There’s playing through the pain, and then there’s playing a gig with two broken fingers. When your other hand recently got “wrecked” after being trapped in a train door.
It sounds unthinkable, but that’s how Snow Patrol guitarist and keyboard Johnny McDaid has been rolling recently.
Speaking to RTE, band frontman Gary Lightbody revealed that the first mishap occurred on the train journey between Switzerland and Frankfurt while they were on tour.
‘We did the whole European tour on the train, it was really fun - except for this thing which happened, where Johnny got his hand caught in a door,” he revealed. “And it wrecked his hand. He ended up getting surgery on his hand. Never missed a show.”
Worse was to come after Snow Patrol had just played a gig in McDaid’s home country of Northern Ireland last month, with another scheduled for the following evening.
“The Thursday night in Belfast, at midnight or so, he fell and wrecked his other hand - smashed his knuckles on his other hand,” Lightbody confirmed. “When we came in for sound check on Friday, he couldn’t move the fingers on his right hand. And he still played the show on Friday night.
Lightbody was speaking on the following Sunday, and said: ‘He has just today gone to get surgery on his hand. It’s insane. He had two broken [fingers] on Friday’s show - and he played the gig.”
It’s not the first time McDaid has been in the wars. In 2019, Snow Patrol were forced to cancel a scheduled appearance at Glastonbury as their multi-instrumentalist had an issue with his neck.
On this tour, though, the shows went on, which - as Gary Lightbody suggests - is pretty unbelievable.
“He’s made of different stuff from the rest of us,” he says, and he’s not wrong. Snow Patrol’s tour continues - injury permitting - in Vancouver on 21 March. They released their latest album, The Forest Is The Path, in September 2024.
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