The Empire Strikes Back

It’s a chilly September afternoon in central London and Gary Lightbody is unwell. So unwell, apparently, that his scheduled interview with Hot Press has to be cancelled. Hmmm...

The last time the Snow Patrol frontman was spotted by your correspondent was at the aftershow party following his band’s blistering gig in the Shepherd’s Bush Empire two nights earlier. I put it down to a serious hangover, and fly home disappointed.
More than two months later, we finally catch up backstage in Dublin’s Button Factory, shortly before he’s due to play a short acoustic set to promote Meteor’s sponsorship of the Choice Music Prize.
“Sorry about missing you the last time, Olaf,” the 35 year-old singer apologises, pulling up a seat.
I can’t resist a cheeky reply: “No worries, Mr. Lightbody... it must have been quite some hangover.”
He looks genuinely shocked.
“I was not hungover,” he insists. “I was fucking throwing up like a wild bastard! It was not a pretty sight. Whoever said I was hungover needs a punch in the balls!”
He laughs and punches my arm. “Anyway... alright you?!”

Casually dressed in a sweater and jeans, Gary isn’t a man overly concerned with portraying any kind of rock star image. Then again, when you’re consistently coming up with the musical goods, it doesn’t really matter what you look like. Not that the musical goods came particularly easily this time around. We’re meeting – finally – to discuss Snow Patrol’s sixth studio long-player, Fallen Empires. Produced once again by Dubliner Garret ‘Jacknife’
Lee, the album was recorded from start to finish entirely on Californian sand.
“We’ve always been obsessed with American music, American culture,” he explains. “It’s the place that, for the first ten years of our career, we really wanted to get to and we couldn’t get there. Making a record there felt like sticking a Snow Patrol flag in the land that kind of inspired us.”
That flag was first stuck in the desert. In October 2010, the band headed to The Joshua Tree National Park for initial writing sessions at Rancho De La Luna Studios. Although these yielded some fruit in the shape of four near-finished songs, Lightbody then fell victim to an excruciating bout of writer’s block, which lasted almost three months and left him reconsidering his future as a rock star. Eventually the tender ministrations of Dr. Michael Stipe got him back on track.
“Michael Stipe is amazing, actually,” he enthuses. “He came in and listened to the songs that I had and really loved them. Before the writer’s block came down I’d written about four songs. We’d done a bunch of music and I’d written lyrics to four of them and Michael came in and listened to those four, loved them, loved the words.
“I think he suggested that I change three words in all – which was a confidence boost in itself for me because I thought he was gonna come in and go, ‘Ah, you’ll have to start again’. Not that he’d be able to demand such a thing but, you know, if his advice had been, ‘I would scrap it’, I probably would have scrapped it. Thankfully, he was very positive.”
Surely you have more confidence in yourself at this point?
“Yeah, you’d think, but at that time I’d had three months worth
of writer’s block and I hadn’t been able to write a single word in those months.”
Never a man to rest on his laurels, it’s possible that he had blown his lyrical load on last year’s Tired Pony side-project. When the rest of the band took some time out after their last tour, Gary instead headed to Portland to make an album in the company of Peter Buck, Richard Colburn, Iain Archer, Tom Smith and various others. Did Tired Pony take it out of you?
“Well, a little...” he shrugs. “It’s funny because I taught myself a new way to write during Tired Pony because it was like a shock to the system. I arrived at the studio with hardly any songs, unbeknownst to the rest of the band. We recorded the songs we had and, during the night, I would write more songs for the next day and just keep it going like that. I wanted to write songs that were stories about America rather than stories about me.
“I kinda wanted to combine that with what I’d done in the past and what I’d done with Tired Pony for this new Snow Patrol album – so that’s what actually put me into the damaged barrel, trying to write from a different perspective for Snow Patrol – because the pressure seemed so much. Like, no disrespect to Tired Pony but people are going to be listening with Snow Patrol. I guess it was less people for Tired Pony so that made it a little easier to be a little bit more spontaneous.”

Over the course of a long career (they first formed in 1994), Snow Patrol have grown from playing to the proverbial two-men-and-a-dog in dingy Glasgow bars to selling out arenas. However, having toured regularly with U2 over the last few years, are their collective eyes now set
on stadiums?
“I’m not even sure if that’s attainable,” he says. “Coldplay are the next stadium band, maybe Muse. But yeah we’re in arenas at the moment and that’s probably as big as we’ll get in terms of gigs. I don’t know. I’d love to play Croke Park or Windsor Park – although that probably isn’t a stadium, it’s more of an arena (laughs) – but yeah, Croke Park, put that on the list. But I don’t know, I really don’t know. I’m more confident than I’ve ever been in the band, but in terms of thinking about arenas that’s just the next level of mindfuck. The shows with U2 were great
fun, though.”
Speaking of U2, Snow Patrol recently covered ‘Mysterious Ways’ for Q magazine’s Achtung Baby! tribute album.
“That was an amazing song to cover. Really, really brilliant. We kind of stripped it right down to the bare song, so there was just the heartbeat of the song. Bono sent me an amazing text saying he adored it, he was playing it to people – he played it to Arcade Fire and they loved it too. It was like the best text I’ve ever gotten!
“But to answer your question about us wanting to play stadiums, I don’t think about gigs when we’re writing songs. Like, something like ‘Run’ came very naturally to me in a dark Glasgow student flat in the middle of winter.”
It must have been an emotional moment when the audience sang ‘Run’ in its entirety to you at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire show last September...
“Yeah, it still gives me fucking goosebumps every time the crowd take it on. I just adore it. I wrote that thinking no-one will ever hear it, so I still like to write songs for myself because that’s the only honesty that there is left. You can’t really write songs thinking about what people want to hear because who the fuck knows what they’ll want to hear by the time you actually release the song?”
Do you still like playing ‘Chasing Cars’?
“Yeah, because of the crowd,” he says. “The crowd makes it. Rehearsing it feels a little chore-ish sometimes, but live it’s taken on a life of its own.”
Back to Fallen Empires. Once Gary got his songwriting mojo back, he and the band – guitarist Nathan Connolly, bassist Paul Wilson, drummer Jonny Quinn and keyboardist Tom Simpson – set up a studio at Eagles Watch, a seafront house in Santa Monica with widescreen windows and breathtaking
Pacific views.
“It was a very long way from Glasgow,” he laughs. “It was brilliant because we recorded a record in the sunshine for the first time. We recorded a record in a house for the first time – with windows. An incredibly simple luxury. We were sitting looking out at the Pacific Ocean. It’s probably why it took us so long! We just set up our gear, we had the keys to the place, so we could come and go as we pleased, and it was just a really relaxed way of working. I guess that’s why we probably were so free on this record. I think it’s the freest we’ve ever been.”
Musically, they took their cues from LCD Soundsystem’s The Sound Of Silver, U2’s Achtung Baby and Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs. They had a little help. Some backing vocals were recorded by the LA Inner City Mass Gospel Choir in Compton, and Troy Van Leuwen from Queens Of The Stone Age provided additional guitars on two tracks...

So how was it for them? While their last studio album, 2008’s A Hundred Million Suns, was more self-consciously ‘arty’ than previous offerings, it could hardly have been described as a major change in direction. It’s the same with Fallen Empires. Despite some interesting techno moments, it’s still instantly recognisable as a Snow Patrol album. This isn’t quite their Zooropa or Kid A, but the good news is that it’s probably the best album they’ve ever made – epic, adventurous, melancholic, joyful and deep, but
still somehow endearingly populist and
occasionally exhilarating.
Gary himself couldn’t be happier with the
finished product.
“I think it’s as close to a fucking masterpiece as we’ve made. I couldn’t be more fuckin’ happy or proud of anything I’ve ever done in my life.”
Do you listen to it often?
“Yeah, I listened to it today,” he nods. “Which is something that’s never happened before. Once the album is masterered, normally I’m done with it
other than to remember how to play it for when we go on tour.”
Your best songs always seem to have been mined from the darkest moments. So when you’re on the beach in Malibu on the Pacific Ocean, where are the dark moment coming from?
“The dark moments are when you forget how to write music,” he states. “Three months of writer’s block would make anyone think about ending their lives (laughs). I was starting to think – towards what would become the end of the writer’s block, I wasn’t to know that – at the time I started to think, ‘I’m going to have to find some new skills!’ Like, maybe I should go acquire vocational skills at a night school or something like that while this is happening, because I may have to leave the band.”
Despite the glamorous location, when the songs finally began to flow he found he was mostly writing about home.
“Yeah, when I eventually started to write it was all about home and childhood and the loss of innocence. But some of the people that I’d met in LA kinda connected the dots between where I’ve come from and where I was. You know, you can talk about LA being luxurious – and the LA that we lived in certainly was, in Santa Monica – but the songs that bookend the album, ‘I’ll Never Let Go’ and ‘The President’, are both about two homeless guys that I would see every day on my way walking into town to run errands. So it’s their stories. And I guess other people’s lives certainly made me think maybe about some of the time that I’ve… not wasted, not exactly, I hasten to add, but I could have been writing about something other than my relationship problems for a while.”
Not that relationship songs don’t feature on Fallen Empires. ‘This Isn’t Everything You Are’ and the brilliantly uplifting ‘New York’ are as heartfelt and honest as any he’s ever written. How’s your love life at the moment?
He pulls a face. “I haven’t been out with anyone for years so it’s been a long time...”
By choice?
“Well, yeah. There’s been women I have met and it’s not quite worked out because we’ve been moving around all the time. But no, I’m ready for the lightning bolt.”
Is the constant travel still suiting you or is it starting to grate a little?
“Well, I was in Santa Monica for the best part of 18 months and that felt like as close to... ironically, I guess, this record is about home and the home that I came from – but I felt like I was home when I was there. It was probably something to do with why I wanted to write about home on the record. Made lots and lots of friends, made a life over there, for sure, and of course I have lots of friends and family at home in Ireland and in London, but living in the sunshine appeals to me.”
I wouldn’t have thought that you were that kind
of guy.
“No, I was learning how to surf and swimming in the sea every day and running along the beach.”
That doesn’t sit very well with the image of you as a tortured artist...
“No, but I’d still be tortured and surf!” he guffaws.
Can you be rich and successful and still
find something…
He finishes the question for me, “To complain about? Ha! Yeah, but it’s about emotion and it’s about passion. I never cared about money when I didn’t have it and I don’t really care about it now that I do. I try and use it wisely.”
It’s easier to not care about not having it when you’re not selling your record collection to pay
your rent...
“Yeah, sure,” he avers. “But it’s never been something that I have put much great sway onto, so it shouldn’t affect the way I write now. It’s not like I’m going to start writing about my Bentleys or whatever because I don’t own any Bentleys. I don’t even drive a car.”
Do you think you have a Protestant work ethic?
“A what?” he laughs, mocking a horrified look. “What do you mean?”
Just that you never seem to switch off and
stop working...
“No, I don’t have that switch, or at least I’ve never been able to find it,” he admits. “I kind of like to go and work with other people to just see how they work. There’s a lot of years of touring with Snow Patrol between Tired Pony and The Reindeer Section, and I think that I got a little perhaps institutionalised, not the rest of the band, it’s no fault of theirs, it’s my own way of working, my own way of thinking, seeing the way other people do it helps me and that has to take place when the rest of the band have time off. I’m not going to stop in the middle of a Snow Patrol tour and go, ‘Hang on a minute lads, I need to go and make an album with someone else’.”

That’s unlikely to happen anytime soon. Not only will Snow Patrol be touring Fallen Empires for the next year, at least, they may also be releasing a companion album. There are plans to bring a mobile studio on the road so they can record while touring.
“There is talk of that, for sure, to try and knock this other album out. We’re more than halfway through this other album because we recorded two records at the same time in Santa Monica and Malibu.”
What’s the other record going to be called?
“I don’t know yet,” he says, thoughtfully. “It could be a companion piece to this album – Rising Empires. Or Fallen Empires II: The Revenge or something. I mean it’ll be something connected to this record and probably released sort of more pointed towards fans rather than a giant publicity campaign and just as a kind of a ‘This is what we did, too’ rather than ‘This is a brand new record’. So I don’t know how we’ll go about releasing that or even finishing it, but we’ll need a mobile studio to do it.”
Snow Patrol – still building empires then...