When Gary Lightbody wrote a song for Kylie Minogue, he did not tell Kylie Minogue. He could not tell Kylie Minogue. In fact, he had no clear way of getting it anywhere near her.
He had heard she might be looking for new material and, as a long-time fan, responded in the most songwriter way possible: by writing “a whole bunch of songs” and hoping one might somehow find its intended voice.
It was equal parts confidence, cheerful optimism, and creative delusion.
“I’d heard that she wanted some songs, not necessarily from me, but she was looking for some new stuff,” Lightbody tells Rolling Stone AU/NZ. “I’ve been a fan of hers for a long, long time, and I just wrote a whole bunch of songs, maybe hoping that she would like one of them… and then couldn’t find a way to get them to her.”
One of those songs eventually made its way to Snow Patrol bandmates Nathan Connolly and Johnny McDaid. They recorded it during the sessions for 2024’s The Forest Is the Path, keeping the working title “KYLIE” throughout the process. There was only one problem: they had ‘finished’ the song, but it was not done yet.
“We got to the end of it and realised that there was one very key element that was missing from the song, which was Kylie’s voice,” Lightbody says. “So we upped our search to get the song to her, and it found its way to her and she liked it. And when she sang on it, it’s the first time it felt finished.
“It was always meant to be for her.”
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Now titled “These Alarms”, the collaboration sounds less like a novelty meeting between two enormous names than a song that finally reached its natural form.
“It’s like normally when you get to the end of a jigsaw, there’s only one piece left. You can see the whole thing,” he explains. “But with this song, it was almost like all the pieces were the wrong way around and her piece was the first one that turned everything around the right way. It made everything make sense.”
Lightbody has spent enough time writing for and with other artists to know that most songs do not make it through. When Kylie finally received the song, his first response was not triumph — it was terror.
“’What if she hates it?’” he remembers thinking. “All these things go through one’s head.”
When the ‘yes’ arrived, Snow Patrol were together in the studio, allowing for cheering and high-fives. Within days, Minogue’s vocal was back with the band.
“It immediately sounded good,” Lightbody says. “Didn’t have to do anything. It just slotted right in. It was perfect.”
The band quickly decided “These Alarms” had accumulated too much of its own mythology to be buried on an album or attached as a bonus track.
“It was a world of its own,” Lightbody says. “It had a story to tell of its own — the story of the making of the song, the story of the writing of the song, the story of the song itself.”
Then came the next chapter: performing it live with Kylie for the first time at London’s Crystal Palace Park.
The official video captures Lightbody introducing her to a crowd of around 20,000 people before she runs onto the stage. It looks euphoric. Inside his head, however, one thought was sounding louder than everything else.
“Don’t forget the words. Don’t forget the words,” he recalls. “If I forget the words, maybe I’ll ruin her night.”
Lightbody is candid about his history of losing lyrics onstage, and the duet was hardly over rehearsed. Snow Patrol had run through it twice as a band weeks earlier, then twice with Kylie backstage at the show. Four attempts in total, followed by the real thing.
“It shouldn’t be allowed to walk up on a stage like that in front of that many people, having played the song as few times as we had, and do it that well,” he admits.
All of his anxiety was quelled within the opening lines. “I can remember every moment of it,” he says. “I don’t need the video to remind myself what happened, although it’s nice to have the video.”
Watching Kylie command the stage — not only on “These Alarms”, but duetting the band’s breakout hit “Chasing Cars” — was both thrilling and, he admits, “slightly humbling.”
“She is 50 times the performer that I am,” Lightbody says. “I was like, ‘Oh, this is an actual frontperson.’ She was effortless and just super cool, and had the whole audience in the back of her hand within seconds. Something that takes me more than seconds, I’ll tell you that.”
While Snow Patrol are celebrating 20 years of Eyes Open, the album that transformed them into a global force, Lightbody is also thinking intently about where they go next.
Looking back has forced him to confront the long shadow cast by “Chasing Cars”. Following its enormous success, he became so determined not to repeat himself that he began avoiding anything that felt remotely connected to it.
“I maybe saw it as a stove to be avoided touching,” he says. “But then realised only pretty recently, before we wrote ‘The Forest Is the Path’, that this was never a stove to be avoided. This was never something that was going to burn me.
“I wasted far too much time running away from that song.”
Lightbody calls The Forest Is the Path the band’s best album-making experience to date. Nothing was off limits. No instinct had to be examined for signs of repetition. The material currently taking shape for the band’s next record feels even more expansive.
“There are no restrictions, there’s nothing off the table, there are no taboos,” he says. The new songs, he adds, are “big, unabashedly emotional” rock songs with “massive choruses.” One of them, “Love, I Guess”, is already in the live set and, by Lightbody’s assessment, going down “an absolute storm.”
As for when Snow Patrol will make it back to Australia? Lightbody says they’re ready.
“All the time we’re asking our agent, we’re asking the promoters out there, ‘When can we come back?’” he says. “We are on it. Believe us, we’re trying our very best.”
