Snow Patrol star opens up about fight against depression
GARY LIGHTBODY is at home with his parents for the weekend and feeling like a kid again. It’s a place of refuge for the Snow Patrol frontman, who has been through the mill in recent years.
He has suffered from depression, vertigo, writer’s block and a dependency on alcohol that he does not call alcoholism, but which resulted in his hand shaking if he felt in need of a drink. But being at home lets the 42-year-old Northern Irish star feel like a teenager. “There is definitely a part of yourself that reverts to the age you were when you left home,” he says, laughing. “I think that’s true of a band too, it doesn’t matter how long you’ve been at it, there always is an element where you’re still kids.”
But it has been quite a journey for Snow Patrol to get where they are today, with numerous changes in name and line-up, as well as endless disappointments. First founded at the University of Dundee in 1994, their first two albums failed to make much of an impression. But in 2003, they released their break-through album What came next was even bigger – the smash hit that was in 2006, with its anthemic single
It topped the charts and was the bestselling British album of the year. Snow Patrol were global stars.
“It took us so long to have a hit, so I do think that most of the stuff that has happened to us over the last 15 years is like my dream, my fantasy,” he says. “It’s very hard to take that completely seriously, so perhaps I tend not to live in the real world as much as most adults would.
“I have suffered from depression my whole life. I actually feel good these days, but I’m a serious introvert and it was years playing gigs before I could look at the audience, before I could look up past my shoes and figure out how to be a frontman. There is a dual life where you’re trying to present the songs as best you can, because you wrote them, so you may as well give it everything you’ve got on stage.
“You can be the happiest you’ve ever felt, come off stage after playing to 20,000 people and feel 20ft tall, and three hours later I’m sitting in a hotel room, feeling completely devastated, isolated, alone. If you’re not protecting yourself against it, it can happen at any time, and that’s why talking about it first is the most important thing.”
The band’s latest album released earlier this year, explores some of Lightbody’s own conflicts. “These aren’t obscure things that noone else goes through,” he says. “These are things that most people go through at some point in their life, be it just a general sense of not feeling right in the world, which happens to everybody at certain times, all the way up to very deep, dark depression. I’ve run the full spectrum of that, as have many.”
But today, Lightbody feels better than he thought was possible. “I’m waking up every day feeling like I’m ready to go, rather than waking up every day feeling like I’m ready to quit. It’s a hell of a change and I’m very happy to have got to the other side of it.”
His decision to stop drinking after a health scare two years ago – when he was diagnosed with infections in his ears, eyes and sinuses – also helped him “massively”, he says.
“I was drinking for Ireland – and every day. I would do the decent thing and not drink until five o’clock, but by five o’clock, my hand was shaking. It was pretty much built-in.
“I couldn’t think about a day without it, think about another way to be, because it seemed to insulate me against what I was feeling.”
The change was profound and Lightbody feels much healthier today. “After a month of not drinking, I felt so much better. The first year was tough, but any time I think about drinking, my brain would put me back to when I had my last hangover.”
Snow Patrol will play at Leeds First Direct Arena on January 29, 2019.