Gary Lightbody, the lead singer of Snow Patrol, is edging his chair farther round the table towards mine. “I’m not coming on to you,” he says, slightly embarrassed, “I’m just trying to get out of the sun. I’m Irish and, well, my arm’s on fire.” The Los Angeles sun may be making a beeline for Belfast’s most pallid pop stars, but nobody at this swanky hotel rooftop pool bats an eyelid at them, even when the photographer steps into the water fully clothed to get a better shot of the band.
This is how Snow Patrol prefer it. “Even our own fans would have trouble picking us out of a line-up,” says Lightbody, who is 33, dressed in jeans and T-shirt, with messy hair, a few days’ stubble and incredibly piercing blue eyes. It’s the last day of their American tour. “We’re very lucky in that the songs are the famous things, so we can walk around anywhere unrecognised. We will be in a clothes shop with our songs playing on the thing and nobody even raises an eyebrow, even in the UK.”
And does Lightbody ever walk into a clothes shop and think, like so many people do: “Oh, for the love of God, not Chasing Cars again”? “Ahahaha,” he says, “It’s normally Shut Your Eyes in a clothes shop. But no, I have never thought anything bad about Chasing Cars. Ever. Yes, it’s the most ubiquitous thing we’ve done, and people have had their own backlash to it, so it’s probably due for our own personal backlash now. But it’s our favourite son, daughter, whatever its sex is — why would we be angry? That song went around the world — we just followed it.”
He has a point. In 2007 that song clogged up the Top Ten and was nominated for a Grammy award, a Brit award and used as a season finale for Grey’s Anatomy and Gavin & Stacey— though its zenith was surely being on the episode of Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps in which Janet’s husband is eaten by a shark. Tonight the band will play it to a few thousand delighted fans in LA. “It’s American fans who come nowadays — it used to just be expats,” explains Nathan Connolly, the guitarist.
But they have other songs — in fact they are about to release a compilation album of 30 of them. “Calling it a greatest hits album would be a bit grandiose,” Lightbody says. “We’ve had eight or nine hits in the UK, so we’re calling it a history. A look back at the past 15 years — and it’s not the end. We’d like 15 years more. But we’re all riding on luck. Every band is.”
Lightbody was recently delighted when a public figure “who shall remain nameless said a lovely thing to me. He said: ‘You’ve written standards, like Frank Sinatra, the Beatles, that become part of the public consciousness.’ And even being as modest as we are,” he grins, “we kind of realised that we have. People are singing them on TV reality shows — probably vexing people as much as it enthrals them.” But the fact that many detest Snow Patrol for their unchallenging melodiousness is “part and parcel, isn’t it? Every action has its opposite. A million people love you, a million people hate you. And ultimately, we are at the beck and call of people buying our records. This is an easily sinkable ship.”
Those 15 years may come as a surprise to many, since Snow Patrol really broke through to the mainstream only in 2003. Three of the five members are from Northern Ireland but they met at Dundee University, relocated to Glasgow and struggled for many years: sleeping on fans’ floors after gigs, pretending to be Belle and Sebastian to get into a nightclub, shedding a member, losing their record deal. “We were as surprised as the industry was when we got signed to Polydor. Nobody who’s been dropped by an indie [the independent label Jeepster] gets picked up by a major. It’s very odd.”
Yet suddenly they were commercially viable popstars and household names, when they had been part of a very alternative Glasgow music scene. What actually changed? “I learnt how to write a chorus,” Lightbody says. “The first two albums didn’t have any! But it’s not as clear-cut or Machiavellian as a formula — I will just guess my way through chords. I don’t know how to read music. We write very slapdash — if anybody ever saw the writing process they’d say: ‘How the f*** did you ever write anything?’ ”
Snow Patrol are a good laugh to hang out with, which may not be apparent from their plaintive songs about love lost and, well, some more love lost. Whole albums about it. Lightbody’s voice often sounds pained. He’s single, the rest of the band have girlfriends or wives. He says he’s rubbish with women. “So hopeless,” he says. “I’d like to attribute it, at least partly, to me never being in the same place for very long. But the rest of the guys in the band make that work, so I know I’m doing something wrong.
“I’ve been in relationships with people I’ve been hopelessly in love with — with the emphasis on hopelessly — and I’ve still not been able to make it work. It’s never their fault. It’s always mine, and I’ve been a bit obsessed with that in my lyrics.” He sighs. “I hope it will change, but ... I don't know if it will ... I’d like to get to the bottom of that.” Well, why don’t you try therapy, I ask. There is a pause. “I’m Irish,” he says. “We don’t do therapy. We just drink more.”
Drinking more also helps the band get on famously (current fave tipple: Jägermeister). By the time that most British bands are regular visitors to five-star Hollywood hotels, the lead singer and the guitarist will have been a full year without eye contact while the drummer is spending his days alone sculpting a tribute to Henry Moore out of the ring-pulls from cans of Stella. Not so Snow Patrol, apparently. “Never start a band with an advert in the back of a magazine. That’s the secret. If it comes together naturally then you’ve got a bigger chance of lasting,” Lightbody says. “We love each other. We hang out when we are not on tour — in fact we phone each other about an hour after we get home from the tour.”
Connolly agrees: “From when you’re a kid, you want to be in a rock band because it’s a band of brothers. And we are, we’re brothers. I mean, what would the f***ing point be otherwise?”
As a teenager, Lightbody wanted to be “the biggest rock star on the planet”, even though he has never been cool, “not ever”. He wanted to be Bono, and years later Snow Patrol would tour with U2, who like Snow Patrol’s music so much that they borrowed their producer. “And we came off stage the first night, in Brussels, and thought: ‘Ah, we’re doing all right’ — even though nobody was really clapping. And then U2 came on, and I saw how Bono — who is such a nice guy — performed. I shattered like glass.”
But he’s glad that they spent so long slogging their way up, “because you need to be kicked around a bit before anything good happens. You need to know what you’re fighting for.” He buys 20 albums a week on iTunes or record shops and loves Elbow more than life. “I’d marry that band. Go to Utah and marry every single one of them.” He thinks that Guy Garvey, Elbow’s singer and guitarist, should be given “some kind of official status as a national treasure, for being the best lyricist we have”.
As for his own lyrics, he keeps notebooks full of them. “Bad, bad words. The day I die I hope those notebooks are incinerated. Some of them are just awful. Even some of the ones that ended up on the albums are awful.”
He fully supports Lily Allen in her mission against illegal downloading because of how it harms younger bands just starting out. “It’s not about us or her, we’re OK — we got through just in time.” He adores their producer Jacknife Lee, who makes them play KerPlunk and do origami between takes. “You’re sitting there thinking: ‘Why I am doing this? It’s nonsense.’ And then you go back in and record the take of your life.”
He thinks Ivor Cutler was right when he said: “Women of the world, take over, because if you don’t, the world will come to an end.” He writes a blog for Q magazine’s website about all the new young bands he’s into. But, come on, didn’t he take on the column solely to ensure that Q can never give them a one-star review?
“Ahahaha, that’s it, you’ve seen my nefarious plan there. Ha ha. No, Q have always been pretty fair with us — even the bad ones. When in other places it felt like personal attacks rather than music reviews. We only read them when we pick magazines up anyway and then turn the page and see that it’s us, and say: ‘Shall we? Oh, go on then . . .’ By accident. But I won’t look it up. I won’t google our name or anything — that way madness lies. If you want all of your fears confirmed, go online, type in your own name!” He can’t even bear it when other bands get one-star reviews, even if he doesn’t like them, “because I know that your life and soul goes into making an album. I’d make a terrible journalist, I want to praise everything.”
Of course, there’s more to a band than their records. There’s the private language they all tend to develop on the road. And that of Snow Patrol is “gibberish. We can speak in a series of noises and make each other laugh without saying any words.” What sort of noises? “We will look like the most mental ... it can’t be explained,” Connolly says. Lightbody adds: “Imagine a chimps’ tea party — but drunk.” There is a pause. Then Lightbody says: “Well, we can just go ... eeee eeee!” Instantly he and Connolly are falling about laughing.
He continues: “And what was that thing you said yesterday? Or maybe I said it! I know! It was: ‘I would have enjoyed that’.” Connolly beams with glee, repeats the phrase: “I would have enjoyed that!” The pair of them are now howling helplessly. But what is that? Nobody outside this band will ever know. All we need understand is that Snow Patrol have most definitely been enjoying it.
Up to Now is released on Nov 9 on Fiction
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