Empire of the Snow

They might polarise opinion, but Snow Patrol know their strengths and their limitations. With their new record, the band strived to achieve a subtle kind of reinvention, Gary Lightbody tells TONY CLAYTON-LEA

HERE WE ARE AGAIN. Snow Patrol. A new album. Tweaks, twists, turns, and Gary Lightbody once again laying his soul on the line. Say what you want about the band (your comments might include the phrases “dull as dishwater”, “cheap as chips” and “Coldplay lite”) but there are very few songwriters and bands out there that take as many explicitly emotional swoops as Lightbody and Snow Patrol.

Fallen Empiresis the new album, and while it won't change the minds of Snow Patrol's toughest critics, it nevertheless sees the band stand on new ground: in between the kind of music we have come to expect (gentle, emotionally depth-charged ballads vying for space with streamlined, often crunchy rock), there are sonic experiments that add extra textures to the overall sound.

If you hate Snow Patrol you won’t be persuaded – indeed, you might not even hear the differences. If you love the band, you’ll appreciate their sense of wanting to stretch – and you’ll like them even more for having the sense not to needlessly, recklessly reinvent their sound.

“It was a completely new adventure for us,” explains Lightbody, taking a break from rehearsals last week when the band were in Dublin to play an intimate gig at the Button Factory. Tall, thin, with flecks of grey playing peek-a-boo in his hair, he is a talkative, highly articulate and personable guy – 20 minutes with him is like an hour with a less loquacious person.

“The way we approached it – our attitude, our recording, the place where we recorded it, the recording style, the way we approached each day, how we approached each song – was completely different to what we had done before.

"Obviously, what's going to happen when I write songs is that I'm still going to write those big ballads – they come naturally to me. With [previous 2008 studio album] 100 Million SunsI tried to fight that natural instinct a little bit, drown the songs in noise and not let them shine as much as I should have. But this time around we said balls to that. Let the songs shine when and where they need, and to experiment when it's apt, rather than trying to simply experiment for the sake of it."

There was, Lightbody extrapolates, a sense of the band embracing their strengths and coming to terms with their limitations. The urge to resist writing heart-wrenching slow songs such as New Yorkand Life-ningwas cast aside. The mantra? We are what we are.

"Before, I would have had a rigid structure regarding songs; for instance, for 100 Million SunsI had already written and demoed songs on my Garageband set-up, and that's pretty much the way the record went. That album's producer, Garret Lee, loved those demos and wanted, more or less, to stick to that blueprint. We didn't venture too far outside of that – even though, at the same time, we tried sonically to change ourselves. Within that template, though, it's very difficult. We didn't realise that at the time, which is why making that record was such a miserable experience."

The nature of reinvention guides certain bands to creative extremes. You're damned if you do and derided if you don't. When it really works it can be amazing (David Bowie throughout the 1970s, U2's Achtung Baby), yet when it falls on its face (hello, Madonna) it appears contrived. How does a band as commercially successful as Snow Patrol achieve the balance of change, familiarity and authenticity?

"We didn't want to put the fear of God into our fans," says Lightbody, half joking, half in earnest. "It's possible the word reinvention gives the wrong impression of a band maybe trying too hard to be different from what they've been like before; that they're somehow ashamed of what they've been. That to me, is the opposite of how I feel about Fallen Empires. I think it's our finest work by miles. In terms of making the songs sound a bit different – and it's only a few we're talking about here – we just allowed our influences to guide instead of restrain."

Throughout the album, there’s a keen sense of Lightbody reviewing his past (notably his upbringing and memories of home) and the company he keeps (the nigh-on unbreakable bond of friends and family). Childhood can, of course, be overly romanticised and recalled by any amount of different versions, but Lightbody says he was at pains to sort out fact from fiction, telling, through a suite of elegant memoirs, a true story.

“I could barely remember what the truth was,” he reveals. “What I really wanted to get a sense of was the loss of innocence, the loss of childhood wonder – as much remembering it as the forgetting of how you saw the world as a kid. That’s what I feel is terribly lost in adulthood, especially now when we’re bombarded constantly with things that make those memories leave us faster, and are almost erased to the point where you never really get them back. So it was pursuing the modern impulse to need everything all at once, and to get back to the simplicity of one thing at a time.”

Getting back to the simple things in life is something that Lightbody might find hard work these days. Certainly, he and the band move in different circles than they did 10 years ago. Back then – a short time before the band released their breakthrough album, The Final Straw, and Runbecame their breakthrough hit single – Snow Patrol played a strip club in High Wycombe. It was, he recalls, not a happy time for the band.

"There were about 15 people in the audience. A few months later, though, Runstarted it all for us."

From then to now has been a slow-start rollercoaster, of course, with the band’s tent firmly pitched in rock music’s VIP area. Does Lightbody have a measure of how much he and Snow Patrol have travelled in the interim period?

“It’s only in recent years I’ve actually felt that I deserve to be at the party I’m at, you know? Now, I feel I totally deserve to be at the party; I have done enough, and feel confident enough in my position in life. Of course you shouldn’t need affirmation from other people, but I guess it took time for me to realise that I was actually a good songwriter rather than just being down on myself all of the time.

“Also it was probably not before time for some of our fans who’d been listening for years to me complaining about how shit I am. Finally I’m in a position to realise that I’m worthy of it. I can’t see it flipping over into the other position of me saying I’m the best songwriter in the world or anything like that, but writing about home and about the foundation of my life has certainly helped a lot.”

Q&A Jonny Quinn & Tom Simpson

The new album – the same but different?Tom: "We're pushing it forward a bit more. Why? Just doing loads of raving!"

You recorded the album in Eagles Watch, a topsy-turvy house in Malibu.Tom: "I don't think it was topsy-turvy. It was actually a well-made, beautiful piece of architecture. We recorded also in a round house in Dingle."

What is it with Snow Patrol and the houses with views?Jonny: "There is some inspiration to be had as you gaze out. It's the sense of open space. In Dingle, it was really dramatic – the waves were hitting the rocks like nothing else. It's the vastness of it all."

Tom: “I never get bored looking over the horizon. And then we had a week writing in the Mojave desert, as you do, running away from the tarantulas.”

When the album was being conceived, did you feel you wanted to remove yourselves from your comfort zone?Jonny: "We're not Radiohead in the sense that they push boundaries and people expect them to reinvent their own wheel. We can do that to an extent, and we could be obscure if we wanted to, but I don't think that's our strength."

Does it matter where you record?Tom: "We could record in a tiny room if we wanted to. But you also don't have to know how everything is made; you can just enjoy the music for the sake of it rather than feeling you need to know what's underneath the bonnet, so to speak."

Fallen Empires

is out now. Snow Patrol play Dublin’s O2 on January 20/21, and Belfast’s Odyssey on January 23/24/25