Gary Lightbody was born in Bangor, County Down in June 1976. A keen poet, he left home in 1994 to study English literature at the University of Dundee. Inspired to make music after seeing Nirvana in 1992, it was there that he formed a band with Mark McClelland and Michael Morrison called Shrug, before changing their name to Polarbear, releasing an EP called Starfighter Pilot in 1997. By now based in Glasgow and having undergone line-up changes, they then became Snow Patrol, and released two albums on the indie label Jeepster before signing to Fiction Records and having huge success with their 2003 album Final Straw, which featured the worldwide hit Run.
The band went on to even further success, with the 2006 single Chasing Cars becoming the most played song on UK radio of the 21st century. Further success followed and the band are still going strong, but Lightbody has had to face up to personal demons, going sober in 2016 after sustained period of hedonism.
Speaking to The Big Issue for his Letter to My Younger Self, Gary Lightbody looks back at a life, that despite its challenges, is so charmed at times he says he feels it’s like someone else is living it.
Sixteen was an interesting age for me, because it was the first year that I knew I wanted to make music. I hadn’t actually told anybody about it yet. Nirvana had just blown my mind – I’d seen them live in 1992 in Belfast. So I was pretty certain that the thing I saw that guy Kurt Cobain do up there, that’s what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. But I wasn’t sure that I was ever gonna get to do it, obviously. I got a guitar for Christmas when I was 14. One of those where you get the guitar and the amp. My dad found it in the back of a newspaper, something like that. It was a wee tiny amp. And I wish I still had it. I don’t know where it went. But it was the best-sounding thing.
I was listening to a lot of metal bands like Metallica and Pantera. My mindset when I picked up the guitar was like well, all these guys like Angus Young [of AC/DC] are lead soloing and he makes it look easy. So obviously I’m going to pick up the guitar and do the same. And then I struggled to play just simple chords. So that guitar got shoved into the back of the closet. And then Nirvana came along. Not that Nirvana songs and Kurt’s songwriting wasn’t complex. It was just that it was not the sort of lead soloing I’d been up against. It was a different kind of brilliance. It made it feel accessible. I felt like Kurt was the guide I didn’t realise I was looking for.
I started writing poetry when I was 14 and I was actually published. And I really hope that none of those books are still out there. It was a very earnest piece about Northern Ireland and growing up there. It wasn’t great. But I was writing. If Kurt Cobain was the inspiration for music, Seamus Heaney was the inspiration for writing. I was introduced to him at 14 by our English teacher. The very first time I heard Mr McKee read Digging, I was suddenly like, Oh, hang on a minute. What? I haven’t been paying enough attention! There’s a line in one of my favourite books, Grab Onto Me Tightly as if I Knew the Way by Brian Charles. The hero meets a girl and falls for her. The line is “Something is happening here.” And I love that line, the simplicity of it. That sums me up at that age. Something was starting to happen.
2001: Performing with Snow Patrol at Cardiff University. Image: Rob Watkins / Alamy
If I went back and told the 16-year-old what’s happened in my life he wouldn’t be able to believe a single word. He would think I was talking about somebody else. Because actually quite a significant part of my life has been spent thinking, I’m not supposed to be here. Somebody’s gonna tap me on the shoulder at any moment and say, actually, this is somebody else’s life. You’re supposed to be over here, living this life.
We waited a long time to be successful. The first 10 years of the band were, by any stretch of the imagination, unsuccessful, even though they were a lot of fun. Of course, there were some really hilarious moments as well. Playing to one person in Leeds. We were a three-piece at the time so there was three times as many people in the band as the audience.
Steve Lamacq and Jo Whiley were the first two people to play Snow Patrol on national radio – the Evening Session played Starfighter Pilot [when they were still called Polarbear], our first single, in 1997 on Radio 1, and that made me the most excited I’d ever been.
I would have been 28 or 29 when we were writing the songs that would be the third Snow Patrol album [2003’s Final Straw]. We met [music manager] Jazz Summers who seemed to believe in us and he took our four-track CD with Run, Chocolate, Spitting Games and How to be Dead around every single label you can think of. No one wanted to touch us because we’d been on an indie label for 10 years and done nothing. I don’t hold any grudges about that, I completely understand it.
2014: Recording a song for the film Shooting For Socrates with Northern Ireland football legend Gerry Armstrong. Image: Richard Splash / Alamy
But then Jim Chancellor [A&R for Polydor offshoot Fiction] got hold of that CD and he came to Glasgow, where we were living, and listened to us rehearse. We were so nervous. Then he took us to dinner and I suddenly couldn’t bear one more minute of waiting. It had been 10 years and we were sleeping on friends’ sofas just hoping for a breakthrough. I just said, “Jim, I can’t stand it, are you going to sign us?” And he said: “Oh yeah, I knew I was going to sign you before I came, I just wanted to check you weren’t a bunch of cunts.”
Before I wrote Run I definitely had the conversation about throwing in the towel. Especially with my parents who were like, seriously, what are you doing? People kept telling me it was going to happen but we were a little wary by that stage in our career. It had been so long. But we had enough belligerence to not give up. It was like, well, I don’t know how to do anything else. This is the only thing I ever wanted to do. So I’m just gonna keep doing it until somebody literally tells me to put my guitar away and never bring it back out again.
When we took Run to [producer] Garrett Lee [better known as Jacknife Lee] he said we’d included all these clever, complex chords and we should drop them. He said, “You’ve written a big song – just let it be a big song.” And I felt like it was maybe the permission that I needed to just be like, “OK, I don’t care about what anybody else thinks about it. I can just write what I genuinely feel and it doesn’t matter whether it’s cool. Just write what’s in your heart.” I never forgot that from then on. Then Jo Whiley played all six minutes of it on Radio 1 daytime and that’s what changed everything.
Snow Patrol’s Gary Lightbody.
I haven’t been in a relationship in a long time. If I was giving my younger self advice I’d say, just be happier. Often in my life I have been thinking too far ahead. And now in my life, what I try and do is feel my feet on the ground. You know, if I’m standing beside a tree, I put my hand on the tree or just something that connects me to the moment. I didn’t know how to do that before. I was always so anxious about what was going to happen tomorrow or next week or next year. I think that probably made me miss out on so much of what was happening in that moment. And I probably wasn’t there for the people in my life and the people that I have loved and have loved me. So I would tell my younger self to be present in the moment and be much more supportive of other people.
If I could have one last conversation with anyone… I’m sure this is the point most people burst into tears because I’ve just… anyway. It would be my dad. I argued with him for so many years. From when I was 16 to my thirties we were diametrically opposed in every possible way. He was conservative, I’m a liberal. I disagreed with everything he said. It wasn’t until I was in my thirties when I realised that rising to everything was not serving us and I started to just change the subject when the conversation was about politics or religion. Not long after that, his mind started to drift a little and he was diagnosed with dementia and I… just never… I never got to say sorry.
Forgiveness is the final essential for peace of mind. I always forgive everybody else. I don’t hold grudges. Forgiving myself is harder. But when you’ve said sorry, when you’ve owned up, and you’re genuine and you’ve thought about the mistakes you’ve made and stupid things you’ve said, you are ready to forgive yourself. Certainly for me that’s been the hardest. So that is something I’ve been working on a lot and meditating on an awful lot, trying to let go and put all this baggage down.
Snow Patrol’s new album The Forest is the Path is out on 13 September. They tour the UK and Europe in 2025. Get more details here.
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