The Script
Hugo
- Crystal Hotel & Ballroom - Crystal Ballroom |
- Friday, October 15
- 7 p.m. doors, 8 p.m. show |
- $28 advance, $30 day of show |
- All ages welcome
Tickets on sale now!
About The Script
It is a heart-rending drama of tragedy and triumph, love and loss, struggle and survival, the epic journey of three young Dublin boys from the wrong side of the tracks who risk everything for a dream.
This is THE SCRIPT. But the ending is not yet written.
Dramatis Personae:
Danny O'Donoghue (25): Raven haired, handsome, sensitive keyboard player with the vocal flexibility and technical range of an American soul legend. "The truth is, I spent a lot of my childhood singing when the other kids were outside playing football and getting into trouble."
Mark Sheehan (27): Shaven headed production whizz and guitarist. "I'm not trying to romanticise it, where we grew up was a shit hole, it was stealing cars, all the usual bollocks, but music gave me a sense that I could break away. I know it sounds like a cliche, but to me, as a kid, that was my way out."
Glen Power (28): Taciturn drummer and multi-instrumentalist, the funkiest white man in Dublin. "My mother always said to find one thing in life that you're good at and the day I picked up the sticks I found it."
The Script are an Irish trio whose music boasts the kind of artful twists sure to turn all preconceptions on their head. This is a whole new brand of Celtic Soul, blending hip hop lyrical flow with pop melodiousness, state-of-the-art R'n'B production with anthemic rock dynamics, classic song construction with gritty contemporary narratives. It's got all the emotion and passion you would expect from across the Irish sea, but it is glittering in its modernity, universal in its singalong addictiveness and global in its syncopation, music for the feet, heart and head. Think U2 versus Timbaland, Van Morrison remixed by Teddy Riley. "Irish people have soul," according to Danny. "It comes from generations of pain, and generations of understanding emotion to be able to physically get that in a solid sound."
"Soul is not a black thing or a white thing, it's a human thing," insists Mark.
"The true vision is to hit people in the heart," declares Glen.
Danny and Mark met in their early teens in the run down James Street area of Dublin, near the Guinness brewery, gravitating to each other through a shared obsession with music, and in particular a love of American black music. "At that time, MTV only came on in Dublin after midnight, it was the fuzzy channel, and for my generation black culture was just a wave through us all," explains Mark. "It wasn't about gangs and guns; it was fashion and fun, singing and dancing."
"One day I heard Stevie Wonder singing and the hairs on the back of my neck went up," says Danny. "I didn't even know people could sing like that, I'd never heard the acrobatics of it before." He spent years in his bedroom, practising vocal licks. "I'd try and emulate all those records, even down to string arrangements. Some of the best singers have emulated a musical instrument - Amy Winehouse is a saxophone - but the violin is the one for me, the vibrato, you can bring so much heartfelt emotion in."
"There is something about the way a voice encapsulates a person," says Mark. "The way Danny sings, the raw emotion, when you hear it in front of you, you cannot deny the power."
Striking up a songwriting and production partnership, Danny and Mark's exceptional talent was recognised early, and, to their astonishment, they found themselves invited to the States to collaborate with some of their production heroes, including such legends of modern R'n'B as Dallas Austin, Teddy Riley, The Neptunes and Rodney Jerkins. "It was a wonderful opportunity to see how these guys build songs," admits Mark, who always carried a little computer drive around and charmed his heroes into swapping libraries of sounds and samples.
Danny and Mark started as a backroom team, making demos for other artists, but when they met fellow Dublin drummer Glen, the dynamic shifted. Although they had never actually heard him play, such was the connection they made that Mark invited Glen on a working holiday to LA. "He just whipped the ass off all these LA session musos," enthuses Mark. "He is the funkiest drummer around with real energy and swing but Glen is also a fantastic guitarist, a fantastic keyboard player and he sings his ass off too."
Something of a prodigy on the Dublin scene, Glen had been playing sessions from fifteen years old, using the money to work on a solo project in his home studio. But that went on hold when his collaboration with Mark and Danny produced three songs in one week. "It was like I found my home playing with these guys," says Glen. "I had never had a chance with any other band to express myself with such freedom."
"Individually, we all had our own talents, but together it just went to another level," according to Danny.
And so The Script went into production. But it has not all been happy ever after. When Mark's mother became terminally ill, the trio returned to Dublin so that he could spend time with her, recording in his old home studio in James Street. "That was pulling on my heart strings in a big way," admits Danny. "Lyrically it was pouring out of me." After ten months, Mark's mother passed away. Four months later, Danny's father, also a professional musician, died unexpectedly of a heart attack. "I came home so that Mark could spend time with his mum, little did I know that I was actually getting to spend that precious time with my dad," reveals Danny. "But then amidst all this travesty and disaster, these songs have risen out of it. That was the time when it finally came home to me how important music was to me, cos in my darkest moments that's what got me through."
Their debut album is something very special: "There is a whole lifetime in these songs," says Mark. "We don't write them in ten minutes. A song takes nurturing, it is an evolving thing. This is a journey, we are in constant change, constant motion. I can't ever put my finger on what exactly The Script is, I don't even think I should, all I know is that it is something that touches me deep inside, and seems to touch other people when we play."
Here is the tracklist:
We Cry
Before the Worst
Talk You Down
The Man Who Can't Be Moved
Break Even
Rusty Halo
The End Where I Begin
Fall For Anything
If You See Kay
I'm Yours
Anybody There
It is time to flip The Script.
- website:
- http://www.thescriptmusic.com/
About Hugo
There's an aura of late night heat and mystery in the music of Hugo. For him, Old Tyme Religion isn't just another album title - it's an apt summation of a certain conviction that continuously embeds itself in his story, and in his songs. His real life experiences have taken him from the Mekong River jungle to the booth of a favorite Thai restaurant in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood he has made home. His spiritual and musical sojourns have led to Old Tyme Religion, a lyrically provocative, tunefully hook-filled unconventional pop debut.
"I'm trying to make rock 'n' roll in the age of hip-hop," he affirms. "A complete thought in 3 minutes and 30 seconds, that's the challenge. A song is a planet with gravity and atmosphere and things living in it. An album is a solar system."
Born in England and raised in Thailand, Hugo --a seriously dedicated songwriter, musician and performer-- has already plowed through several aesthetic incarnations on the road to Old Tyme Religion.
As a young teen in Thailand, he achieved nationwide success by cutting four studio albums with Siplor, "a hick band with a mission," whose charge against "the man" resulted in a couple of their records being banned from the radio. Reflecting on this experience, he realized how formative and insular his Thai musical experiences had been. "The records I was making in Thailand, in isolation from American culture, were made as if we were still in the '70s. Nothing after 1977, Elvis wasn't dead, punk never happened. Thailand has this hangover from the '60s and '70s. The juke boxes had Creedence Clearwater Revival, anything that had a bit of heat to it looked right and sounded right through the cicadas and the mosquitoes, heavy into that swampy dark ominous thing."
Committed to bringing his music to the rest of the world, Hugo cut through the heat and humidity and journeyed to London. He went on an extensive blues exploration, listening to Howling Wolf, Son House, Robert Johnson, Skip James. "The guys that sometimes when they were singing, they didn't sound like people," explains Hugo. He wasn't looking for beer commercial blues; he was hunting down "the Mississippi Delta stuff, the country blues, that whole atmosphere."
He began working his way through pop sounds post-1977, citing Appetite For Destruction, Nirvana, Dr. Dre, Jeff Buckley, MGMT, Tame Impala, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Devendra Banhart, The Big Pink and "anything Jack White touches" as exemplary for the period.
To Hugo, the putative conflict between the mainstream and the underground dissolves when the quality of the music is high enough. "The Doors were a mainstream band," he states, "and no one would doubt their credibility or importance. I think the Doors are as 'arty' as anything more obscure; same with the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones." This fine line between accessibility and intrigue is where Hugo's music naturally falls. "That's the pop medium I'm trying to work in. I don't see myself as alternative or indie or anything like that at all. I consider myself to be making mainstream music. That's what I want to do, play for people that like the material."
One of his songs, "Disappear," found its way onto Beyoncé's international best-selling album, I AM... SASHA FIERCE, in the proverbial nick of time. Hugo's London prospects were dimming and he was contemplating a retreat to the jungles. "I was going to pack it in and go back to Thailand," he admits. "That song was a life-saver as far as my career was concerned. London is frigging expensive."
"Disappear" also tapped into one of Hugo's particular strengths as an artist. "I'm a collaborator. I like things to happen and things happen when you get people involved in them," Hugo says. The song led to more collaborations and a deal with JAY-Z's Roc Nation, an intriguing home for Old Tyme Religion.
When it comes to his craft, Hugo doesn't like writing in code or obscurities, preferring a direct, unambiguous approach. "I want people to know exactly what a song is about," he admits. "I'm not a poet. Lyrics are different from poetry...," he pauses before adding, "...unless you're Jim Morrison or Bob Dylan."
Each of the songs on Old Tyme Religion has a different story to tell and a different mood to set. While the title track is a bluesy morality tale told from the POV of a murdered lover in a romantic triangle, "Bread & Butter," Hugo's "version of uncomplicated lust music," is both a sly send-up of machismo and an unabashed celebration of eros, wrapped in a party groove tailor-made for summertime all year long.
It's that heat and humidity that drives the swampy pulse of "Mekong Delta," a steamy vision of love, and transcendence, by the banks of a richly symbolic river. With its spiritual kinship to the Mississippi Delta, the mysteries of the "Mekong Delta" are as universal and elemental as water.
As a tip of the fedora to Roc Nation's founder, Hugo puts a twist on the classic "99 Problems," finding a new previously unforeseen nexus linking pop, rock, country, urban and hip-hop.
Philosophic at heart, Hugo surmises that, "if reincarnation is for real, he'd like a couple more go-rounds on the great cosmic wheel." For now, that wheel keeps spinning and we can all experience that Old Tyme Religion.
- website:
- http://www.hugoofficial.com/
