Gary Lightbody Article
Boredom and an hour-and-a-half case of insomnia is dreadful for one's hard drive, especially after an afternoon of Snow Patrol CDs going back and forth in relation to... important things (there sounds like there should be some fascinating story in there, but trust me, there isn't) Anyways, somehow I come up with the wise idea of searching up Gary Lightbody pictures on bing, because I realize I haven't attempted such before. Yadda yadda, I scroll through for as long as I can (a thousand entries, I believe) and towards the end I find this neat pic of Gary that I haven't seen before, and accompanying it is a very lenghty interview with him that begins with a description of his fidgeting habits. Me being the weirdo I am, I'm immediately interested.
Long story short, it was a glorious piece. I'm pretty sure no one will actually follow through and read the thing (it's very long, but if you do read it, you're a wonderful person) but it's the very end that made me post it here. Throughout the article, the interviewer asks Gary to define various words, words like 'fear' and 'success' and the like. The last word that's asked is 'happiness', and Gary describes this seemingly insignificant show in Switzerland that was in the pissing rain. It stopped raining for their set, and... oh screw it, I won't ruin the end for you. Read the article, really. It won't impact many people, I'm sure, but the last paragraph got tears prickling in the corners of my eyes, and ask anyone who knows me and they'll tell you I have a heart of stone. It's.... yeah, it's just Gary. It's plenty to be content with.
More than anything else - more than the prospect of a bad review, or a record that doesn’t sell (and he’s had both in the past) - the thing that scares Gary Lightbody most, the Snow Patrol frontman tells me, is loneliness.
I have asked him to define the word fear for me. “I don’t like being alone,” is his answer. “It’s something I need to learn to ...” he stops speaking, begins to twist in his chair, rubbing his hands together. He’s actually scaring himself. “See, I’m getting antsy just thinking about it ...” he says.
It is, it should be said, the only antsy moment of our conversation. Lightbody has a reputation as a nervous, edgy interviewee, but he seems anything but in the time we spend together. “I’ve really calmed down in the last wee while,” he says. A day later I speak to his fellow Snow Patroller, keyboard player Tom Simpson, who says of his friend and band mate: “He’s definitely in a calmer place, a very positive place at the moment.”
Today, that place happens to be in an office in Kilburn, north London. Outside, kids in the school across the way are running wild on their lunch hour. Inside, beneath the Snow Patrol posters and gold discs, Lightbody talks to me, calmly, openly, his Northern Irish accent still strong (stronger than mine) about his own wild days. While he’s at it, he also tells me about love and sanity (or lack thereof), about success and failure (and which he found the more disorientating). About the pleasures of being in a band. And the costs. About masculinity and about loneliness, of course.
Anonymity
But first let’s get up to speed. For those who haven’t been keeping tabs, the story of Irish-Scots band Snow Patrol is one that’s simply told. Formed at Dundee University 15 years ago (when Lightbody was just 18) the band spent years and years slogging away but no-one paid any attention (and that was on a good day).
Then, in 2003, now based in Glasgow, as their third album threatened to repeat the underwhelming pattern of its predecessors, the single Run completely transformed their fortunes. And that was just the start. The single Chasing Cars went further, becoming the most played song on radio in the last 10 years, a song played at weddings and funerals and on TV shows. More than nine million people have watched the video on You Tube. Suddenly, Snow Patrol were officially huge.
And yet you’d struggle to recognise Lightbody. He’s tall, thin, anonymous - a word that his detractors would use about his band. But he likes his anonymity, likes the fact that for all the records Snow Patrol have sold - and it runs into the millions - people would struggle to pick any of them out in a police line-up.
Today he’s wearing a blue hoodie and an air of contentment. His hair is an unruly mop on top of his head. It’s the look of someone who doesn’t consult a stylist. Or a girlfriend. “I’m single, extremely single,” he says. And has been for a while now. But he is surrounded by friends and family. And that includes the band, some of them mates he’s known since school days.
All in all, he reckons he’s fortunate. “I’m so lucky - the amount of friends I have, the amount of good friends, the amount of people who have my back, the amount of people who love me unconditionally.”
Just as well, he admits. “I’ve tested that love many times, mostly unconsciously. But I have had my moments where I’ve went off the rails and they’ve never given up on me - the guys in the band and many others. If I ever got married I’d have a tough decision picking a best man and that’s a great position to be in.”
For the purposes of this interview I have brought with me a series of words to ask for Lightbody’s definitions. We’ve already had fear. Let’s try another one. What, I say, does the word home mean to the singer? “Home is still where my family is,” he says. That means Northern Ireland. That means Crawfordsburn, next door to his mum and dad, not far from his sister and his niece whom he clearly dotes on. “But I rent a place here [in London] because everyone else lives here. So I have one toe in London and two toes in Glasgow and the other seven in Crawfordsburn.”
Another word. Freedom? “Being your own boss,” he says quickly. “Once we get our tour schedule you don’t have that much freedom, but at the end of the day you’re doing what you love, so we have a hell of a lot of freedom. We don’t answer to anybody, really, apart from the fans. And then not directly. They vote with their feet and at the moment they’re giving us a vote of confidence. Long may it last. It might not, but the freedom that we’ve had in the last six years has been mind-blowing. To be able to do whatever we want is an extraordinary thing for a band that went through such a long period of scraping by.”
Success
When he was 19 Gary Lightbody’s idea of success would have been to play King Tut’s in Glasgow. At the time Snow Patrol were students living in Dundee and making their first album “and that was almost enough”, admits Lightbody. The idea of playing King Tut’s was as much as they dared hope for. “There was the Barrowland, but that was way, way off. That was 2,000 people, crazy to think that would be possible.”
For a long, long time it remained so. For years and years Snow Patrol mooched around the Scottish music scene to no great effect. In a way it was a comfort, Lightbody reckons. “When you don’t reach terribly high then your failures are always going to be pretty small anyway. With our first few albums I don’t think anyone was thinking they were going to sell a million copies - except me, secretly.”
But there’s failure and there’s failure. There were vague hopes that the first two albums might make silver status, ie sell 60,000 copies. Fat chance. “They didn’t get anywhere near that. We were like a sixth of that.” Little wonder then that the band were eventually dropped by their indie label Jeepster. “I don’t hold any grudges,” Lightbody says now, with all the grace success allows.
Still, the band struggled on. You wonder how long they would have kept going if Run hadn’t come along? He hums and haws through an answer of sorts. “It would have been ... I don’t know how long ... I wouldn’t have wanted to put a time limit on it ... maybe another year in the shadows ...” He pauses, reconsiders. “ Not in the shadows necessarily. I wouldn’t have minded making music in the shadows. We kind of still are because no-one knows who we are.”
What he will say is that if they had broken up it wouldn’t have been acrimonious. But everyone would have needed to get proper jobs and “once you break that really intimate connection of a band - in each others’ pockets every day - if that deep, deep connection starts to lessen, we would all have been living five different lives rather than the one”.
There was a point towards the end of 2003, he says, when the title of the third album Final Straw did look prophetic. It had been released and for the first four months hadn’t done any better than its predecessors. As a band they began to think, “This is it, we’ve given it a shot, we’ve given it our best and it’s not worked.”
And then out of nowhere the single Run just took off, took over, took them around the world. Chasing Cars went even further. “Outer space maybe,” Lightbody says, smiling. And suddenly there were new problems and pressures to deal with.
What soon became clear, unfortunately, was that Lightbody was better suited to cope with failure. He had years to get used to it. Success was to prove far more confusing. “There was a disconnect between what you imagine rock success is and what it ends up being,” he says now. “Your life is the same. You don’t change.
Breakdown
“I thought as a teenager if I’m just selling a million records then I’ll be fine. Everything’s going to be great. And that’s not the way it is. You’re still yourself in that scenario and, in fact, if you carry anything, any problems - mental problems, physical problems - into that new success, you find them harder to deal with. Because you don’t have any time for yourself any more, when you start to get swept away in that touring machine, and you’re going from tour to album to tour to album.
“And there is a point where you - where I did, for sure - have a breakdown, probably due to alcohol and drugs and the constant working and touring and everything. It does get to a breaking point and then you have to either succumb to it and f*** up everything. Or, as I did - as I do - change, because I’ve got a great bunch of people around me who go, ‘Listen sunshine, you’re being a tool. Let’s get you sorted out.’”
This is the crux of Lightbody’s story, the point he circles again and again in our conversation. His lowest moment, the moment he’s spent the last few years climbing away from.
When you say you had a breakdown, I ask, how did that manifest itself? “Well, you’re in a nondescript hotel room somewhere in the world and you literally can’t move, you’re just crippled by anxiety, motion sickness, call it what you want. I just wanted everything to stop, just for a minute. Not just a minute, but for days, weeks, whatever. This had to stop. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t do anything. But it was a psychosis. I was just completely unbalanced, mentally and physically worn out.”
He pauses for a breath before continuing. “It was all my own doing. There’s a way of being in a band. There’s a way of touring that doesn’t result in that sort of behaviour, that sort of breakdown. I’ve found it since, but I guess you have to go through the shit to get to the good stuff.”
In the past he’s talked of himself as a “chaos magnet”, someone who lived a messy life emotionally, alcoholically. But it seems things got worse with success. I wonder if there was an element of rock’n’roll posing about such behaviour, living out the fantasy? Or was he simply using booze and drugs as fuel?
“Maybe a little of both. I don’t know if it was getting me through because I woke up feeling awful every day. So I wasn’t feeling inspired to continue, but yeah, I’d think, ‘Well, I’m in a band.’ You get wilful, ‘I should be doing this shit. F*** this. F*** everyone if they say I can’t do it. I’m going to do whatever I want. This is a f****** rock’n’roll band. I’m not working in an office.’ All these things. All this petulant, childish nonsense goes through your head. You think you’re invincible and you find out on your own that you’re not. It’s never a pretty day.”
Flying straight
That was then. He’s shaped up, started flying straight. He stopped drinking on tour. Now he doesn’t drink at all, he tells me. When did he take his last one? “A few months ago now. I haven’t missed it yet. I can sit in a pub. If I go out with the lads I go out for the craic, you know. It’s mighty. You don’t need to be hammered. There’s a certain point in the night if everyone’s drinking and you’re not when it gets to the stage where you can’t understand the conversation any more. You don’t need to say bye. Nobody knows you’re there.”
Gary Lightbody is discussing masculinity. “Being a man, being a proper man, is being loyal and being genuine and being strong for your friends when needed. And admitting that you were wrong.” What it is not, he says, is shouting at each other “while lifting things heavier than ourselves. There’s an anger in that kind of behaviour that you can’t possibly lift enough weight to get rid of”.
His model of manhood is his father, “everything a man could be” he believes. “He was born before the Second World War, 1938. So I guess he was brought up in the fifties where that sense of commitment to family was slapped into you. You work hard for your family, you put food on the table and you put a roof over their heads and that’s just it. He never complained. He just got on with it.
“I’m my mother’s son in that I’m extremely sensitive. I’m a worrier. My mum is an extremely passionate woman but she worries for Ireland. My dad was this rock for the family - still is - and that’s what I think of when I think of masculinity. Strength without being aggressive. He never raised his hand to me ... That was my mother’s job,” he laughs.
As he’s also said, there are no women in his own life. Not at the moment. I wonder how many times he’s been in love. He pauses. “Umm, I don’t have to think about it. I know exactly the number, don’t think I’m stalling. I’m just wondering what this number will do to anyone who reads it ...” He pauses again, and then decides. “Twice,” he says.
He never gave either time a chance, though, he says. Between the band and the lovers the band always won out. “At the time I didn’t really understand what was going on and why I felt slightly unsentimental towards people who I should have been quite the opposite to. I don’t know .... You can’t be in love with two people at the same time ... even if one of those people is five people.” He stops, smiles. “That could be the weirdest sentence ever,” he says.
More than that, for a long time he had a real fear of intimacy, one that led him to infidelities. But that was the old Gary Lightbody. The antsy one. He’s not that man any more. “I don’t have the same fear. It’s too late for the two times ... well, more than two times I’ve f***** it up. I found it hard to just let go of the band. I didn’t think I had space for anybody and when people got into that space I kind of started resenting them for it. It’s not their fault, it’s my fault.
“I’ve been in relationships where they’ve been extremely OK with me going on tour, but it’s living in those moments when you’re not on tour. There’s so much pressure because you’ve got two weeks: ‘We’ve got two weeks to make this work’. It’s like a team-building exercise. It felt like we were trying too much in the one portion of time. But again, that was my problem. And again, it’s in the past.”
No time to waste
He’s not currently seeking a change to his “extremely single” status. “As I say, it’s only happened twice. I’m not expecting it to happen any time soon. I’m open to it, but until I get knocked off my feet ...” He smiles before finishing the thought. “I’m 33 years old. I’m not really wasting anybody’s time.”
Not that he has much to waste. After we speak he’s off for rehearsals ahead of the band’s gig in Glasgow’s Bellahouston Park next month. He’s started making music for movies. Then there’s a new group, Tired Pony (R.E.M.’s Peter Buck is a member), with an album due in July (it’s a kind of new country record, Lightbody says). And then another Snow Patrol album will hove into view. “The next record needs to be bold, needs to be full of confidence - which we are now, so it shouldn’t be too hard.”
He still wants to make the perfect record, one that deserves to sit beside OK Computer, Definitely Maybe, Screamadelica. If he gets the chance he’d like to take his niece to the beach. That’s enough to be getting on with.
So if he’s alone, these days, he’s not lonely. He has his best friends all around him. He knows why that matters these days. “There was a certain point in my meltdown when I felt I couldn’t phone anybody because I felt I’d let so many people down. What I didn’t realise was that everybody was there and they just wanted me to reach out and in the end they had to come and get me. “There were probably all these conversations going on like, ‘F***, we have to help this guy’. And I’m on the other end going, ‘F***, please help me.’ I’m determined I’m never going back to that point, that it’s never going to happen. But I’m also a little fearful. I’ve got to leave that fear behind because it’s not doing me any good.”
It’s almost time to go. Before he heads off I ask him for one final definition. Gary, I say, what is happiness? He tells me a story. It’s about a gig. A festival in Switzerland. “It was shitty and raining all day. It wasn’t rainy during our set but it was cloudy and we played Run. And literally when I sang, ‘light up, light up’ for the first time the sun came out from behind the clouds and it lit the whole place up and everybody just smiled; 20,000, 25,000 people. “I don’t believe in God but if these things keep happening maybe I’ll change my stance. There were tears running down people’s faces. I’m just looking around at the people I went through so much with together ...” He leaves the story there. On stage, with friends. Far from lonely. That’s the kind of moment he loves. He’s hoping for more.
Long story short, it was a glorious piece. I'm pretty sure no one will actually follow through and read the thing (it's very long, but if you do read it, you're a wonderful person) but it's the very end that made me post it here. Throughout the article, the interviewer asks Gary to define various words, words like 'fear' and 'success' and the like. The last word that's asked is 'happiness', and Gary describes this seemingly insignificant show in Switzerland that was in the pissing rain. It stopped raining for their set, and... oh screw it, I won't ruin the end for you. Read the article, really. It won't impact many people, I'm sure, but the last paragraph got tears prickling in the corners of my eyes, and ask anyone who knows me and they'll tell you I have a heart of stone. It's.... yeah, it's just Gary. It's plenty to be content with.
More than anything else - more than the prospect of a bad review, or a record that doesn’t sell (and he’s had both in the past) - the thing that scares Gary Lightbody most, the Snow Patrol frontman tells me, is loneliness.
I have asked him to define the word fear for me. “I don’t like being alone,” is his answer. “It’s something I need to learn to ...” he stops speaking, begins to twist in his chair, rubbing his hands together. He’s actually scaring himself. “See, I’m getting antsy just thinking about it ...” he says.
It is, it should be said, the only antsy moment of our conversation. Lightbody has a reputation as a nervous, edgy interviewee, but he seems anything but in the time we spend together. “I’ve really calmed down in the last wee while,” he says. A day later I speak to his fellow Snow Patroller, keyboard player Tom Simpson, who says of his friend and band mate: “He’s definitely in a calmer place, a very positive place at the moment.”
Today, that place happens to be in an office in Kilburn, north London. Outside, kids in the school across the way are running wild on their lunch hour. Inside, beneath the Snow Patrol posters and gold discs, Lightbody talks to me, calmly, openly, his Northern Irish accent still strong (stronger than mine) about his own wild days. While he’s at it, he also tells me about love and sanity (or lack thereof), about success and failure (and which he found the more disorientating). About the pleasures of being in a band. And the costs. About masculinity and about loneliness, of course.
Anonymity
But first let’s get up to speed. For those who haven’t been keeping tabs, the story of Irish-Scots band Snow Patrol is one that’s simply told. Formed at Dundee University 15 years ago (when Lightbody was just 18) the band spent years and years slogging away but no-one paid any attention (and that was on a good day).
Then, in 2003, now based in Glasgow, as their third album threatened to repeat the underwhelming pattern of its predecessors, the single Run completely transformed their fortunes. And that was just the start. The single Chasing Cars went further, becoming the most played song on radio in the last 10 years, a song played at weddings and funerals and on TV shows. More than nine million people have watched the video on You Tube. Suddenly, Snow Patrol were officially huge.
And yet you’d struggle to recognise Lightbody. He’s tall, thin, anonymous - a word that his detractors would use about his band. But he likes his anonymity, likes the fact that for all the records Snow Patrol have sold - and it runs into the millions - people would struggle to pick any of them out in a police line-up.
Today he’s wearing a blue hoodie and an air of contentment. His hair is an unruly mop on top of his head. It’s the look of someone who doesn’t consult a stylist. Or a girlfriend. “I’m single, extremely single,” he says. And has been for a while now. But he is surrounded by friends and family. And that includes the band, some of them mates he’s known since school days.
All in all, he reckons he’s fortunate. “I’m so lucky - the amount of friends I have, the amount of good friends, the amount of people who have my back, the amount of people who love me unconditionally.”
Just as well, he admits. “I’ve tested that love many times, mostly unconsciously. But I have had my moments where I’ve went off the rails and they’ve never given up on me - the guys in the band and many others. If I ever got married I’d have a tough decision picking a best man and that’s a great position to be in.”
For the purposes of this interview I have brought with me a series of words to ask for Lightbody’s definitions. We’ve already had fear. Let’s try another one. What, I say, does the word home mean to the singer? “Home is still where my family is,” he says. That means Northern Ireland. That means Crawfordsburn, next door to his mum and dad, not far from his sister and his niece whom he clearly dotes on. “But I rent a place here [in London] because everyone else lives here. So I have one toe in London and two toes in Glasgow and the other seven in Crawfordsburn.”
Another word. Freedom? “Being your own boss,” he says quickly. “Once we get our tour schedule you don’t have that much freedom, but at the end of the day you’re doing what you love, so we have a hell of a lot of freedom. We don’t answer to anybody, really, apart from the fans. And then not directly. They vote with their feet and at the moment they’re giving us a vote of confidence. Long may it last. It might not, but the freedom that we’ve had in the last six years has been mind-blowing. To be able to do whatever we want is an extraordinary thing for a band that went through such a long period of scraping by.”
Success
When he was 19 Gary Lightbody’s idea of success would have been to play King Tut’s in Glasgow. At the time Snow Patrol were students living in Dundee and making their first album “and that was almost enough”, admits Lightbody. The idea of playing King Tut’s was as much as they dared hope for. “There was the Barrowland, but that was way, way off. That was 2,000 people, crazy to think that would be possible.”
For a long, long time it remained so. For years and years Snow Patrol mooched around the Scottish music scene to no great effect. In a way it was a comfort, Lightbody reckons. “When you don’t reach terribly high then your failures are always going to be pretty small anyway. With our first few albums I don’t think anyone was thinking they were going to sell a million copies - except me, secretly.”
But there’s failure and there’s failure. There were vague hopes that the first two albums might make silver status, ie sell 60,000 copies. Fat chance. “They didn’t get anywhere near that. We were like a sixth of that.” Little wonder then that the band were eventually dropped by their indie label Jeepster. “I don’t hold any grudges,” Lightbody says now, with all the grace success allows.
Still, the band struggled on. You wonder how long they would have kept going if Run hadn’t come along? He hums and haws through an answer of sorts. “It would have been ... I don’t know how long ... I wouldn’t have wanted to put a time limit on it ... maybe another year in the shadows ...” He pauses, reconsiders. “ Not in the shadows necessarily. I wouldn’t have minded making music in the shadows. We kind of still are because no-one knows who we are.”
What he will say is that if they had broken up it wouldn’t have been acrimonious. But everyone would have needed to get proper jobs and “once you break that really intimate connection of a band - in each others’ pockets every day - if that deep, deep connection starts to lessen, we would all have been living five different lives rather than the one”.
There was a point towards the end of 2003, he says, when the title of the third album Final Straw did look prophetic. It had been released and for the first four months hadn’t done any better than its predecessors. As a band they began to think, “This is it, we’ve given it a shot, we’ve given it our best and it’s not worked.”
And then out of nowhere the single Run just took off, took over, took them around the world. Chasing Cars went even further. “Outer space maybe,” Lightbody says, smiling. And suddenly there were new problems and pressures to deal with.
What soon became clear, unfortunately, was that Lightbody was better suited to cope with failure. He had years to get used to it. Success was to prove far more confusing. “There was a disconnect between what you imagine rock success is and what it ends up being,” he says now. “Your life is the same. You don’t change.
Breakdown
“I thought as a teenager if I’m just selling a million records then I’ll be fine. Everything’s going to be great. And that’s not the way it is. You’re still yourself in that scenario and, in fact, if you carry anything, any problems - mental problems, physical problems - into that new success, you find them harder to deal with. Because you don’t have any time for yourself any more, when you start to get swept away in that touring machine, and you’re going from tour to album to tour to album.
“And there is a point where you - where I did, for sure - have a breakdown, probably due to alcohol and drugs and the constant working and touring and everything. It does get to a breaking point and then you have to either succumb to it and f*** up everything. Or, as I did - as I do - change, because I’ve got a great bunch of people around me who go, ‘Listen sunshine, you’re being a tool. Let’s get you sorted out.’”
This is the crux of Lightbody’s story, the point he circles again and again in our conversation. His lowest moment, the moment he’s spent the last few years climbing away from.
When you say you had a breakdown, I ask, how did that manifest itself? “Well, you’re in a nondescript hotel room somewhere in the world and you literally can’t move, you’re just crippled by anxiety, motion sickness, call it what you want. I just wanted everything to stop, just for a minute. Not just a minute, but for days, weeks, whatever. This had to stop. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t do anything. But it was a psychosis. I was just completely unbalanced, mentally and physically worn out.”
He pauses for a breath before continuing. “It was all my own doing. There’s a way of being in a band. There’s a way of touring that doesn’t result in that sort of behaviour, that sort of breakdown. I’ve found it since, but I guess you have to go through the shit to get to the good stuff.”
In the past he’s talked of himself as a “chaos magnet”, someone who lived a messy life emotionally, alcoholically. But it seems things got worse with success. I wonder if there was an element of rock’n’roll posing about such behaviour, living out the fantasy? Or was he simply using booze and drugs as fuel?
“Maybe a little of both. I don’t know if it was getting me through because I woke up feeling awful every day. So I wasn’t feeling inspired to continue, but yeah, I’d think, ‘Well, I’m in a band.’ You get wilful, ‘I should be doing this shit. F*** this. F*** everyone if they say I can’t do it. I’m going to do whatever I want. This is a f****** rock’n’roll band. I’m not working in an office.’ All these things. All this petulant, childish nonsense goes through your head. You think you’re invincible and you find out on your own that you’re not. It’s never a pretty day.”
Flying straight
That was then. He’s shaped up, started flying straight. He stopped drinking on tour. Now he doesn’t drink at all, he tells me. When did he take his last one? “A few months ago now. I haven’t missed it yet. I can sit in a pub. If I go out with the lads I go out for the craic, you know. It’s mighty. You don’t need to be hammered. There’s a certain point in the night if everyone’s drinking and you’re not when it gets to the stage where you can’t understand the conversation any more. You don’t need to say bye. Nobody knows you’re there.”
Gary Lightbody is discussing masculinity. “Being a man, being a proper man, is being loyal and being genuine and being strong for your friends when needed. And admitting that you were wrong.” What it is not, he says, is shouting at each other “while lifting things heavier than ourselves. There’s an anger in that kind of behaviour that you can’t possibly lift enough weight to get rid of”.
His model of manhood is his father, “everything a man could be” he believes. “He was born before the Second World War, 1938. So I guess he was brought up in the fifties where that sense of commitment to family was slapped into you. You work hard for your family, you put food on the table and you put a roof over their heads and that’s just it. He never complained. He just got on with it.
“I’m my mother’s son in that I’m extremely sensitive. I’m a worrier. My mum is an extremely passionate woman but she worries for Ireland. My dad was this rock for the family - still is - and that’s what I think of when I think of masculinity. Strength without being aggressive. He never raised his hand to me ... That was my mother’s job,” he laughs.
As he’s also said, there are no women in his own life. Not at the moment. I wonder how many times he’s been in love. He pauses. “Umm, I don’t have to think about it. I know exactly the number, don’t think I’m stalling. I’m just wondering what this number will do to anyone who reads it ...” He pauses again, and then decides. “Twice,” he says.
He never gave either time a chance, though, he says. Between the band and the lovers the band always won out. “At the time I didn’t really understand what was going on and why I felt slightly unsentimental towards people who I should have been quite the opposite to. I don’t know .... You can’t be in love with two people at the same time ... even if one of those people is five people.” He stops, smiles. “That could be the weirdest sentence ever,” he says.
More than that, for a long time he had a real fear of intimacy, one that led him to infidelities. But that was the old Gary Lightbody. The antsy one. He’s not that man any more. “I don’t have the same fear. It’s too late for the two times ... well, more than two times I’ve f***** it up. I found it hard to just let go of the band. I didn’t think I had space for anybody and when people got into that space I kind of started resenting them for it. It’s not their fault, it’s my fault.
“I’ve been in relationships where they’ve been extremely OK with me going on tour, but it’s living in those moments when you’re not on tour. There’s so much pressure because you’ve got two weeks: ‘We’ve got two weeks to make this work’. It’s like a team-building exercise. It felt like we were trying too much in the one portion of time. But again, that was my problem. And again, it’s in the past.”
No time to waste
He’s not currently seeking a change to his “extremely single” status. “As I say, it’s only happened twice. I’m not expecting it to happen any time soon. I’m open to it, but until I get knocked off my feet ...” He smiles before finishing the thought. “I’m 33 years old. I’m not really wasting anybody’s time.”
Not that he has much to waste. After we speak he’s off for rehearsals ahead of the band’s gig in Glasgow’s Bellahouston Park next month. He’s started making music for movies. Then there’s a new group, Tired Pony (R.E.M.’s Peter Buck is a member), with an album due in July (it’s a kind of new country record, Lightbody says). And then another Snow Patrol album will hove into view. “The next record needs to be bold, needs to be full of confidence - which we are now, so it shouldn’t be too hard.”
He still wants to make the perfect record, one that deserves to sit beside OK Computer, Definitely Maybe, Screamadelica. If he gets the chance he’d like to take his niece to the beach. That’s enough to be getting on with.
So if he’s alone, these days, he’s not lonely. He has his best friends all around him. He knows why that matters these days. “There was a certain point in my meltdown when I felt I couldn’t phone anybody because I felt I’d let so many people down. What I didn’t realise was that everybody was there and they just wanted me to reach out and in the end they had to come and get me. “There were probably all these conversations going on like, ‘F***, we have to help this guy’. And I’m on the other end going, ‘F***, please help me.’ I’m determined I’m never going back to that point, that it’s never going to happen. But I’m also a little fearful. I’ve got to leave that fear behind because it’s not doing me any good.”
It’s almost time to go. Before he heads off I ask him for one final definition. Gary, I say, what is happiness? He tells me a story. It’s about a gig. A festival in Switzerland. “It was shitty and raining all day. It wasn’t rainy during our set but it was cloudy and we played Run. And literally when I sang, ‘light up, light up’ for the first time the sun came out from behind the clouds and it lit the whole place up and everybody just smiled; 20,000, 25,000 people. “I don’t believe in God but if these things keep happening maybe I’ll change my stance. There were tears running down people’s faces. I’m just looking around at the people I went through so much with together ...” He leaves the story there. On stage, with friends. Far from lonely. That’s the kind of moment he loves. He’s hoping for more.