a way with That's the idea behind Songbook, the series in which songwriters discuss their craft in depth amidst intimate performances of their most famous songs. To write a great song, one that captures a universal feeling with simplicity and depth, is not an easy thing to do. With Songbook series 3, we wanted to find out more about the process. Gary Lightbody of Snow Patrol seemed like someone who might be able to help us. Lightbody, who formed Snow Patrol in Dundee in 1994 and achieved mainstream success nine years later with the band's number one album Final Straw, has achieved that goal every songwriter dreams of: to write a song that enters into the fabric of society. Chasing Cars (2006), Lightbody's mournful, minor-key ballad of loneliness, has been the soundtrack to relationship break-ups and bedroom crises the world over. It's played during funerals, weddings, and the meaningful moments of soap operas. It had touched a lot of people on a deep level. melody Snow Patrol's Gary Lightbody draws Will Hodgkinson of Songbook into the private world of his creative process we had years of driving around in a shitty van doing gigs for 30 people Lightbody learnt about writing a great pop song and being in a successful rock band the hard way. Snow Patrol worked at the coalface of the live circuit for years, performing tiny, poorly attended gigs to deafening lack of interest from the world at large, until eventually breaking through in 2003. And Lightbody is as unlikely a rock star as you are likely to meet. He's polite, rather awkward, and has used the proceeds from a string of hit singles to buy a house in his native Belfast that's round the corner from his mum and dad's. Snow Patrol get a hard time for the press, mainly for being terminally uncool while selling records in their millions. With no real star quality to speak of, Lightbody is living proof that great pop songs do not depend on the image or sex appeal of the people singing them. Having no formal training, Lightbody started out by getting a few guitar lessons from his uncle. By the time he bought his own guitar and amplifier aged 14, he was writing songs of his own. `I can't remember what the first song I wrote was -- probably about some girl that broke my heart, which is similar to what I'm writing about now,' says Lightbody with a nervous laugh, as we start to talk and do our best to ignore the TV crew and banks of equipment surrounding us. `All I remember from the early days is my folks banging on the kitchen floor and telling me to keep it down because it was way too loud and way too awful.' Most songwriters start out by copying the songs they like. Lightbody wrote his own material soon after picking up a guitar, although by his own admission this was not necessarily a good thing. `I was writing straight away and I still have an aversion to performing covers,' he says. `Why cover a song that you like? The person that did it first did it right. But I didn't have that noble philosophy when I started. I just wasn't good enough to play other people's songs.' Like so many pop songwriters, Lightbody has no formal training. He can't read music. He is not a virtuoso. But pop music isn't really about musicianship; it's about ideas. `I wrote a lot of poetry when I was younger. I loved music as well, so the two went hand in hand. I soon discovered that writing in silence was much harder for me; when I started playing music the poetry flowed much Snow patrol Final.indd 30 7/12/09 15:00:05