It’s fair to say that Gary Lightbody and I go back a bit.

Since first jumping on the Snow Patrol tour bus - well, knackered Ford Transit - in 2001 when they were impoverished indie hopefuls, we’ve caught up almost a dozen times as they’ve gone on to conquer all in front of them.

There have been highs (winning the 1999 Hot Press Phil Lynott Best New Band Award, scoring their first top 5 hit with ‘Run’, ‘Chasing Cars’ becoming one of the songs of the 21th Century); lows (being unceremoniously dropped by their first label, the acrimonious departure of founder member Mark McClelland, Gary’s mental health struggles); and lots of just getting on with rock ‘n’ roll business (never ending tours, talking to nosey journalists and spending long periods – seven years in the case of Wildness – working on records).

The past few years have been challenging ones for Snow Patrol with the departure in September 2023 of longtime Snowmen Jonny Quinn and Paul Wilson and a first abortive attempt to record their eighth album, The Forest Is The Path.

Gary responded to the former with a social media post which read: “We are heartbroken they have decided to leave us but wish them nothing but happiness, success, joy, compassion and everything they want in all their future endeavours”, and to the latter by bringing in production and songwriting guru Fraser T. Smith whose praises will be loudly sung in a moment.

Given all of the recent upheaval, did Gary and fellow surviving bandmates Nathan Connolly and Johnny McDaid consider pulling the plug on Snow Patrol?

“There’s always doubt when something that massive happens,” he reflects. “Pablo (Paul) had been part of Snow Patrol for twenty-seven years, Paul for twenty, which are huge amounts of time to be in a band and a relationship together. It was a marriage, it was all the things.

“When someone leaves it’s not taken lightly. You don’t just strike your hands together and go, ‘Okay, what’s next?’ You think about it for a while and, of course, we did talk about whether it was the right thing to continue. Reasonably quickly but not disrespectfully, we got together and said, ‘We want to keep going. We have more to do, we have more to write.’ Me, Johnny and Nathan have always been like brothers but this record has made us even closer.”

Gary pauses for a moment and with his voice cracking slightly adds: “Stuart, you know that we’ve respected everyone who’s been in the band but we always have to think about what we still have to say.”

Snow Patrol. Photo: Tom Beard

With Gary and Johnny both much in demand as songwriting collaborators – between them they’ve penned hits with and/or for the A-List likes of Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran, Harry Styles, Robbie Williams, Faith Hill, P!nk, Keith Urban, Shawn Mendes, Alicia Keyes and BTS – and Nathan last year releasing and touring in support of his The Strange Order Of Things solo album, was it hard finding time to make a new Snow Patrol record?

“All of us – and Johnny particularly so – are busy but it wasn’t that difficult to find the time,” Gary says. “It’s something that we’re all really, really enthusiastic and excited about. Making The Forest Is The Path wasn’t a secondary thing, it was everybody’s top priority. It was clear that we were trying to make something really special.

“We put so much time into it because we recorded it twice,” he adds. “We needed to move everything else out of the way to do it justice.”

After several months of it spectacularly not clicking in the studio, Snow Patrol sent an SOS to Fraser T. Smith, the Grammy and Ivor Novello award-winning English musician and producer who’d previously been part of the Adele, Stormzy, Dave, Ghetts, Kasabian, Raye and Sam Smyth success stories.

“He’s one of the most extraordinary men we’ve ever met,” Gary enthuses. “We’d worked with one of the greatest producers of alltime, Jacknife Lee, for twenty years but just wanted to try somebody new. That trying somebody new didn’t work out the first time, but then we found Fraser who’s just a sweet, kind, funny human and a joy to work with in the studio. Everything felt very expansive, experimental and limitless. There were no roadblocks or anything holding us back. It felt like every valve had been opened.

“Here’s me trying to make engine analogies when I don’t know anything about cars, but it was firing on all cylinders as a result of the five weeks we spent with Fraser. Albums probably shouldn’t be as easy as that – and previously it hadn’t! – but it all just clicked when he came on board.”

Was there a particular song or day in the studio when Gary thought, “Yeah, this is fucking working!”

“Recording ‘Never Really Tire’, there was this extraordinary moment of symbiosis when everybody apart from Ash, the drummer who had to keep this very rigid beat, just started playing from instinct,” he nods. “Standing in the middle of this swirling Möbius strip of force and energy, of positivity and light, was as exhilarating as anything I’ve experienced with Snow Patrol.”

The best definition of a Möbius strip I can find being: “When you try to go forward, you ring sideways, when you try to circle in, you find yourself outside.”

In the press blurb, Gary describes The Forest Is The Path as being “rooted in reflection, introspection and interrogation, and my not being in a relationship for a very long time, ten years or more.”

Is he still hopeful that true love will find him one day?

“Yes, very much so,” he insists. “I don’t feel closed down or closed off in any way. I know some of the lyrics on this record aren’t signalling that. A lot of it is me singing from the various places I’ve been in during my life, rather than where I’ve got to now. In the words of Foy Vance, ‘At least my heart was open/ At least my blood is still pumping.’”

Snow Patrol. Photo: Tom Beard

Talking to me last year, Gary confided that, “I’ve been very anxious my whole life and am now coming to terms with it. I was worried about all sorts of things that I probably didn’t need to be worried about, but I’ve done a lot of work on it intensively these past five years.”

That work seems to have paid off with Gary demonstrably happier than when he was back-and-forthing to Los Angeles, which is a tough place to live if you’ve got insecurities.

“I’ve always had a base in Bangor and spent half, or slightly less, of my year here,” he resumes. “When I fully came back it was just after those first eight months of COVID. I felt it was time. My sister lives next-door with my niece and my mum is up the road, so we’re all very close literally and figuratively. That connection to family is really important to me.”

Is Gary still going for his daily sea swim?

“Daniel Wiffen has nothing to worry about but, yeah, I’ll be going in after this,” he grins. “I also try and go to hot yoga three times a week up in Belfast. I’ve been doing it for ten years and it’s brilliant for both body and soul.”

Swimming daily isn’t the only thing he and the aforementioned Olympic gold medal winner have in common, with both of them making Game Of Thrones cameos.

“In the same way I’m not a threat to professional swimmers, I’m never going to put a professional actor out of work but it was an amazing thing to do,” he says of his Westeros experience.

Perhaps it’s because he’s knocked alcohol on the head and avoids other stimulants, but Gary’s voice has never sounded as rich and expressive as it does on ‘These Lies’, a stripped-down number worthy of a place alongside ‘Run’ and ‘Chasing Cars’ in the pantheon of great Lightbody confessionals.

“I don’t want to hex it but, fortunately, my voice has held out,” he resumes. “A lot of this record was done sitting down relaxed and not thinking, ‘We need to get this take!’ For ‘These Lies’, I was on the floor in the lotus position with the lights off and candles all around me – which was a pretty dramatic way to sing it! I was just allowing the song to take me wherever it wanted to go.

“It took me thirty years to realise that maybe it’s better not to sing from a place of complete wound-up anxiety that you’re going to get it wrong! It’s the same with the live thing. If in the past I had a bad vocal gig, I’d be pulling my hair out thinking, ‘What the fuck’s going on?’ These days I’m like, ‘It’ll be fine’, which is so much nicer!”

You’re thinking, “This record couldn’t be anymore emotionally-charged” when along comes the everything including the kitchen-sink title-track.

“I’ve got to give a big shout out here to Mr. Roy Kerr, a producer who’s worked with the likes of London Grammar and Natalie Imbruglia. I’ve known him for twenty-five years and he used to call himself the Freelance Hellraiser. You might remember his Strokes vs. Christina Aguilera mash-up which started that craze. For a wee while now, him and I have been making what is supposed to be my first solo record. Nathan did this cyclical guitar part in Michael Keeney’s studio in Bangor. I said to him, ‘Is it okay if I use that for my own album?’ He was like, ‘Yep’, so I recorded it on my phone and took it home to use as a sample in the song I set about writing. Long story cut short, Roy got his hands on it and it ended up being just fucking bonkers and epic.

“When I played it to Johnny and Nathan, they said, ‘Can we just have this on the Snow Patrol record?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, I was thinking that because I love the name of the song and want to call the album that.’ It all happened during the final week of the recording process, so the timing was very fortuitous.”

Another The Forest Is The Path standout is ‘This Is The Sound Of Your Voice’, a song of immense stadium-filling power, which finds Gary declaring: “And Belfast continues/ Never doubted it wouldn’t/ It’s climbed off the canvas more than any other city could’ve.”

Are there tangible differences between the Belfast – or to be more precise, Bangor – that Gary grew up in and the one he’s back living in full-time now?

“Yes, for sure,” he nods. “For me, it’s the music. When I was a teenager there were virtually no places as an under-18 to go and watch bands. With the notable exception of Nirvana and Red Hot Chilli Peppers who both blew my mind, I didn’t get to see that many gigs. There were bands and venues, sure, but it wasn’t anything like the genre-defying, expanded universe of talent we have now. It feels so different from the Belfast I remember as a kid.”

Having previously championed the likes of King Cedar, A Plastic Rose, Strange New Places, Tom McShane, The Florentinas, brand new friends and David C. Clements through his Third Bar artist development company, Gary is currently loving Derry punks Cherym and Jordan Adetunji, the breakout Belfast hip hop artist who he’s vociferously championed.

“There are so many extraordinary artists here making unbelievable music,” Gary says. “Over the past fifteen years I’ve put a lot of money into our wee label because I want bands from Northern Ireland to have a platform. The amount of CDs and zip files we get from artists is staggering. There’s no way we’d have enough time to work with all these amazing people.

“Jordan Adetunji blowing up at the moment is unbelievably cool because I’ve been a fan of his for a long time and knew he was going to be a big star.”

While Jordan Adetunji exemplifies the vibrant multicultural Northern Ireland of today, the recent racist riots in Belfast, Derry and Newtownards were a throwback to the knuckle-dragging bigotry of yesteryear.

Asked whether he found the unrest disturbing, Gary shoots back, “Yes, absolutely. I grew up in the midst of The Troubles and ever since I was a kid all I wanted was peace for everyone – not just in Northern Ireland but all around the world. Any time there’s violence and rioting – for whatever reason or, at the moment, lack of reason – it’s disturbing and agonising and horrifying. Yeah, I just want peace everywhere.”

Snow Patrol at Thomond Park

Gary was on the guestlist for the West Belfast premiere of the Kneecap movie, but was unable to attend because of Snow Patrol promo duties.

“They very kindly invited me to it – and I was dying to go – but I had to be elsewhere,” he rues. “I don’t know if they’ve acted before (They hadn’t, Ed) but they look very, very comfortable in the trailer. I’m a huge fan of Michael Fassbender so I can’t wait to see it.

“I just think that they’re a brilliant band. They were on the same day as Snow Patrol at the Belgian festival, Rock Werchter. I didn’t catch them but a mate of mine who’d come to see us did and said there were 8,000 people moshing to Kneecap. He was like, ‘This is the best thing ever!’”

Along with his ongoing financial support of Third Bar and Belfast’s Oh Yeah Music Centre, Gary is bankrolling the Lightbody Foundation, which last year gifted £10,000 each to Young Lives vs Cancer, West Wellbeing, Stuff A Bus, Nexus and Oasis Caring In Action. The latter, in case you’re wondering, being a mental health befriending service as opposed to a benevolent fund for the Gallagher brothers.

“Going back to what we were talking about earlier, no matter what Belfast people have gone through they’ve always had this great heart and great sense of humour, which helped them survive those darkest of times,” he proffers. “Along with that heart and humour, there’s hope and joy which everyone living in the city has a right to share in, no matter who they are or where they’re from.”

Gary Lightbody is still buzzing from Snow Patrol’s night out in Limerick’s Thomond Park.

“Honest to god, what a gig and what a crowd!” he marvels. “Kingfishr, who are Limerick boys and fantastic, were first on followed by the Pillow Queens who I love. Their first album was amazing but the second one’s even better. You know us, Stuart, we want to have as many local and Irish bands on the bill as we possibly can. As soon as I knew we were playing Limerick, I was listening to everything I could and thinking about who we could possibly ask.”

Did they get a Pillow Queen to do the Martha Wainwright part on ‘Set The Fire To The Third Bar’?

“No, we didn’t because it was only our third gig in two years and we were just holding on by the skin of our teeth playing new songs and the like!” Gary laughs. “There were too many moving parts already without dragging someone else into our psychodrama. It ended up being an incredible night, though, and really has us fired up for touring the album.”

The Forest Is The Path is out now. Snow Patrol play the Dublin 3Arena (February 25) and Belfast SSE Arena (27 and 28)