Becalmed in the Morrison Hotel bar in Dublin between Olympia shows in late November, you can almost hear the cogs and wheels in Gary Lightbody’s brain creak as he pieces his thoughts together for the purposes of the Christmas inquisition. Last night was his first time back on the vino in a while, and even though he took it easy, he’s still got that I-feel-like-a-million-dollars-all-green-and-crinkly thing going on.

“It’s funny ’cos I’ve been completely sober for a long time,” he says. “And I haven’t been in Dublin, and last night we were out at Doran’s, and Dermot Doran, one of our great, great friends, was like, Lemme getcha something,’ and he just wouldn’t take no for an answer – that’s the way I’m justifying it, anyway – so I had a couple of glasses of wine, but I got off with it very lightly. I could’ve ended up still out at this point, ’cos that’s what Dublin does for us generally. We’ve learned something this year which we’ve never had before, and that’s discipline. We’ve learned that if you’re gonna do it day in day out for months and months and months you’ve gotta be in the right mindset, you can’t think that it’s Christmas everyday.”

Point taken. Up until relatively recently, there was the received notion that Snow Patrol could be a great live band when they weren’t too pissed to keep it together.

“I know,” Gary says. “The NME called us Britain’s booziest band.’

They obviously haven’t met The Corrs.

“Oh really? I’d like to hang around with them, then! No, I mean everyone else is still having plenty of fun, I just have to lay off the booze because of the voice, because it just disappears on me if I get hammered too much, and the last thing I want to do coming up to the end of the tour is miss the gigs I’ve been looking forward to all year.”

Has that been a major concern?

“There’s been a few points where I’ve been close to losing it during the year,” he admits, “and the last thing you wanna do when you lose your voice is get stressed ’cos that just makes it worse. Not to be a prick about it, but without me singing, there’s no gig, so I have to take on some responsibility for that. There’s four other people and countless others behind the scenes that I’d be disappointing if I was out getting mashed every night and not being able to perform.”

As you join us, Snow Patrol have just begun their 04 December tour, ostensibly a victory lap at the tail end of the Final Straw campaign. Over the last 18 months the band have sold a million and a half copies of their third album and scored a couple of respectable chart hits in the form of ‘Run’ and ‘How To Be Dead’, something of a vindication for those who predicted great things on evidence of their first two albums ‘Songs for Polar Bears’ and ‘When It’s All Over We Still Have To Clear Up.’

But as the band prepare to bid adieu to their annus miraculous, the end feels like the beginning and the beginning feels like the end. January is Brandnewary; come 2005 they’ll be starting from a new year zero.

“Our last show is on New Year’s Eve and that really is knocking the year on the head and then we’ll have a break,” Gary says. “We all have to move house in January, and after that we’ll start getting songs together and start recording the album at the very latest March.”

So, as their press officer will attest, Snow Patrol not the type to shirk work. Lightbody comes across as a thoughtful, personable fellow who, like Fran Healy or Chris Martin, exudes a palpable air of decency; one of those musicians you could probably go on the tear with and bring home to your mother afterwards without much disgrace.

“It’s funny ’cos we were in Belfast last night,” he says, “getting a little bit of time with friends again, (but) it’s just not enough. There’s so many people turn up for a show and you get to spend a couple of minutes with each person and you just feel like you’re endlessly being rude to the people that you love. You’d just like to take each one of them off individually and go on the piss with them for a night.”

Compounding that, Snow Patrol’s stature has changed enormously since ‘Final Straw’ took off, so one imagines there’s a lot of second-guessing going on, old friends wondering if the boys have changed, the band wondering if their old friends think they’ve changed.

“That’s exactly right. It’s very difficult to prove to people that you’re not any different if you can’t spend any longer than five minutes chatting to them. It’s not something that we feel the need to prove, but it simply is that we are no different. We’re probably better for the year that we spent together in terms of being stronger as friends, and therefore if the relationships within the band become stronger, then things like ego and melodrama and all that sort of crap go out the window. We keep each other’s feet on the ground. We travel with an amazing crew that’s all our pals basically, so it’s like family, it’s a lovely infrastructure, and everybody within that structure is able to call each other dickheads, and that’s the most important thing.”

Lightbody once said life on the tour bus is like being part of a submarine crew, with all the claustrophobia that entails – not the first time I’ve heard the ‘Das Boot’ analogy from a musician.

“It happens on long American tours, but we’ve only had two of those this year,” he says. “We’ll have been to American five times before the year is out and that’s the most gruelling bit of it. But generally day to day life isn’t that stressful, and we’re as chipper and as upbeat as when we were starting out fresh-faced in August of last year. We might not look fresh faced, but we’re keeping it together rather splendidly and I’m very proud of us all; nobody’s had any hissy-fits or nervous breakdowns or anything like that.”

Mind you, they still have to deal with the decompression when they finally come off tour…

“Jesus, you’re making it sound very hard to do! It’s always something with you!”

Gary Lightbody grew up in Bangor, the only one of the core Snow Patrol crew not brought up in Belfast or Scotland. Play the Freudoid and ask him about his earliest memories of music and he’ll tell you this:

“I think I went with the flow a lot as a kid as regards to music, nothing really grabbed my attention for a long time. I listened to stuff like Iron Maiden and Metallica like everybody else was doing, not realising at the time that I actually hated it. There was something completely lacking in that type of music, it was passionless and tuneless. I didn’t know it until I heard something with passion, simplicity and tunefulness all rolled into one, ‘Nevermind.’ That’s when music hit me in the chest like a cannonball. I thought, ‘This is very, very interesting.’I devoured every bit of journalism about Nirvana and bought all the albums they talked about, like Teenage Fanclub, and from then back to Big Star and The Posies and Sebadoh, Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr and The Vaselines, and then it was just like one of those nature programmes that would speed up, a garden blooming, everything seemed to be happening at once.”

Lightbody is by no means alone in this. From Therapy to Ash, you’ll find a lot of Ulster musicians who connected with the pre-grunge Amerindie web of people like Husker Du, The Replacements and so on.

“It just made me realise that I’d been wasting my time with this nonsense,” he explains. “That’s when I first started to realise that what you need first and foremost to be in a band is passion. Musicianship is third or fourth on the list somewhere. Kurt was a brilliant guitar player but he never let it get in the way of his songwriting and his storytelling. All those ‘axe solos’ on Nirvana records, there aren’t any really, that’s what completely defied convention in my mind.”

Lightbody moved to Dundee to attend college in 1994 where he met the other members of the band, guitarist Mark McLelland and drummer Jonny Quinn (second guitarist Nathan Connolly joined after the first two albums, when the band left the Jeepster label and signed to Polydor subsidiary Fiction). In Glasgow, he found a community of likeminded musicians, and culturally the scene was close enough to home to be comfortable, but at a sufficient remove to free him up.

“It was like a security blanket around you and yet there was more freedom,” he says. “It was the perfect situation to grow up gently I guess. But yeah, I mean, I met Mark the first day we were there so I guess it was destined to take over my whole student life right from the start, this getting a band together thing, and it really was nothing more than that for a while, just us pissing about, but it was still more important to me than my studies.”

Aside from Snow Patrol duties, Lightbody also found the time to record a couple of extracurricular albums (‘Y’All Get Scared Now, Ya Hear’ and ‘Son Of Evil Reindeer’) with The Reindeer Section, a loose aggregation of musicians including members of Idlewild, Arab Strap, Teenage Fanclub and Mogwai.

“It’s something I still think back and don’t even believe it happened,” he recalls. “It wouldn’t generally happen in most cities. Everybody was playing on each other’s albums before The Reindeer Section anyway, I mean you look at the list of additional credits on any album, there’s a name or two from other bands, it was something that was very easy for people to visualise well before we were even in the studio making the record. Nobody went, ‘Ach, no, I’m busy.’ We only had a week to make the first album, so if they weren’t physically in Glasgow they weren’t available, but everyone that was came down.”

Did this spontaneous approach benefit his work with Snow Patrol?

“I think it was (Arab Strap vocalist) Aidan Moffat said it best: making a record like with The Reindeer Section is like having a really good fuck, but it’s not the love and affection that you need in your daily life. It is like an illicit affair on the side that reminds you of how much you love your wife.”

Which provides us with a link to the next question. Was it weird having an album like Final Straw – in which Gary essentially spilled his guts to the world – get so big?

“Yeah well… I mean obviously you can’t possibly think about that at the time because you start second guessing whether you should be a bit more guarded. So there was never a thought while I was writing the lyrics that I should be a little less . . .”

Explicit?

“Explicit is a good word. It never even crossed my mind. And it won’t happen the next time either, I won’t think about it because hopefully we’ll be able to find a little vacuum or a bubble to make the next record in, just going away for a few months and being together as a group of people, a bunch of lads, and not think about anything else only making a record, and that’ll make me be honest again I hope. The only thing I have in terms of lyrics is to write what’s in my heart and that’s the only way it’s ever gonna work.”

One of the interesting things about Final Straw is it sounds so big yet intimate at the same time.

“A big part of it is the production, which is down to Garret (‘Jacknife’ Lee, ex-Amazing Colossal Man and TLC/Basement Jaxx/U2 studio collaborator). We were able to concentrate on not having to worry about anything else but being honest and passionate, and then he was like, I dunno, a football manager, he just organised all our thoughts into some kind of cohesive order or arrangement. It’s what we’ve always being missing, because if you listen to our previous albums, it sounds as if we just couldn’t decide, and that made the albums sporadically good and sometimes the opposite of that. Hit and miss, I suppose. Garret stripped away all the superfluous shite, for want of a better word, and kept it very simple. ’Cos we’d been playing some of those songs, ‘Run’ especially, since before the last album was even released, the second album.”

‘Run’ is of course the band’s best known song, and that strange hybrid: a lighter-waving anthem drenched in private grieving. Can he remember the first time the band played it?

“Probably from March 2000 we’d have been getting it together in the studio, we were definitely playing it in the summer of 2000 to about 20 people in the arsehole of somewhere in Scotland, up a tree. I guess it does have a life of its own. Live it’d be hard to deny that that would be the moment of the evening each night in terms of reaction from the crowd.”

I read somewhere that Gary’s abiding concerns when writing the Final Straw material were love lost and the coalition forces’ invasion of Iraq. Tolstoy’s line “marriage is war” seems apposite.

“Well I’ve never been married,” he says, “but I can… well y’see, that’s probably why I’ve never been married because I sort of see things like that, I see the contradictions in people before I see the complimentary personality traits, so I always set out to kind of ruin a relationship. Not on purpose, but in my head somewhere, there’s always a button that clicks on at some point when things become cosy, I think I just have a natural instinct to destroy. I think I did as a child as well, pulling the arms off action men or whatever, burning stuff. It’s probably the same way I go about relationships. It’s very, very, very childish, very destructive, and I’ve hurt a lot of people as well. I mean, I really don’t do it on purpose, I always set out with the best intentions and somewhere along the line I fuck it up. So that’s generally what I write about.”

For sure, a song like ‘How To Be Dead’ manages to encapsulate the complex back-and-forth of a snarled-up relationship. The way Lightbody phrases the line, “You’ve not heard a single word I have said/Oh my god” evokes those arguments that go round and round so long you don’t even know what they’re about anymore.

“You just know you’ve been fighting for a long time,” he nods. “You have to go through the same fucking thing every day.”

Funny how you can get intensely affected by music regardless of who creates it. I don’t flip out over Snow Patrol the way I flip for The Stooges or Roy Orbison or whomever, but when I hear a tune like ‘Run’ a high volume, resistance is futile. It’s kind of like watching those triumph-against-adversity biopics about paraplegic Vietnam vets entering the Olympics. You’re watching the whole thing with one eye, but somehow by the third act, where the Ron Kovic-alike with the handlebar moustache is closing on the finishing line, biceps pumping, face contorted with the effort, you get all choked up and your Adam’s apple starts going up and down like a ballcock. The point being, a song like ‘Run’ transcends notions of taste or style by dint of sheer emotional wallop.

Has Gary heard anything that had a similar effect on him this past year?

“It’s been the best year in a long, long time for music, the sheer volume of great albums,” he says. “I think people are finally getting over the hangover of the 90s. Nothing really excited me from the UK or Ireland for that matter for a long time, and now look at the wealth of bands and songwriters in Ireland and Glasgow and parts of England. The Shins, The Duke Spirit, Death Cab For Cutie. There’s just bands coming up all over the place. I don’t know what it is. I mean, do you think there is a great wealth of talent or am I just romanticising it?”

I think there’s a lot of good stuff, I just don’t know that much of it is terribly original or innovative.

“You might be right. Nothing has set my life on fire, but it’s more like dozens and dozens of tiny little fires keeping you warm.”

So what can we expect from the fourth Snow Patrol album? Have they demoed any new songs?

“They’re all in my phone actually. I sort of write sketches during soundchecks and the odd time on the bus. I’ve probably got 20 to 25 of those and we just simply haven’t had the time to get them together. It’s frustrating ’cos a soundcheck is not the right environment, you have engineers and backline guys and everyone running around, and I’ll get frustrated and just give up. You don’t want people watching you when you’re trying to put a song together. I’d rather it was somewhere close to being fully formed before anyone saw it.”

I can understand that. One offhand remark from the monitors guy could corrupt the idea at its larval stage.

“I know. ‘That’s sounds like fuckin’ Steps!’ ‘Alright, thanks very much, I’m never writing a song ever again!’”

One of Ireland’s foremost music and pop culture writers, Peter Murphy (b. 1968, Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford) got a taste for journalism at the age of 17 when he won first place in an EU sponsored competition for young essayists. After ten days of being wined, dined and chauffeured around Europe on someone else’s tab, the only proviso being that he file a report at the end of it, he figured this was the way to live. But first, he had to get the rock ‘n’ roll bug out of his system, and spent most of the next decade playing drums with a succession of bands. He quit music to become a journalist in 1996, quickly establishing himself as a senior contributor to Hot Press. Since then he has written over 30 cover stories for the magazine, accumulating a portfolio of interviews that includes Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Nick Cave, Willie Nelson, Radiohead, Public Enemy, Shane MacGowan, George Clinton, Sonic Youth, Television, Henry Rollins, PJ Harvey, Richard Hell, David Johansen, Warren Zevon, Wim Wenders, Iain Banks, Will Self, William Gibson, Billy Bob Thornton, FW De Klerk and many others. His work has also appeared in the Bloodaxe Books anthology Dublines, the Sunday Independent (Ireland) plus international publications such as Rolling Stone (Australia) and Request (US). Miscellaneous assignments include writing the programme notes for jazz legend Miles Davis’ art exhibition hosted by the Davis Gallery in Dublin (2000), collaborations with cult author JT LeRoy for the American magazine Razor (2002), and co-producing Revelations, a two-hour radio documentary about The Frames (2003). He is frequently employed as a rent-a-mouth by the BBC and Irish national radio and television, is a contributor to the online archive Rocksbackpages.com and more recently gave a talk entitled Nocturnal Emissions at the ReJoyce symposium in the National College of Ireland, tracing the influence of James Joyce’s writings on Irish music. He has also been invited to contribute an essay to the liner notes of the 2004 remastered edition of Harry Smith’s Anthology Of American Folk Music, and is currently writing his first novel.

© 2004 Laura Hird All rights reserved.