The Script’s Danny says lockdown helped him discover inner happiness

Singer Danny (41), who played three nights at Dublin’s 3Arena this week, has previously opened up about struggling with anxiety.

However, Danny tells the Sunday World that he made peace with himself and is now enjoying life and performing more than ever.

“You kind of meet yourself a little bit when things are taken away from you,” he says. “I feel like I got rid of a lot of the things that I thought were making me the man that I was, but they weren’t, they were just holding me down.

“Now I keep it simple. I don’t have a big house, I don’t have a big car – actually, I can’t even drive. I keep it the simplest that you can. I love music, so I play guitar every day, I play piano and I write songs and I go and sing them to people.”

After 14 years at the top of the music world, Danny says he realised that he had achieved everything he wanted – but he wasn’t happy.

“It was 14 years in a very unique position and there wern’t an awful lot of people that could even advise me or understand what I was even thinking about because there’s no one who has gone through the same path. There had been so much stuff from interpersonal band things to family stuff…the deaths of parents, the births of children.

“It's a lot to unpack and it took me nearly the two years off to unpack it all. But man am I as light as a feather now. I’ve unpacked a lot of it, made friends with a lot of people that I felt I’d got a bit distanced from…the people who really matter and the people who really count. Because at the end of the day who else was there for you during Covid but the people you loved.”

Going forward, Danny says he now approaches life with a simple set of rules. “They are a very simple set of rules to me anyway, which is ‘Where do I want to go? Who do I want to go with? What do I want to eat? What do I want to drink? What do I want to listen to?’ That’s the five things there and it cuts all the other sh*te out.

“I now longer have FOMO (fear of missing out). I just want to go to this place, this restaurant with these people and drink that wine and listen to this music and have the craic. I’m keeping that frame of mind now.”

The Hall Of Fame hitmaker piled on the the pounds during lockdown, but shed them before The Scrip’s current tour thanks to daily exercise and martial arts training.

He added: "I do martial arts and I've been boxing for a number of years, but then I started doing Muay Thai and it's been amazing. So I do it about an hour a day and it drops the weight.”