“In the indie world, you’re not meant to be successful.” Snow Patrol's Gary Lightbody on dealing with superstardom after being written off as “damaged goods” by the music industry

Snow Patrol, live in September 2024 — (Image credit: Katja Ogrin/Redferns)

In 2001, after releasing two albums on British independent record label Jeepster, Snow Patrol were dropped. Two years later, after being picked up by Fiction records, the band scored a UK Top single with Run, and their third album, Final Straw, debuted at number 3 on the UK charts. It has since gone on to be certified six times platinum in the UK (1,800,000 sales), double platinum in Europe (two million sales) and gold in America (600,000 sales and counting).

In a new [paywalled] interview with The Times, frontman Gary Lightbody recalls the moment that he realised that things had changed for the North of Ireland band.

“There was a bar in Glasgow called Nice n Sleazy and we were in it every week,” the County Down-born singer/guitarist remembers. “I went in after Run was a hit and it was like the scene in the western movie: the place went silent. In the indie world, you’re not meant to be successful.”

“After we got dropped, every major label in Britain rejected us because we were damaged goods,” he notes.

“For the next eight years it was an insane ride,” Lightbody adds. “We weren’t prepared for it until we went on tour with U2, which was a tutorial on how to do it right. Until then we had been performing in the same clothes we walked into the venue in. With U2 we saw how, if you want to be big, you have to make people feel like they are part of something. You do that by connecting to every person in the room, which is what Bono does so brilliantly.”

Snow Patrol's next album, 2006's Eyes Open, was an even greater commercial success, becoming the best-selling album in the UK that year, and the 15th best-selling album of the decade in Britain. It's second single, Chasing Cars, is now the most-played song of the 21st century on UK radio: it has also sold more than four million copies in America.

“It’s the songs, not us, that are famous,” Lightbody tells The Times, “which is great because crazy fame is paralysing.”

Snow Patrol's new album The Forest Is the Path is released on September 13.

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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.