The Script’s international South African video

Danny O’Donoghue (DO): It’s about the unsung heroes; the people of this world who are going through a really incredibly hard time. Although you may not see it now, the hard time you’re actually going through is your training – to be a superhero; it’s where superheroes learn to fly.
We went to Johannesburg to shoot this video in a place called Alexandra, where about half a million people live in a really impoverished area. To us they’re our superheroes. These are people who have next to nothing but are trying to make life better for themselves. We went down, we set up a stage right there just to try to change the energy for the day and really just bring some love down to this region for the day.

As I said, this can go from anywhere, from the most impoverished region to the UK, to single mothers, to teachers and parents. Everybody knows someone who is a superhero to them, and that’s what this song is about.

The new album is called No Sound Without Silence. What is the meaning behind the title?

Mark Sheehan (MS): There are so many different variables. It started off as a mantra. For every record, we have a mantra. On this one it was ‘There is no sound without silence.’ It was something we said to each other because we had huge stage shows to 20 000 or 30 000 people. We played to all those people full of energy and life and you leave that to go to a contemplation period where you’re possibly isolated, just writing lyrics or being alone in a hotel room.

That alone is a contrast for us, but even within the songs there’s contemplation time.
So for us, without geeking out and being a bunch of nerds about it, it was really that mantra that carried across through the whole record, so that we could make something that had the highs and lows.

You went to South Africa for your video shoot for Superheroes. How do you go about choosing the location?

DO: It’s normally the director’s job – he has a pure vision for where and what he wants. He’ll consult the band on some stuff. We were presented with a number of different areas to go to for Superheroes: India being one, somewhere in Europe being the second and South Africa being the third. South Africa is somewhere we have a lot of history with. On our last tour, we’d never been to South Africa. We put tickets on sale, thinking we’d just see what happened. We ended up going from, like, a 5 000 seater to a 26 000 seater because the demand was so much.

It’s such a beautiful place. Scary as well. It’s got two sides, like a lot of places. We went there, had such an amazing time and it really made an impression on us. Cape Town was also in the If You Could See Me Now video, so we decided to throw Joburg a bone and go there and shoot the video.