The Script’s Danny O’Donoghue: I met my wife after checking her out in the street

Danny O’Donoghue, 45, is an Irish singer-songwriter and frontman of The Script. Formed in Dublin, the band broke through in 2008 with hits including “The Man Who Can’t Be Moved” and “Breakeven”, and have since scored six UK No 1 albums. O’Donoghue was also a coach on the first two series of The Voice. In 2023, his close friend and band co-founder Mark Sheehan died aged 46 after a brief illness. He married his long-term partner, Anais, last year. Here, he looks back at the moments that shaped him, from growing up in a nine-person Dublin household and getting an “Irish Power” tattoo at 18. Shorts Getting through grief is like climbing through barbed wire. Three things help me: church, boxing and therapy. They give me somewhere to put what’s going on inside my head. I was born Catholic, but sometimes I wonder what I’m doing when I go to church. I think I’m trying to stop thinking about myself. Going to church is really about practising gratitude. Most of us grab our phone first thing, check Instagram and fill our minds with everybody else’s noise. I find that poisonous. I try to leave the phone alone, go outside, get some sunlight and, when I can, go to Mass at 9am. I sit, listen and try to offer some energy towards somebody else. I’ve been doing combat sports for seven years. I started with Muay Thai, then tore my meniscus and moved more heavily into boxing. It’s somewhere healthy to put aggression and stress. A lot of men grow up being told: stiff upper lip, take it on the chin, nobody wants to hear your problems. I’ve lost people who couldn’t talk about what was happening inside them. The boxing ring is another kind of church. You leave something there. A lot of my anger comes from not knowing I was dyslexic. I only found out a few years ago. At school, I could see other children picking things up more quickly than me. Learning requires you to be vulnerable enough to say: “I don’t know this. Can you teach me?” I wasn’t comfortable doing that, so embarrassment came out as frustration and anger. I met my wife by walking past her in the street. I spotted Anais about 30 feet away and waited what I thought was the gentlemanly amount of time before turning around to check her out. She had turned around to look at me, too. We smiled, she waved, but I left it in the hands of fate and walked away. A week later, she walked into my local pub. I was drinking Guinness with the boys, saw her and shoved my pint under the table. I offered to get in a round, even though everybody already had a drink. At the bar, I could feel her looking at me. Eventually, I turned around and said: “So, we finally meet.” Our first proper kiss was in a graveyard. We had dinner, went for a walk and kissed there. About a month later Covid happened and we moved in together. We spent almost every day of lockdown together and somehow melted into one person. I’d never used a dating app or been set up on a date, so the fact that we found each other walking down the street still feels like magic. Anais and I walk together almost every day. We put the phones down, get outside and talk. The more purposeful time I give to our marriage, the better everything else becomes. The secret to marriage is deliberately making time for each other. There were nine of us living in our house when I was growing up. Mum, Dad, three boys, three girls and my nanny, all in one not-very-big house in Dublin. If everybody brought a friend home, suddenly there were 16 people – always somebody talking, shouting, laughing. Growing up with three sisters taught me a lot about talking openly. In a busy Irish household, everybody knows everybody else’s business. I have “Irish Power” tattooed on my arm because, at 18, I felt completely free. My late bandmate Mark and I got tattoos in America. We were driving towards Las Vegas with the windows down, blasting the Irish band Aslan, thousands of miles from home. I saw an “Irish Power” bumper sticker with a shamrock and thought: “I’m getting that tattooed on me.” We were young, far from home, and felt like anything could happen. I always knew I’d have eight No 1s. When I was a kid, I slept on a mattress on the floor and stuck eight free CDs from magazines like Smash Hits and Top of the Pops on the wall beside me. Every night I looked at them and imagined they were my platinum records. Looking at it now, after The Script have had eight No 1 albums in Ireland, is very strange. Maybe I was one lucky kid who stuck eight CDs on his wall and happened to get exactly what he wanted. Or maybe I dreamed it into existence. The Script’s new album, ‘The User’s Guide to Being Human’, is out now