The Man Who Can't Be Moved

‘The Man Who Can’t Be Moved’ was the second song to be released from the chart-topping, self-titled debut album by Irish trio, The Script. The track entered the UK Singles Chart at No.30 in July 2008, eventually reaching No.2, narrowly missing out on the top spot to Katy Perry’s mega-hit ‘I Kissed a Girl’. Internationally, ‘The Man Who Can't Be Moved’ won the band star status in Israel (No.2), Denmark (No.2), Belgium (No.3, Wallonia), Japan (No.4), Switzerland (No.17), and Netherlands (No.19), as well as in Italy, Spain, Sweden, Germany, Austria, Australia and New Zealand. Meanwhile, in the US, it was The Script’s second entry into the Billboard Hot 100 chart, eventually going platinum there. It was the track that established the band as a major international force. A big song, made for festival crowds to sing along to – and a huge hit – it subsequently re-entered the UK charts on a number of occasions – notably after the Dublin outfit released their sophomore studio album Science & Faith; and also following a cover performance by David Julien on The Voice UK in 2012 (for which Danny O’Donoghue had been selected as a judge). Mark Klasfield’s emotion-stirring Los Angeles-set music video has been viewed over 318 million times.

Danny O’Donoghue and Mark Sheehan were buddies from the age of 12. They bonded as teenagers in their desire to do something serious in music. With Irish pop in the ascendant, in 1996 they were involved in the formation of Mytown, a boyband that gained immediate traction, signing a deal with Universal Music and releasing one album. The project ran aground amid record company politics and when they were released from their contracts, the members peeled away to forge their own various paths forward. That pop initiation gave impetus to the songwriting and production partnership formed by O’Donoghue and Sheehan.

The duo collaborated with songwriters like Montell Jordan and Teddy Riley (the driving force behind both Guy and Blackstreet), as well as writing for artists of the commercial heft of Britney Spears and TLC. But the performing bug had bitten them, and they returned to Dublin to form The Script, adding drummer Glen Power to the team. By the time the band’s first album was ready, they had the reputation and the network to ensure that the record would be taken very seriously indeed. And so it proved.

Drummer Glen Power of The Script, shot for Hot Press by Conor Heavey

‘The Man Who Can’t Be Moved’ was just the second single released from their debut, titled The Script. It was a huge hit in Ireland, the UK and across Europe, as well as in Israel and Japan. While it stalled at first in the US, it went on to do platinum numbers in the world’s biggest music market. The band have described it as a Forrest Gump-style song, in which a character returns to the place where he first met the lost love of his life and beds down there for however long it might take for his girlfriend to find him again. Ironically, given that it was their breakthrough, the song might never have been. The record company were already happy with what the band had delivered as their debut. Thankfully, the band felt that they had another great song in them, bursting to get out.

“We’d kind of completed our album,” Danny O’Donoghue told Smooth Radio, “and were very unsure at the time about what songs we wanted to portray, and what we wanted to be as a band. The record label had basically closed the album. They were all high-fiving because we had songs like ‘We Cry’ and ‘Breakeven’ – so, ‘The Man Who Can't Be Moved’ was one of the last songs to have come along.”

Photo by by Ruth Medjber

There are elements of Chuck Berry’s ‘Long Distance Information’ in the opening verse. “Got some words on cardboard,” Danny sings, “Got your picture in my hand/ Saying, ‘If you see this girl/ Can you tell her where I am?’” It could also be a kind of homage to Bob Dylan’s ‘If You See Her, Say Hello’ on his break-up meisterwerk, Blood On The Tracks. “If she's passin’ back this way,” Dylan tells just about anyone who'll listen, “I’m not that hard to find/ Tell her she can look me up/ If she’s got the time.” Songs of crazily unrequited love are a vital part of the canon, and ‘The Man Who Can’t Be Moved’ fits the genre like a glove.

“I didn't actually go back to the corner where I first met my ex-girlfriend,” Danny added.

Danny acknowledges that ‘The Man Who Can’t Be Moved’ was a pivotal moment for The Script.

“What was beautiful about it was that the rest of the world agreed and the song just took off,” he said. “It really changed our lives. It’s put clothes on our backs and put a roof over our heads – so to me that’s the real power and magic of music. You never really know how it’s doing until you get to see the mid-week results. They were like: ‘It’s you or Katy Perry!’ (In our song) I was sitting on the corner waiting for a girl to come back and she was going: ‘I kissed a girl and I liked it’. That was the song we were up against! I just couldn’t believe it because Katy Perry was such a huge artist to us. I couldn’t believe we were fighting for any position with her.”

The band realised that they really did have a massive song – one for the ages that is – on their hands when they started to see other big name artists singing the song.

“Ed Sheeran did a cover version of it,” Danny recalled. “One night he just picks a song and says, ‘I love The Script’. It was sent to me and I couldn’t believe it. I thought it was amazing.”

Buoyed by the success of ‘The Man Who Can't Be Moved’, The Script’s debut album entered the Irish Album Chart at No.1, holding the top spot for five weeks. It also topped the UK charts and was a hit across Europe and in Australia, where the record went platinum. It reached No.64 in the US charts, setting the scene for their follow-up Science & Faith, which reached No.3 in the US Billboard 200. The Script was nominated for Irish Album of the Year at the Choice Music Prize in 2008.

Frequent cover stars in Hot Press, The Script have since continued an unbroken streak of Number Ones on the Irish Albums Chart through #3 (2012), No Sound Without Silence (2014), Freedom Child (2017) and Sunsets & Full Moons (2019) – with Tales From The Script: Greatest Hits (2021) debuting at the top of the chart.

The Script at Croke Park by Kathrin Baumbach

The Script at Croke Park by Kathrin Baumbach

In addition to Ed Sheeran, ‘The Man Who Can’t Be Moved’ has been covered by Straight No Chaser, N-Dubz, Xenia, Josiah Hawley and David Julien on The Voice UK, among others. In May 2018, the Script filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against UK singer James Arthur, asserting that Arthur's 2016 single ‘Say You Won’t Let Go’ bore strong similarities to ‘The Man Who Can't Be Moved’. The lawsuit was settled in December 2018 on unknown terms, but it was announced later that Danny O’Donoghue and Mark Sheehan each received a co-writing credit for Arthur’s single.

‘The Man Who Can’t Be Moved’ has been featured in numerous TV programmes, including Ghost Whisperer, Waterloo Road, 90210, The Hills, Made In Chelsea and The Vampire Diaries. But that’s not all...

“We were both going through break-ups,” Mark Sheehan said of the moment when ‘The Man Who Can’t Be Moved’ was written. “‘One day you’ll see me on the news’ – that was the literal part of the song.” A major statement of ambition on behalf of The Script, it was also the part that literally came true. In fact, it got even better than that. Because, as the boys who wrote the song attest, it was when they heard ‘The Man Who Can’t Be Moved’ played during a pub scene on ITV’s legendary soap Coronation Street that The Script really knew they’d made it. And the rest is history.

Press shot by Andrew Whitton