The Danny O’Donoghue show

He’s a judge on The Voice and rumoured to be romancing protégée Bo Bruce — but The Script’s Danny O’Donoghue doesn’t want fame, even if everyone knows his name, says Jasmine Gardner
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10 August 2012

It is surely safe to say that these days we O’Do-know-who Danny O’Donoghue is. Sure, when the Irish frontman of The Script first spun round his red chair on the BBC’s talent show The Voice, everyone drew a blank. Yes, his band had already released two number one albums, but he was still nicknamed Danny O’Dunno-who.

But now 10 million The Voice viewers are familiar with the 31-year-old’s black quiff, his Irish babble and his inability to stay seated (he made a habit of giving standing ovations during The Voice) and they’re ready for his third album (helpfully named #3), out next month.

Besides, according to O’Donoghue, his previous anonymity was always intentional. “It was strategic,” he says, sitting with his heels tucked uncomfortably up on his seat in an unglamorous conference room at a Lego-block hotel on the A40. “We didn’t want people to think we were a self-adoring band. We wanted people to accept us for the music first.”

“We don’t want to be known for being famous ... You’re not going to catch us falling out of f***ing nightclubs saying, ‘I was with this person or that person,’ just to get f***ing press.”

This seems odd, as just last week he told Irish broadcaster RTE he didn’t initially deny rumours that he was dating his The Voice protégée Bo Bruce because “I thought this could actually be quite advantageous,” he said.

“After the four months that we’ve been run through the press we could have tweeted and put a stop to it, but between me and Mark [Sheehan, co-writer and The Script guitarist] we went, ‘Were you hurt over this? No. Has it done anybody any harm? Why would you stop it?’...Honestly it’s not bad for business,” he clarifies now.

But did he tell his ex-girlfriend, Imra Mali, that it was just rumours? “I’d broken up with her months before, I didn’t need to… You can’t be hurt by lies. She knows because she’s been in a relationship with me for four years, it’s like, ‘Oh more bullshit’.”

Over those years there can’t have been that much bullshit. He was still Danny O’Dunno-who. Those jibes have never bothered him. “People have been saying that since I was f***ing 12 years old. It still hasn’t stopped us doing the things we’ve done,” and of course he realised that “the benefits [of going on The Voice] are that people will know who we are at the end of it.” But O’Donoghue insists his real motivations were more altruistic, for the music industry.

“It’s actually bad for our whole genre for people not to know that you’re successful. If you don’t see The Script, The Killers, Snow Patrol, Maroon 5, having a public persona then your image is going to be that that type of music is gone or going away.”

By “that type of music”, what O’Donoghue means is bands who write their own songs and play their own instruments. He spits venom on this point. “That is important to bring back to mainstream pop … F***ing think of your own f***ing songs, write your own f***ing material … You’re not a proper artist if you don’t. I wouldn’t work with anybody who doesn’t. ‘Here’s my album, it’s an album that represents my life,’ and you haven’t written one lyric on it? F*** off.”

O’Donoghue’s lyrics are important to him. He says this album is “the most emotional yet”, and the track, If You Could See Me Now, is a tribute both to O’Donoghue’s father, who died unexpectedly in 2008 of a stomach aneurysm, and his bandmate and long-time friend Mark Sheehan’s mother, who died the same year, and father who died when he was 12.

Just last month Bo Bruce’s mother also died, but he won’t be drawn on whether he has had any contact with her since to offer her support. “There’s nothing you really can say,” he says.

But he is very open about his own loss. “I was recording here [in London]. It was a very strange sequence of events. I said, ‘I just want to go home,’… I moved my flight to that day. I got home and there was an ambulance outside at about four o’clock in the day. My mum said he’d gone to work fine and literally that night, gone.”

What he hadn’t been able to confront with his first album, he could third time around.

“We were sipping on whiskeys and before we knew it, I started to write this verse. I couldn’t stop writing and as I was writing I was crying.” Now he says of his loss, “It’s a sore but it’s not as raw … I’m ready to deal with it. Or I’m ready to go out on a limb and say, “Maybe I’m not ready to deal with it but f*** it, here it is anyway.”

The Script’s new single Hall of Fame (featuring will.i.am) is out on September 2

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