There's No Business like Snow Business

You can say what you like about Gary Lightbody, but you could never accuse the man of rock star arrogance. On being informed that Snow Patrol have scooped Hot Press’ prestigious Irish Band of the Decade award – no mean feat that – the singer, who is able to command the attentions of thousands while on stage, is a little flustered and lost for words.

“Eh? What? That’s incredible! That’s… Oh wow! Thank you!”
Over the course of their fifteen-year existence, the band has been nominated for, and won, several awards, including a clutch of Meteor Music Prizes.
“It’s nice to know that people know you exist,” says Lightbody disarmingly, as if any of us could have escaped their ascent to the stratosphere after the success of The Final Straw.
“Sometimes it can feel like you’re in your own little world, so things like this are amazing. Hot Press have been supporters of us from the very beginning. A lot of magazines lose faith in you or build you up to smash you back down again, so it just shows that Hot Press are willing to stick to their guns and support a band all the way through their career.”
This is true. Here at Hot Press we know a good thing when we see, or rather, hear it. It’s fitting that a band that received HP’s Phil Lynott Award for Best New Band in 1999 should, ten years on, have made good on that early promise.
It could have all fallen apart. Dropped in 2001 by their indie label Jeepster (“A development which, frankly, suggests that the much-lauded Scottish label is in possession of more buttons on its duffle coats than braincells,” noted HP’s Colin Carberry), Snow Patrol gave it one last roll of the dice with Final Straw. That they are here today is the result of “a little touch of belligerence” according to Lightbody.
Bloody-mindedness being a characteristic rather associated with Norn Iron.
“It certainly is a trait with some of our politicians! I guess it is a little bit, to be honest. I’d like to think of it as a positive quality in the sense of how we’ve used it anyway. It’s more to do with the self-belief side of belligerence than it is to do with just not listening to anybody. We’re not made of stone. Obviously when we were getting a lot of negative reaction… well, we still get a lot of negative reaction, but it hurts less when people are buying the records, I’ll tell you that!
“We never stopped believing that we had more to give. Once you get the ego kicked out of you, you’re free to make music on your own terms. Final Straw was us making music in a vacuum, not caring what anyone thought, and it just so happened that we lucked out, that people actually seemed to take to it. We didn’t think anybody was listening anymore. At that stage, it was ten years after we started and we hadn’t really sold any records, so why on earth would we think that we would sell any now? We didn’t have any pretence or aspirations of record sales or taking on the world. It was music for the sake of music, and that’s really been our motto ever since.”
When success finally decided to trouble Snow Patrol, it arrived with a bang.
“Somebody joked that we were a ten-year overnight success. We were playing to literally fifteen people in December of 2003 in High Wycombe in this little pub; two months later ‘Run’ was a top five hit and the album was a top five hit and we were playing in the Shepherd’s Bush Empire down the road from High Wycombe in London to three thousand people. Our lives just flipped upside down.
“Since then, we’ve been on tour for five years, and in between times, we’ve been making albums. We haven’t stopped. When you finally take the lock off the cage of a ten-year sleeping beast, then it wants to roam around as much it possibly can.”
Touring and playing live, especially since they now regularly manage to get more than double-figures at their shows, is how Snow Patrol measure their success, according to Lightbody.
“We judge it by gigs, not so much chart positions or records, which is good – it’s only in the latter part of our career that we even had those things, like record sales! I grew up in Bangor and we played there in 2007 in Ward Park, the park I used to play football in and where Jonny Quinn, our drummer, used to ride his bike. It was a really special day for us, playing a proper hometown show.
“The Chelmsford V Festival this year was a crowd like I’ve never seen, none of us had, certainly in England. We were deputising for Oasis and we thought it was going to be a tough crowd, but it was quite the opposite, it was incredible. It was one of our highlights of the year.”
This November saw the release of Up To Now, a 30-track retrospective of the band’s career, including hits like the ubiquitous ‘Chasing Cars’ and ‘Signal Fire’, earlier tracks from Songs For Polar Bears and When It’s All Over We Still Have To Clear Up and oddities such as their cover of Beyoncé’s ‘Crazy in Love’.
“We all did a list and named a bunch of songs, and they just happened to be the same ones. There were a couple of ones that a few members wanted on and some others didn’t, so we just talked about it rationally. There was no arm-wrestling or eye-gouging! ‘How To Be Dead’ didn’t make the final cut. That’s the only one that might have raised an eyebrow amongst the fans, but I think it’s a pretty comprehensive list.”
‘Give Me Strength’ and ‘Dark Roman Wine’, the two new tracks included on the album, are Lightbody’s personal favourites.
“A lot of that is probably because they are new. New things are always much more exciting, but I do think that they are probably the strongest songs lyrically that I’ve written in a long time. Aside from that, ‘Set The Fire…’ with Martha Wainwright was probably my favourite moment in our career.”
Given how far they’ve come, Lightbody should surely be feeling pretty confident as a songwriter.
“Eh…” he hesitates, “I think so. I still have plenty of insecurities. I’m a nervous wreck most of the time – it’s just in my nature.”
With Up To Now drawing a line under the past, does Lightbody have a gameplan worked out for the next
ten years?
“Yes,” he laughs. “I suppose you want me to elaborate on that?”
That would be useful!
“As far as the music goes, I think when we just say ‘yes’ it opens us out into slightly new avenues. Anyone who knows the nonsense I post on the website will know of my love of dance music and I’d like to explore a little further the electronic side of things, although I can’t imagine we’ll suddenly turn into a dance band!”
They may have spent more time on the road than off it since The Final Straw, but if Lightbody gets his way, they’ve only just begun.
“There are so many places we haven’t played. When we do world tours it’s not like when Coldplay do a world tour – there are plenty of countries that we don’t sell records in. What would be good is if we could start to play more in those countries. I’m talking about countries as close as France and Spain, but also we’ve never toured South America, we’ve never done any shows in Russia, we haven’t done too much in South East Asia. It would be nice to spend some time playing in countries that we’ve never played in before. We’re junior explorers, we like to go to new places.”
It seems nothing less than world domination will suffice.