How Snow Patrol's Chasing Cars came from a boozy night out

15 June 2022, 14:20 | Updated: 13 April 2023, 09:48

Snow Patrol's Gary Lightbody tells the story behind Chasing Cars

Watch the Snow Patrol frontman tell Radio X the story behind the band's most enduring single.

2020 saw Snow Patrol's Chasing Cars named the most played track of the 21st Century.

The Northern Irish and Scottish band's 2006 single - which was taken from their fourth studio album, Eyes Open - was dubbed the most popular track on UK radio for over the last 20 years.

Despite only peaking at number six in the UK, the song stayed in the charts for three years and has remained present in pop culture ever since - thanks to its appearance on popular US series Grey's Anatomy.

Now, Radio X have been given the story of how the song came to fruition from the man himself.

It involves a very boozy night, a sore head and plenty of gigging.

Watch him explain all in our video above.

Lightbody told Radio X: "In a pretty wild night of songwriting in 2005, myself and Jack Knightley in a studio in Kent [...] we wrote 10 songs, five of which ended up on Eyes Open, in the space of about three hours, and there was about a bottle of wine at least one an hour".

He continued: "Normally when you wake up from a night of songwriting and too much booze, you wake up and go, 'No, no no, no. This stuff isn't going to be heard by anybody,' but we were very lucky to have five songs like that that ended up on a record, and more lucky than we've ever got in our lives to end up with Chasing Cars, which obviously has endured longer than we ever could have hoped for".

Watch Stereophonics dedicate their song to Snow Patrol after they stood in for the band at Latitude Festival 2019: