The Irish/Scottish five piece have sold over 11 million albums and have been responsible for several era-defining singles, including Run, Chocolate, and Chasing Cars (which spent an incredible 104 weeks in the UK Top 75 and was voted song of the decade in a Channel 4 poll). Their albums have been nominated for the Mercury Music Prize, Grammys and MTV Europe Music Awards, with Final Straw landing them an Ivor Novello Award in 2005. By anyone’s standards, it's been a pretty good century so far.
Snow Patrol formed in Dundee, Scotland in 1994 and are currently based in Bangor, Northern Ireland, where most of the band members are from. They consist of Gary Lightbody (vocals, guitar), Nathan Connolly (guitar, vocals), Paul Wilson (bass), Tom Simpson (keyboards) and Jonny Quinn (drums). Lightbody and Quinn are the only original members who remain in the band.
The main thing to get about Snow Patrol is that, 14 years after they started out as a student band at Dundee University, they’re still flying, gloriously and unpredictably, by the seat of their pants. “The great and terrifying thing about our band,” declares their leader and main songwriter Gary Lightbody, “Is that everything has always happened as it’s going along. There’s been very little masterplan. We allow things to happen as much by accident as by deliberate intention.” One notable early accident was their name. Lightbody’s band used to be known as Polar Bear - hence their 1998 debut album Songs For Polarbears - but were obliged to change it after discovering that this was what the bassist of Jane’s Addiction was calling his side project. ‘Snow Patrol’ had already been chosen for them by a friend who didn’t care for the Polar Bear moniker; and so it came to pass that Snow Patrol signed in 1995 to Jeepster, home of their Glaswegian indie heroes at the time, Belle and Sebastian.
