Snow Patrol front man Gary Lightbody reveals battles with drink, drugs and depression

SNOW Patrol frontman Gary Lightbody felt the death of the late DJ Avicii acutely, having struggled with substance abuse and mental health issues before making the band’s new album Wildness.

Snow Patrol are back with their first album in seven years and an Australian tour.

SNOW Patrol front man Gary Lightbody never met the late superstar DJ Avicii, but he felt the pain of his passing acutely.

When Lightbody heard of the Swedish electronica artist’s battles with mental health issues and alcohol that led to his untimely demise at the age of 28, he realised that it could just as easily been him.

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Snow Patrol are back on track after Gary Lightbody (centre) recovered from this “fragile state”.

“One hundred per cent,” says Lightbody over the phone from his Los Angeles home, only days after Avicii’s death last month. “That would be me. I would be dead by now. I became very emotional. I didn’t know him at all — but I felt very connected to him. It’s heartbreaking when that happens. I am very grateful that didn’t happen to me but it’s very sad that it did happen to him.”

Lightbody is pondering his own issues with depression and substance abuse, which he has wrestled with for decades, ahead of the release of Snow Patrol’s first album in seven years, Wildness. The delay, which Lightbody helpfully points out was about the same period of time in which The Beatles released all their albums, was in no small part down to what he calls his “fragile state”.

Even as Snow Patrol shot from Scottish indie darlings to genuine arena-fillers in the mid-2000s, thanks to songs such as Run and Chasing Cars (which became one of the biggest hits of the decade after it appeared on US medical drama Grey’s Anatomy), and a string of successful albums, Lightbody was still reeling from the mental health issues of depression and self-loathing that he traces back to his teenage years of feeling like an outcast in sectarian Northern Ireland.

"Wildness" by Snow Patrol. Picture: AP

That, combined with vast quantities of alcohol and cocaine, had left Lightbody both unwilling and unable to get started on new material for the band he has fronted since 1993, even though he was still making music with the likes of Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran and One Direction.

“I was writing lots of songs but nothing was getting finished,” says Lightbody. “On my voice memos on my phone, there was more than 600 song ideas. I just didn’t have any follow-through or grit to keep going with the song until it was done.”

Lightbody stopped doing co-writes a couple of years ago (although he still catches up with his mate Sheeran, who he describes “one of the most extraordinary human beings I have ever met”), because he realised that they were just distractions from what he really should have been doing. At around the same time, he also quit drinking after a serious health scare at his LA home just before his 40th birthday.

“I was in my house doing my exercises and I touched my toes and came back up again and the whole room started to shake,” he says. “I was in LA at the time so I thought it was an earthquake. After about five minutes the earthquake was still going and I started to think ‘this isn’t an earthquake’. So I phoned a friend who lives a few blocks away and I said ‘listen, are we having an earthquake right now?’ He said ‘No, we’re not’.”

His friend ordered him to a doctor, who said his head was a mess of infections that needed to be treated immediately and told Lightbody that if he wanted to reach his 41st birthday, he should cancel the trip he had planned to see Northern Ireland play in their first major football championship in decades. Instead, Lightbody sought help from acupuncturist friend Gabrielle Hammond, who cured the infection, helped him clean up his lifestyle and put him on the road to good health.

“So that’s what I did — I stopped drinking, I don’t eat sugar any more, I meditate every day,” says Lightbody, who wrote the song Heal Me on the new album about the experience. “My life is immeasurably different to what it was before and I have Gabrielle to thank for that. She saved my life in a lot of ways. I was drinking myself to a reasonably early grave.”

Singer Gary Lightbody from band "Snow Patrol" during concert at the Adelaide Entertainment Centre 12 Sep 2007. band/snow/patrol

It took months, but gradually Lightbody started to write for Snow Patrol again with more purpose and clarity. But he also found that the very demons he was trying to bury through self-medication were still waiting for him. Even when Snow Patrol were at their peak and basking in the fruits of their chart-topping labours and good fortune, their front man was often quietly suffering.

“It’s hard, I suppose, to imagine someone like myself who is playing on a stage in front of thousands or tens of thousands could be in any way low or depressed,” he says now. “I am in no way taking anything for granted or complaining about the life that I have. It’s an extraordinary life, but depression has nothing to do with how good your life is. Depression is a thing all of its own.

“I have headlined festivals in front of 80,000 people and then two hours later been in a hotel room on the floor crying in the crash position. It just comes and rips your house down, rips your heart apart and you have to learn how to deal with it in a better way than just drowning it in booze and trying to forget about it. Because it’s part of you.”

Gary Lightbody says Snow Patrol is playing live better than ever and looking forward to getting back to Australia.

One of the first songs he wrote for Wildness was the anthemic Don’t Give Up. Perversely, he actually penned it while he was still drinking, thinking it was about a friend who was also suffering depression and was suicidal. He soon realised, however, that he was deflecting — the song was actually about him and that “this is my s--- and I have to start dealing with it”.

“I think if I learned anything,” he says, “the main two things are that you have to talk about this s--- with either professionals or people that you love or both.

“And the other one is that you have to stand and face your demons. You actually have to become friends with your demons. They live in you. The thing that I am most afraid of I don’t think is ever going to die, I just have to learn to love it.

“I could use that song as a guiding force and a beacon to get me through the album,” he continues. “It’s a very simple line — don’t give in — but it means the world to me because it might have been the thing that actually got me through the f---king record.”

Now reunited with his band mates, who he says were patient and supportive the entire time, Lightbody says he is heartened by how the new Snow Patrol material has been received, and that they can’t wait to get back on the road.

“We have never sounded this good live and I am so excited to get the gigs up and running because if we are this good live right now, after six months we are going to be slamming,” he says. “I am Northern Irish and we are not allowed to compliment ourselves, so if I can say that then it must be good.”

Wildness is out now. Snow Patrol, Palais Theatre, August 2, livenation.com.au; Air + Style Festival, The Domain, Sydney, August 4, Moshtix.