Snow Patrol on 20 years of Chasing Cars, and their ‘non-duet’ with Kylie

Ever wanted to write a song so huge it becomes your pension plan? Here’s the secret: pretend you’re making it for someone else.

That’s what Snow Patrol’s Gary Lightbody was doing back in 2005, in a garden shed owned by his friend and producer, Jacknife Lee.

“We wrote 10 songs in a couple of hours, over quite a few bottles of wine,” he recalls.

“It was essentially a session for other people and sometimes, that takes the pressure off because you’re not thinking about how you’re going to record it, or what it means to have that song become part of your life.”

Three bottles in, Lightbody stumbled on a chord sequence and a lyric: “If I lay here / If I just lay here / Would you lie with me and just breathe in the world?”

The atmosphere shifted. Suddenly, the session wasn’t for anyone else. They’d found something that would change Snow Patrol’s career forever.

“It’s the song that took us to the whole world,” Lightbody says. “We just followed it along like little ducklings.”

That song was Chasing Cars. You know it. You might even be sick of it. It’s been streamed more than two billion times. In 2019, it was named the UK’s most-played radio song of the 21st Century.

But it wasn’t finished that first evening. Eagle-eyed readers may have spotted that the lyrics quoted above received a subtle rewrite. In total, it took months of work to perfect the song’s deceptively simple arrangement.

“We even played it live a few times without finished lyrics,” says Lightbody. “I hope those recordings have been destroyed. Those early lyrics were bad.”

They haven’t.

You can hear an embryonic version on YouTube, recorded in Seattle in 2005. At that point, Lightbody was pining for a woman who’d rejected his advances.

“You come to me / With these three words / ‘Not right now’.“

That storyline was eventually replaced with a more romantic one. But hearing it gives more context to the song’s inscrutable title – borrowed from a phrase Lightbody’s father had used about his son’s hapless love life.

“You’re like a dog chasing a car,” he’d said. “You’ll never catch it and you wouldn’t know what to do with it if you did.”

In its finished version, Chasing Cars was released as the second single from Snow Patrol’s fourth album, Eyes Open, in June 2006.

A slow-burning hit, it peaked at number six in the singles chart, but really took off after being featured on the US medical drama Grey’s Anatomy.

It’s now the UK’s eighth best-selling song of the 2000s, with a staggering 1.2 million copies sold.

“The numbers are ridiculous,” says Lightbody.

“It doesn’t make any sense in any kind of real way where you can go, ‘These are the things that we did to become successful’.

“All of it happened by accident.”

The band will celebrate the song’s 20th anniversary later this year with two shows at the Royal Albert Hall. They’ll play Eyes Open in full, as well as some deep cuts and greatest hits… and maybe some special guests.

It comes after a major turning point for the Northern Irish band. In 2023, drummer Jonny Quinn and bassist Paul Wilson both quit.

The remaining trio – Lightbody, guitarist Nathan Connolly and multi-instrumentalist Jonny McDaid (who’s also Ed Sheeran’s chief collaborator) – tried to write a new album, but the sessions fell apart. The songs weren’t flowing. The band’s confidence was shot.

“It’s the first time we ever had to do it,” Lightbody says. “If you have to scrap an album after 30 years of being in a band, you might think, ‘We might as well pack up and go home’.

“So that was a kind of a sliding doors moment, where in another strand of the multiverse, we’re not together anymore. But this version of us went, ‘No, let’s try again’.”

A major catalyst was hiring Adele and Stormzy’s producer Fraser T Smith, whose “calming” influence helped the band refocus. The resulting album, 2024’s The Forest is the Path, gained Snow Patrol their best reviews in 20 years.

“It grips my heart and squeezes,” wrote the Telegraph’s Neil McCormick. On AllMusic, Neil Yeung called it “a late-era treasure trove” full of “emotional catharsis and introspection”.

A record of space and breadth, it found Lightbody – a recovering alcoholic who’d moved from Los Angeles back to his native Bangor – mourning the loss of his father and reassessing his life.

“I spent so many years not understanding myself and not understanding what was going on in my own head,” he says.

“I was always waiting for that tap on the shoulder to say, ‘You’re not supposed to be here. All this [success] was meant to be for somebody else’.”

That feeling never entirely disappears. But Lightbody is more comfortable in his skin since getting clean in 2016.

He’s replaced alcohol with cold water plunges and hot yoga… And he’s just achieved a lifetime ambition: recording a song with Kylie Minogue.

“I’ve been a huge fan ever since I went to the Féile [festival] in Cork in ’95 and saw Kylie on that bill with the Prodigy and Blur,” he says.

“I’d heard on the grapevine that she was looking for a song or two, so I set about writing some.”

The one that caught Kylie’s attention was These Alarms. Released last week, it finds Snow Patrol at their best, with a singalong chorus that bounds over like a puppy and charms you into submission.

Rather than trading lines back and forth, Lightbody and Minogue sing the entire song in unison. He says it shouldn’t really be considered a Snow Patrol song at all.

“The song was always called KYLIE – in all capital letters – all the way through the recording.

“I don’t even know if you could call it a duet. It’s more like we formed a band for this one.”

Singing together makes sense. The song is all about connection. Given the state of the world, it’s tempting to withdraw, the lyrics admit, but what we really need is each other.

“The title, These Alarms, can mean a lot of things,” explains Lightbody.

“For me, they’re the ones that were ringing in my head when I wasn’t sober. I spent my whole life playing concerts, but not really being ‘in concert’ [with other people] in a meaningful way.

“I was always searching for something, but I didn’t really know what it was… And then it turned out I had it all along.”

The answer was simply friendship. And the people Lightbody needed most were there on the stage with him.

“The natural state for bands is entropy. Everything falls to chaos. But it’s kind of amazing, because it’s happened the other way around for us,” he says.

“We’re not Emerson, Lake and Palmer travelling in separate buses. We’re closer than ever.”

You can hear it in the music and see it at their concerts.

After more than 30 years, people still want to feel the feelings that Snow Patrol make them feel. When they played an outdoor show at Liverpool’s Pier Head last month, thousands of fans who’d been unable to get tickets turned up anyway.

“There was an enclosure for the 12,000 people that bought tickets – but at one point, I said, ‘put your lights up’, and I looked down the street, and it was just lights all the way down,” says Lightbody.

“I think that’s the key to our music, in a general sense. It’s an invitation. There’s no jackets for this club, there’s no secret codes. It’s like, ‘just come and be with us’.”