“When you know, you know...
I knew when it wasn’t right, but now I know whatever that is that it’s one hundred per cent right,” Danny says. Danny O’Donoghue and his girlfriend Anais Naing Danny and Glen with new bandmates Ben Sargeant and Ben Weaver Danny and Glen with the late Mark Sheehan . As he gets set to launch a new album with The Script, singer Danny O’Donoghue reveals that he has finally found “the one” in his partner of three years, French beauty Anais Naing.
And Danny (43) from Ballinteer, Dublin, is shouting his love from the rooftops with a brand new song called One Thing I Got Right . The songwriter also pours out his passion for Anais (31) in another new love song called At Your Feet . “Her favourite song is At Your Feet , that’s directly about her,” Danny tells the Sunday World .
“She is delighted with that one.” Pop idol O’Donoghue had a previous three-year relationship with Brazilian model Anne De Paula, but they split up in 2018. He met events manager Anais during lockdown in London after bumping into her in the neighbourhood where they live.
Danny and Glen with new bandmates Ben Sargeant and Ben Weaver He reveals that, with the benefit of past experiences, he has no doubt in his mind that Anais is his life partner. “When you know, you know..
.I knew when it wasn’t right, but now I know whatever that is, that it’s one hundred per cent right,” Danny says. “She’s great.
I met her during Covid and if you’ve been with anybody through Covid it’s like you compress 10 years into those years. You learn everything, all the good bits, mostly the bad bits, and if you get through those moments..
. I don’t know if it’s a rite of passage, if you’ve made it through those few years then you know.” It’s been an incredibly tough year for O’Donoghue and fellow Script band member Glen Power following the shock death in April last year of founder member and guitarist Mark Sheehan.
“We took most of last year off to try and figure out what we wanted to do,” Danny says. “[We decided] the best thing for us to do is to move forward. It’s the only thing you can do.
.. the grief will never go away, all you can do is try to grow around it.
“You saw the outpouring of support when Mark passed – he’s not just my brother, he’s Ireland’s son. We tried to deal with that all of last year..
. when is the right time to, not necessarily smile again, but to be where you start to have to live. You got to move on, it’s the only thing you can do.
“I think Christmas time was a big one for me, coming home, getting sloshed drunk because I had so many triggers. I didn’t realise Dublin is a big trigger for me..
.you begged, borrowed and stole with this fella [Mark] on every corner in Dublin. “Coming home I was like, ‘I’m not going to drink this Christmas,’ and then before I landed I was pissed on the plane.
I spent Christmas just drinking my way through Christmas. I was no fun, no craic and I was a nightmare. It was awful, and then I got back on December 27 and I said, f**k it, that’s it – and so I gave up drink, smokes, caffeine.
“I have good support, but it’s how you process it [grief]. I don’t feel processing it drunk was the right way to do it, or processing it any other way than stone cold sober because there are a lot of layers to get through and all you’re doing is kicking it down the road.” A song on the album called Home Is Where The Hurt Is was inspired by that experience, but Mark is also remembered in the songs.
Danny and Glen with the late Mark Sheehan One of them is Gone , which contains the lines: ‘Like a shooting star across the sky, in a second you were gone. What if stars that light up twice as bright only burn for half as long.’ Danny says: “It was the first time I was able to articulate what Mark meant.
” He reveals that Gone was the key to unlocking his song-writing for the album. “I hadn’t written in such a long time..
.writing was cathartic for me, writing about him, but I couldn’t write anything until I had that lyric in Gone . It’s something I love as a lyric and then also it just paid homage to him.
“It was also uplifting and anybody who spent time with him, even five minutes, knows how uplifting the guy was. He f**king hated ballads, we always made mid-tempo sad songs, but he f**king hated them. And then for me to immortalise him in one of them!” he laughs.
. Danny tells why The Script will now continue as a four-piece group. “We thought it was the only right thing to do because being a three-piece and being The Script was such an iconic thing,” he says.
“We felt we didn’t really want to move on in the same capacity. We’ve been in that formation, three of us on stage, for such a long time and we feel like we are never going to fill Mark’s shoes so why try. “Anybody getting into that position would just be judged by our fans and everybody else, so we thought just to freshen it up we’re retiring that and we’re moving forward as a four-piece.
We have Ben Sargeant, who has always been in the band, and we’ve got a new guitarist Ben Weaver, who is absolutely incredible.” But Mark is in the music on the new album. He was cracking the whip over the lyrics.
When I was revising some of the lyrics I was thinking, ‘what would he say?, he’d say, ‘this is sh*t and can we do better.’ The whole way along I had to revise with that in mind.” The Script’s new album, Satellites, will be out next Friday.
.
