205. Take back the city – Snow Patrol live at London’s O2 Arena

I love this city tonight
I love this city always

It bears its teeth like a light
And spits me out after days
Snow Patrol — October 2008

A Northern Irish band playing London — on the night before St Patrick’s Day. It really has been been quite a week.

In Snow Patrol’s home town of Belfast, as in Omagh all those years ago, an outbreak of mindless violence has lent passion to the public desire for peace. Shootings carried out by dissident republicans of the ‘Real IRA’ and designed to break the peace process have proved to have the opposite effect.

In Washington, Michelle Obama dyed the White House fountains green and President Obama met with Martin McGuinness.

Each event was unthinkable a decade ago, but with the IRA disbanded and Sinn Fein committed to achieving peace through democratic means, the branding of the gunmen as traitors by McGuinness has closed one full circle of the Irish peace process.

It’s been a long hard road to come this far, both for Ireland and for Snow Patrol. The band was formed in 1994 — the year my elder daughter was born and only twelve months after a massive IRA car bomb destroyed the office blocks of South Quay, just a mile away across the river here in London.

That was another world and another mindset, before the Good Friday Agreement brought all sides together and Omagh failed to split them. In the years since then, London’s eastern fringes have grown and thrived.

Here in Greenwich, the birthplace of universal time, a new millennium was marked beneath this vaulting tented roof.

Dubbed a monstrous white elephant then, the elegant Millennium Dome has been transformed into a remarkable 20,000 seat arena for the greatest acts in the world today. In 2012, the O2 will host the Olympic basketball and gymnastics.

After a birth into critical obscurity, it might be said that Snow Patrol spent their first decade across the Millennium fading further still from view. It wasn’t until 2003 and release of their third album, Final Straw, that things began to change.

With festival appearances in Glasgow and Glastonbury, a showing at Live8 in 2005 and a spell as U2’s support band on tour, gradually they grew a following.

Finally (almost ironically for an indie band) it was the featuring of the mesmeric Chasing Cars on primetime TV series Grey’s Anatomy which dragged them blinking towards the limelight.

A string of successful singles followed through 2006 from the slick and polished Eyes Open, and with a new album out last autumn, Snow Patrol hit the road this spring with the glow of confidence and A Hundred Million Suns behind them.

And so here we are in Greenwich, as chatty lead man Gary Lightbody would say. This might be Europe’s largest and most spectacular indoor concert hall, but there’s an immediacy to the show this evening which reflects the band’s Irish warmth and their humility in getting here.

I’ll sing it, and you can sing it back to me invites Lightbody as the audience provide the backing track to Shut Your Eyes. And so we do for this song, with its greatest ever guitar riff of the 2000s, and through many more to follow.

The new material is tried and tested well, beginning with a flawless vocal opening to If there’s a rocket… continuing atmospherically and optimistically across The Golden Floor, then bursting through Crack the Shutters to an energetic cut of Take Back the City.

With a swelling sheaf of songs to fill the largest venues, the band have the measure of this metropolis tonight. In sum, the setlist weaves a rich tonal combination, the darker shades of ballad and early bash through Run, Chocolate and Spitting Games shadowing the punch of their shiny spiritual successors Hands Open and Chasing Cars and the emotional depth of You Could Be Happy.

Surely we are, as the show finds a stirring close on Open Your Eyes, a vision played across the screenplay of an early morning journey through the sunlit streets of Paris — the arrival in another great city just one more step on a lifetime’s path of slow-burning aspirations and inevitably accepted disappointments.

It seems just a minute too long to wait before the band return to play their 16-minute experimental epic The Lightning Strike to the accompaniment of animated swirling stars and planets. Interesting and evocative — certainly. Fitting encore material — probably not.

But by now we’ll forgive Snow Patrol even their own paler Pink Floyd moment, and after an age our patience is eventually rewarded with a final flourish through You’re All I Have — an absolute ripper, this one — it’s the best song of the night.

As we file out of the concert, the dome’s white hot roof and yellow struts glow hopefully upwards into the new millennium which they were built to grace. This arena has finally discovered the vision and the dream it was really built for.

Across the nightfall, Canary Wharf’s high towers stand lit up across the Thames. Since they were built, London has thrived and survived two terrorist onslaughts before a full-blown financial crisis. Now she faces an uncertain future ahead.

Only yesterday, it seems, I brought two small infants to see the Dome. Yet beside me now stand two teenagers at their first rock concert. Our evening here with Snow Patrol has been fourteen good years and more in making.

Progress finds its time, in time — and as with a good pint of Guinness on St Patrick’s Day, then so tonight with Snow Patrol in London — it’s really true that good things come to those who wait.

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