You don't often hear "Snow Patrol" and "subculture" in the same sentence, but beneath the fluffy softness of Run and Chasing Cars beats the inventive, inquisitive mind of Gary Lightbody. He tells Kevin Courtneyabout working without rules, going to Berlin and quantum physics
SUCCESS can bring you lots of nice things. Girls. Drugs. All the Father Tedbox sets money can buy. It can also buy you less tangible commodities, such as choice. When Snow Patrol came off touring their hugely successful album Eyes Open, they found that more than money was in seemingly endless supply: so was the range of options open to them.
With two best-selling albums, the temptation might have been there to stick to the winning formula and serve up another helping of emotional indie that made Eyes Openthe UK's top album of 2006. But Snow Patrol leader Gary Lightbody has got too much nervous energy for that.
Instead, Lightbody decided to tear down the template and start from scratch. Their new album, A Hundred Million Suns,sees Snow Patrol return to the rough-edged roots developed on such quirky early albums as Songs for Polar Bearsand When It's All Over We Still Have to Clear Up.
Recorded in the idyllic Grouse Lodge in Co Westmeath and the legendary Hansa studios in Berlin, the album may challenge a few expectations about Snow Patrol.
When rock stars become huge, they usually become obsessed with the occult, Scientology, astrology or eastern mysticism. A Hundred Million Suns finds Lightbody dabbling in the dark arts of krautrock and (gasp!) quantum physics.
I meet the gangly Lightbody in a room overlooking Trafalgar Square in London, where he has just spent 10 minutes nervously trying to improvise a piece to video for an upcoming music sales conference. It's Q4, the fourth quarter, and a lot hangs on this new album. With the record industry staring into a black hole due to falling sales, Snow Patrol's label will be praying that A Hundred Million Sunsgoes supernova, so they're working Lightbody harder than the Large Hadron Collider.
The label would no doubt like the record to spawn another hit to equal and perhaps overtake Chasing Cars. Lightbody, though, will be happy if people simply listen to his band's latest offering with an open mind.
"I dunno, you like to think . . . I guess the point is to make the album for yourself first, because if you try and guess what people want you're very often wrong. And it's very easy to see an album that's been made from the head and not the heart."
FROM GLASGOW TO GALWAY
The process began in Galway, where the band took a house by the banks of Lough Corrib and began working on the tunes. "The way we do things is, we go and we take all of those external influences out of the equation and we just sort of relearn to create. Because touring is kind of a re-creating process, you're re-creating the songs on stage every night. So we went to Galway for six weeks. It was great fun, just cooking for each other, and just sort of living as we did when we first moved to Glasgow, all the band together in the one house."
Snow Patrol's move from Belfast to Glasgow happened way back in the mid-1990s, when Bangor-born Lightbody went to study at Dundee University and began playing gigs with his mates as Polarbear. After changing their name to the one we all know and love, the band signed to the Jeepster label, home of Lightbody's heroes Belle & Sebastian, and released their debut album in 1998.
Ten years later, these mild-mannered indie boys have conquered all, and those days of penury and pot noodles seem like ancient history. Still, after the breakthrough hit of Final Straw, and the stratospheric success of Eyes Open, why on earth would anyone want to go back? Why not just complete the trilogy with another massive crowd-pleaser? Just take the millions and run?
"No, we didn't want to do that," Lightbody says. "We saw Eyes Openas kind of Final Straw'sbig brother. But we were determined to end that pattern there, and we didn't want to repeat ourselves. And that's what we set out to do - we set out to make a different record. That's exactly why we start from scratch every time we make a record. You kind of have to unlearn everything to begin again. We wanted to approach it in a completely new way, and every song sounded different, right from the demo stages, to what we'd done before."
FROM WESTMEATH TO BERLIN
Working with producer Garret "Jacknife" Lee, Snow Patrol found themselves going even further back, to the golden years of David Bowie in Berlin. At Lee's instigation, the band completed the album in Hansa studios, where Bowie had immersed himself in his krautrock phase 30 years ago via such albums as Low and Heroes.
"There are elements of krautrock, certainly in the last section of The Lightning Strike," agrees Lightbody. "And Daybreak, that's definitely a little krautrocky, and it's got Heroes's guitars. But Iggy's The Idiot, which was made there too, was probably my favourite album from that period. Nightclubbing is one of my favourite songs from the '70s.
"But I don't think it's as much the history of the place that was inspiring to us. It was actually Berlin itself as it is now that was the most inspiring thing. It was the modern Berlin that was just so thrilling. It's a place apart. Separate from most of Europe in terms of innovation and excitement, and the subculture as well, an underground culture that is just . . . you feel something is beginning there that is very exciting."
You wouldn't normally hear "Snow Patrol" and "subculture" in the same sentence, but it's easy to forget that beneath the fluffy softness of Runand Chasing Carsbeats an inventive, inquisitive mind, always on the lookout for ideas and ready to try anything that will spark the imagination.
"There's no point in going to a place just for the sake of change," stresses Lightbody. "You wanna go to somewhere you think you might get the most benefit from. And Berlin was exactly what we needed after the idyllic utopia of Grouse Lodge. The kind of very peaceful pace that we were working at, we wanted the opposite. It was the most productive we've ever been.
"Berlin was a catalyst for a whole new chapter in the record. It injected every song with a sense of the strange. We were up for anything. Garret's a great mixer, in the great Irish sense of the word, in that he's a good instigator. He's also great at nurturing our flights of fancy. He won't hold anyone back."
FROM BELFAST TO BEATLESQUE
The flights of fancy took the band in some unexpected directions. The lead single, Take Back the City, for instance, is a cultural call to arms that wields a velvet fist. It's inspired by Belfast, and is as vibrant and optimistic a theme tune a town could ever wish for. Then there's Lifeboats, Lightbody's attempt to replicate that lysergic magic effortlessly conjured up by Super Furry Animals' Gruff Rhys.
Probably the most radical departure from the three-minute love song format is the closing track, The Lightning Strike,which is essentially three songs ( What If This Storm Ends?, The Sunlight Through the Flagsand Daybreak)fused into one 16-minute indie-prog epic. It starts with a descending piano progression, bolstered by brass, then bursts into a slow-building Beatlesque crescendo, complete with choir, before settling into a skittering piano motif and finally ending on a cluster of krautrock guitars.
"I guess there are elements of the first two records, married to what we'd learned on the last two, and hopefully creating something that's new again. But, you see, that sort of ties too much into the idea of a masterplan, and that's something that we try to avoid. Because the songwriting is the key, not some Machiavellian plot.
FROM SCHOOLROOM TO PHYSICS LECTURE
With success comes the luxury of pursuing interests that were once beyond your reach. You can do a Simon Le Bon and take up yachting or do a Bruce Dickinson and become an airline pilot. Lightbody has found a much more esoteric hobby: the strange and unfathomable world of quantum physics. While other rock stars are snapped falling out of nightclubs with a supermodel on their arm, Lightbody is more likely to to be spotted at a stuffy old science lecture, quarks, leptons and bosons spinning round in his head.
"Quantum physics is something that I'm very interested in, but it throws up more questions than answers for me. It's mostly theoretical, and it's extremely interesting that people have the brains that can stretch that far into their own imagination, and yet they can do an equation that qualifies it.
" I wasn't good at in school, I'd no aptitude for it at all. But it's only now that I feel comfortable in my own skin, in my own life, that I can now start to think about the bigger ideas."
A Hundred Million Sunsis out today and is reviewed on page 14. Snow Patrol play limited-admission gigs in Dublin's Gate Theatre on Sunday lunchtime and Belfast's Empire later that night. Tickets are available via the band's mailing list.
Snow Patrol are also at HMV Grafton Street in Dublin today at 1pm to sign copies of their new album. Entrance by wristband only, available from 8.30am this morning at the store. Two wristbands per person only.
In his spare time: Lightbody's side projects
The album's sold, the tour's over and the giant inflatable pig is put away for another year. What to do next? Start a side project, of course. Which is what Gary Lightbody keeps doing . ..
The Reindeer Section
Be careful what you say after a few pints. At a 2001 gig in Glasgow, an ebullient Lightbody suggested to a few of his musician friends that they should make an album together. Around 47 of them called his bluff, including members of Mogwai, Alfie, Mull Historical Society, Belle & Sebastian, Arab Strap, The Vaselines, Idlewild and Teenage Fanclub.
The loose collective made two albums, Y'All Get Scared Now, Y'Hear!and Son of Evil Reindeer, but the logistical nightmare means that Reindeer Section gigs come even less often than Christmas.
The Cake Sale
Brian Crosby of Bell X1 put together this Reindeer Section-style collection to make an album in aid of Oxfam's Make Trade Fair campaign. The Cake Sale'sline-up included Bell X1's Paul Noonan, Glen Hansard, Gemma Hayes, Nina Persson from The Cardigans, and Nick Seymour from Crowded House. As part of the project, Lightbody recorded a duet with Lisa Hannigan, but fans were more interested in rumours of a romance between Snowboy and Ricegirl.
Listen. Tanks!
When he's not producing for Snow Patrol, U2 or Bloc Party, or releasing his own dance music, Garret Lee hooks up with Lightbody for this experimental electro-folk duo.
So far only one song, Black and Silver, has surfaced, featuring multi-tracked vocals and a glockenspiel, but Lightbody promises more.
The Americana project
Lightbody: "I've written a whole bunch of country songs over the last few weeks, kind of nu-country, more Jayhawks, Wilco and stretching to the quieter moments of Low and Bonnie 'Prince' Billy. That's the sort of music that I was kind of reared on, emotionally and musically, I suppose it's called Americana.
"My dad had Merle Haggard and Moe Bandy records in the house, Conway Twitty and that. He also loved spaghetti western
themes, and my mum listened to Nana Mouskouri. But there weren't a lot of records in our house. I had to go searching for records with my pocket money."
KEVIN COURTNEY
