“It was like being plugged into an electrical socket that has charged me ever since.” Snow Patrol frontman Gary Lightbody on the rock show that made him want to start a band

(Image credit: Gus Stewart/Redferns)

Snow Patrol frontman Gary Lightbody has spoken about how Nirvana's first and only show in Belfast, Northern Ireland made him want to be in a band.

As a teenager, the first rock band that Lightbody fell in love with - “or at least the first one I’ll admit to getting into" he once told Rolling Stone - was AC/DC, but it was hearing Nirvana's 1991 album Nevermind which “exploded everything”, and flicked a switch within the County Down schoolboy.

“It just blew my fucking head off,” he recalled in 2008. “Music was getting really a little stale and Nirvana just blew the cobwebs off. I picked up the guitar that I got a few years back that I’d only used for standing in front of the mirror and pretending I was Angus Young, and started to play songs from Nevermind.”

“Without Kurt Cobain and Nirvana I wouldn’t have been in a band,” the 48-year-old musician acknowledges in a new [paywalled] interview in The Times.

On December 9, 1991, Nirvana were scheduled to play their first show in the North of Ireland at the 600-capacity Conor Hall/Belfast Art College, as the penultimate gig of a UK/Irish tour, the gig (and a scheduled performance in Dublin the following evening) was pulled, as were the remaining dates on the trio's European tour. In a reflection of the Seattle trio's sky-rocketing popularity, when the Belfast show was rescheduled for June 22 the following year, it was booked into the city's 7,000-capacity Kings Hall. Gary Lightbody (plus future members of Ash, and this writer, incidentally) were among those with tickets for the rescheduled date.

So much had changed for Nirvana between their two visits to Europe. Nevermind had topped the Billboard charts, Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love had got married, Love was pregnant with the couple's first child, and Cobain had acquired a heroin habit, and overdosed for the first time. On the morning after Nirvana's Kings Hall show, the singer would collapse at breakfast in Belfast's Europa hotel, suffering from methadone withdrawal: the official story, given to the media by the trio's UK PR, was that Cobain had a 'weeping ulcer'.

“You had to say and do a lot of things to keep face for the band,” he later confessed.

But this none of this drama was known to the 7,000 fans who packed out what was then Belfast's biggest concert hall on June 22, with excitement building to a peak following support slots from The Breeders and Teenage Fanclub. And for the 70 minutes they were onstage, Nirvana sounded exactly like what everyone said they were, the most thrilling rock band in the world. When they exited stage left following a typically thrashy Territorial Pissings - the first Nirvana song Gary Lightbody ever heard - at least one teenage fan was changed forever.

“It's still the greatest gig I've ever been to," Lightbody told BBC Northern Ireland in 2023. “It was an awakening.”

“It was like being plugged into an electrical socket that has charged me ever since," the singer tells The Times. “I haven’t ever felt the battery power of that night wane.”

Artists

A music writer since 1993, formerly Editor of Kerrang! and Planet Rock magazine (RIP), Paul Brannigan is a Contributing Editor to Louder. Having previously written books on Lemmy, Dave Grohl (the Sunday Times best-seller This Is A Call) and Metallica (Birth School Metallica Death, co-authored with Ian Winwood), his Eddie Van Halen biography (Eruption in the UK, Unchained in the US) emerged in 2021. He has written for Rolling Stone, Mojo and Q, hung out with Fugazi at Dischord House, flown on Ozzy Osbourne's private jet, played Angus Young's Gibson SG, and interviewed everyone from Aerosmith and Beastie Boys to Young Gods and ZZ Top. Born in the North of Ireland, Brannigan lives in North London and supports The Arsenal.