishes, whereby Bono got up, and he spoke the words to Beautiful Day … at Glen’s family’s wishes.“
“Underneath it all [someone was writing on Instagram], ‘I had to sit through f**ing Bono.’ What do you mean you had to sit? We’re not watching X Factor. It’s shut-the-f**k-up time right now. Social media is now a blood sport. It’s atrocious, some of that stuff.”
The funeral gave him “a great send-off. I felt most of the stuff Bono said was true: best friends – everyone felt like you were best friends” with Hansard.
O’Donoghue will be back in Ireland for The Script’s forthcoming arena tour, though the band he leads will be very different from the one he formed in Dublin in 2001. It has expanded to a four-piece, with Ben Weaver in for Sheehan on guitar and Ben Sargeant on bass. The drums will be manned by Adam Marcello, who replaces Power.
“Glen’s stepped away for the time being,” O’Donoghue says. “We’re at a position where he’s earned that right to do it. I’ve continued on the whole way through, and then I’ll be taking time off in March.
“I think everybody deserves and has earned their spot now to be able to do what they want to do. Let’s just see where it goes. He needed a break. We needed a break. In March, I think we’ll both get that. And you know, like I said, who knows where the future is going to go? But I’m very optimistic about where it is, where it’s all heading as well.”
He’s still working out who he is without Sheehan. After this winter’s tour, he’s not sure what the future holds for him or The Script. Maybe it’s time for a change. He’ll wait until the latest run of dates ends to take stock.
“I bought a property down in Wicklow. Some people thought it was a listed building, so it was sitting on the market for ages. But we dug around, and it’s not. It’s a schoolhouse.
“I just had this dream of me going down and getting the tools and taking the place apart. And just doing something which I completely know nothing about. I can go back into student mode. My brother is very handy as well. So, I think, a bit of a family project.
“And, at the same time, start a family, spend time with my wife and maybe sit back a little bit. I’ve been hard at it now for 18 years.”
The User’s Guide to Being Human is released via BMG. The Script play 3Arena, in Dublin, on Friday, October 30th, and Saturday, October 31st; and O2 Arena, Belfast, on Monday, November 2nd