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The last time I interviewed Snow Patrol, four years ago, we sat in a cheap and frankly unpleasant Camden hotel. This wasn’t “cool Camden”, this was “all-we-can-afford Camden”. And when I told the band’s singer, Gary Lightbody, that they were about to be huge, he laughed and shot me a look that said “yeah, right”.

His scepticism was understandable. At the time, Snow Patrol had been wandering around the fringes of the music industry for 10 years, getting nowhere fast. My confidence, though, was equally understandable. I had just heard a new song of theirs, Run, which had “career-transforming hit single” written all over it. A few weeks later, it was released — and lived up to its promise — but, sitting in that grotty north London hotel, mention of Run merely prompted Lightbody to remember how cold, damp and miserable he’d been standing waist deep in a river to shoot the promo video for the song, and how annoyed he had been when, seeing the final cut, he realised that he was only actually seen from the chest up, so could just as easily have been standing on dry land all the time.

Four years later, we sit in the brighter, sunnier surroundings of St James’s Park, a few hundred yards from Buckingham Palace, and reflect on the brighter, sunnier position in which the band find themselves, with two multi-platinum albums under their belt and another about to be released. “It’s been a strange few years, a wonderful few years,” Lightbody says. “But one thing that hasn’t changed is that I still keep getting almost drowned in videos. Chasing Cars — another one of our singles — I was drowned in that one as well. I think it’s wish fulfilment on behalf of somebody.”

It says a lot about Lightbody that he thinks it necessary to explain to me what Chasing Cars might be. I doubt that Frank Sinatra used to say things like “My Way — that’s one of my songs, by the way” — a comparison I bring up because My Way is the only song ever to have spent longer in the UK charts than Chasing Cars, which stayed there for 85 weeks. It has also outperformed the best efforts of Coldplay and Radiohead in the US charts, been named best song of all time by listeners to Virgin Radio and propelled the album Eyes Open to seven-times platinum status.

Perhaps the most remarkable Snow Patrol statistic, however, is that Eyes Open sold more copies in the UK in the year it was released, 2006, than Dire Straits’s Brothers in Arms did in 1985 or Madonna’s True Blue in 1986. To shift more units in today’s download-happy culture than two ubiquitous, MTV- dominating, hit-packed mega-albums managed back in the pre-digital days, when people actually paid for music, is an astonishing achievement.

Perhaps even more astonishing, in our celeb-obsessed world, is that Snow Patrol have garnered this level of success while remaining virtually anonymous. When Lightbody and I first arrived in St James’s Park, we headed for the cafe and, wanting a quiet table for the interview, sat well away from the other customers. Moments later, we were approached by a waitress who informed us that we were not allowed to sit in that particular section.

I’ve been in this situation before, and I know what happens next: the waitress realises that she’s in the presence of a rock star, rules are waived, exceptions are made, autographs are signed and we get on with things. But no, not a glimmer of recognition. Nor has Lightbody an ounce of the prima donna in him; he’s headed for the legal part of the restaurant before I am.

I suggest that reaching a big audience while retaining your anonymity might be the best of both worlds. “Yeah, definitely,” Lightbody agrees. “It’s what everyone secretly wants; 98% of musicians aren’t looking for fame. You want an audience, but without the celebrity thing. We just got lucky, I guess. I can’t imagine how I would have handled all that.”

Lightbody may still have to deal with another level of fame. The band have just signed up with the management team responsible for the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Muse, Q Prime, who aim to take a band who sell well in four countries and turn them into a band who sell well in 20 countries. The album that Q Prime hope will turn Snow Patrol into a truly global band is A Hundred Million Suns. The title and lyrics are informed by Lightbody’s new love of science. “I didn’t have any aptitude for it at school, but I’ve become very interested in science over the past couple of years,” he says. Indeed, on the evening of the day we meet, Lightbody heads to the Southwark Playhouse to see The Ethics of Progress, a performance lecture about quantum physics. “In the past, my lyrics have sometimes been bogged down by my own self-flagellation — can’t see past my fingertips. This time, the opposite has happened. It’s about realising that we’re just dots.”

There are other lyrical shifts, too. Lightbody is best known for his break-up songs, which trawl over the fragments of past relationships gone wrong, but A Hundred Million Suns features several more positive love songs. “The problem I’ve always had with writing about love is that you don’t really stop and think about it when it’s occurring,” he says. “This time, I made myself think about it — how to fit it into words. The new lyrics took a lot longer than usual, but I’m proud of them.

“Sometimes I come up with a good line, but it sounds clumsy. Lyrics are as much about how the words sound as they are about the meaning. Garret drilled that into me,” Lightbody adds, referring to the band’s producer, Garret “Jacknife” Lee.

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