"Harry's Game" has proven repeatedly to be Clannad's lucky charm. It was written originally over 10 years ago as the theme for Yorkshire Television's adaptation of a fictional North Ireland-based thriller by writer Gerald Seymour. The song marked not only their debut on an international label, but also acted as a cornerstone for their transition from performing mainly acoustic-based traditional Irish folk music to electrifying and pioneering the many-layered vocals and instrumentation that is now the recognizable "Clannad sound." It is the lush, melody-based music which has consistently seemed to enchant the masses, especially in times of rhythm and beat heavy lean and mean tunes.
The first time around, the theme from "Harry's Game" reached number five in the British pop charts and won the band an Ivor Novello Award for Best Television Soundtrack. Nearly 10 years later the song was featured in the film Patriot Games and subsequently was chosen as the theme for a nationwide advertising campaign currently being run in the U.S. by Volkswagen. The public response has been overwhelming, with hundreds of people calling the advertisement's 800 number to find out, not what the car was, but where they might find the commercial's "neat" background music. All this response has caused Anam, the album on which the song last appeared, to enter the U.S. Billboard charts, a first for Clannad in their 20 years of recording.
Back at the concert hall, the remaining few strains of "Harry's Game" fade as the crowd is moved to their feet to applaud. The band's logo is beamed across the stage's backdrop as a reminder that the group they have been watching for the last two hours is, indeed, Clannad.
But long before "Harry's Game," before Volkswagen and any level of corporate involvement, there were the families Brennan and Duggan, who had been living in a remote part of Ireland's countryside known as County Donegal. Siblings Pól (pronounced "Paul"), Ciarán (pronounced "Keeron"), and Máire (pronounced "Moya") Brennan decided to form a band that would reflect the musical sounds they grew up with in the remote coastal area of Gweedore. With their twin uncles, Noel and Pádraig (pronounced "Paric") Duggan, they initially called themselves "an clann as Dobhar," meaning "a family from the townland of Dore," but soon abbreviated the name to Clannad. The time was the late sixties, and the group sang mainly in their native Gaelic tongue, a practice which was not met with initial approval.
"When we first started to actually play the traditional songs in our contemporary style, we weren't very encouraged by what we were doing, because people thought it was a bit mad that we were singing Gaelic songs," Máire explains. "People used to say to us, `Listen, you'll not get anywhere doing that'."
The Brennans came from a very musical family to begin with. Their father Leo was a former cabaret band leader and their mother Baba was a school teacher who ran the local choir. "Around our house there were always instruments, from my father's showband time. He had guitars, double basses, and saxophones lying about. When his band folded up, we picked up some of the instruments and started to play. Previously his only trade was music, so he bought a tavern, basically to play in; he wanted a stage. When we came home from school holidays, it meant there was a stage for us as well. He used to say, `Get up there and relieve me for a half an hour and do a bit of a spot.' We'd do cover versions of anything, like Beatles, Beach Boys and Joni Mitchell songs. We started to add Gaelic songs to our repertoire because Gaelic was our first language. The wealth of songs around the County of Donegal was really overwhelming.
"My grandparents on my mother's side were a great source of songs. My grandmother used to teach us Gaelic songs and my grandfather used to tell us mythological stories. We began to research even more; we'd go to the old woman down the road, or the old man who had songs hundreds of years old, which had been passed down."
The young Brennans' and Duggans' passion for the traditional music of Ireland soon expanded even beyond their native Donegal. They started visiting such outlying communities as Tory Island off Donegal's coast, where only 100 people now live. Armed with some 500 Gaelic songs, they began to arrange these songs for a full band, something which had previously never been done. They were quite surprised by the initial reaction to their newly-arranged versions of local traditional tunes. "When we started to sing these songs in the tavern, it was really funny because the visitors would clap to them, but the locals wouldn't. They'd be, like, `What are you doin', singing those songs?' It wasn't the `in' thing to do and they were really quite taken aback by it.
"But we really got involved in (traditional music) in a big way. The more we researched it, the more we loved the way they were written, the double meanings, the love songs and emigration songs. They were also just written about anything that happened down the road or they were written about seaweed or anything. The melodies and the words all struck us so much. Unlike, say, Planxty, who used more traditional instruments like fiddle and pipes and sang very English ballads, ours was a different approach.
"Gaelic came from the West coast of Ireland, it wasn't something you'd be heard speaking when you went to the city. It was a redneck kind of thing, so to sing it was worse. We really took up a kind of challenge, but we were mesmerized by the beautiful airs. They were usually only done by a singer (solo, unaccompanied), never in a contemporary style and never with harmonies. The real purists, anyone who was into the Gaelic part of it, hated us for what we were doing to the songs. So we were really kind of in the middle."
The first of a series of tuning points for Clannad came when they entered into the local Letterkenny Folk Festival and won first prize, a recording contract with the Irish arm of Phillips.
"That was in 1970 and we were still in college and school but we didn't do the record until 1973, because the record company didn't like the idea of us doing half the album in Gaelic. It wasn't heard of to sing Gaelic unless you were really heavy into folk, ethnic and traditional music and then for only a really small minority of people."
That first album in 1973 was called simply Clannad and showed a band aware of contemporary Celtic music of the day. There were hints of modern influences, most notable Pentangle's, in songs such as "The Pretty Maid" and "Morning Dew." But it was the Gaelic songs, particularly an early arrangement of "Níl sé'n lá" ("It's Not Yesterday"), a drinking song they found on one of their Tory Island expeditions, that really showed the band's ability to form contemporary, jazz-influenced versions of traditional material.
Another album followed in 1975 on Gael-Linn records and was appropriately titled Clannad Two. Produced by Planxty and Bothy Band founder Dónal Lunny, it showed a tremendously more mature band that was quite committed to singing mainly in Gaelic. Their arrangements were still experimental for the times, but their increasing skill in the use of traditional acoustic instruments kept the music well within the boundaries of folk music.
Clannad Two featured some great traditional music, including Máire's fine harp playing on the O'Carolan tune "Eleanor Plunkett" and great ensemble work on tunes like the Breton "Rince Briotánach" and "Teidhir Abhaile Ríu," a fine Irish matchmaking tune. It is the sheer beauty of Máire's voice on "Coinleach Ghlas an Fhómair" ("On the Green Stubble of Autumn") that transcends any language barriers.
The following year they produced Dúlamán, which probably was the high point of their albums of solely traditional material. The title track is a great song about two dúlamán, or seaweed, merchants, one of whom is trying to win the hand of the other's beautiful daughter. The song has a lively repeated Gaelic chorus with a fine lead song by Ciarán. It's been a favorite of Clannad's live shows for a very long time and is still performed in a rock version which captures the flavor of the original recorded acoustic version. The other highlight of the album is the jaunty tale of sibling betrayal in "Two Sisters," a version gathered from the well known Northern Derry singer Brian Mulled.
The band in '76 still consisted of Máire on lead vocals and harp, Ciarán on double bass, electric piano and vocals, Pól on flutes, guitars and bongos, Noel on guitar vocals and Pádraig on mandolin, guitar and vocals. They still retained the Gaelic spelling of their surnames of Ó Braonáin for the brothers, Ní Bhraonáin for Máire and Ó Dúgáin for the twin uncles. During their first tour of Europe in 1976 a standing ovation after an eight-minute version of their Tory Island drinking song convinced them to become full time professionals.
"Previous to this Ciarán was in college. My uncles were radio officers and they were going to go off in the ships. I was teaching music in the school and Pól was going to the university. We went into the dressing room (after the aforementioned ovation) and said, `Ok, should we have a go at this or not?' We decided to put everything else on hold and really put everything we've got into music."
The band next made Crann Ull (originally released in 1978 on Tara Records) it featured a stronger emphasis on Máire's harp playing. "Ar a ghabhail 'n a 'chuain damh" featured a particularly full band arrangement reflective of their live jams at the time.
"Lá Coimhthioch fan dtuath" ("A Strange Day in the Countryside") showed the first hints of the more atmospheric side of the band's arrangements. On "Gathering Mushrooms" they included their sister Eithne Ní Bhraonáin on supporting vocals. She would, many years later, become a successful solo artist (shortening and phoneticizing her name to Enya), with much of her sound based on the mid-period vocal experimentations of Clannad.
Clannad in Concert [Oghm Records] was released in 1979, featuring excerpts from their 1978 Swiss tour and a lovely version of "Down By the Sally Gardens" and a slightly over 10-minute version of "Nil sé n lá." It served as a base for various solos by the individual members, and it is also a far better and more representative album of Clannad's earlier live sound than Ring of Gold (which was actually a bootleg) on Celtic Records. In 1981 with the album Fuaim (pronounced "foom," meaning sound) on Tara Records, recorded in Dublin's famed Windmill Studios, Clannad began to experiment with a more lush and electric sound. Enya became, for a short time, a full member of the band, adding keyboards and harmony vocals as well as lead vocals on two songs, "An Túll" and "Buaireadh An Phósta." This album marked Clannad's first experiments with synthesizer. It also had guest Neil Buckley on clarinet and saxophones plus a percussionist and electric guitarist.
By the following year Enya was off to pursue her solo career and the band was about to record the album which would forever change their career as well as their sound. Magical Ring (Tara) appeared in 1982 and opened with a stunning collage of voices and synths on a little number called "Harry's Game."
" `Harry's Game' was done and released before Magical Ring. We got a contract (to RCA) after that which developed into the album. We were approached and asked if we would be into doing a song for this fictional drama that would be on three nights on TV. If you can imagine, there's only four stations in Britain, so there's more of a chance of people tuning in to something that is topical. We saw the show of course before saying yes to it. It was a fictional story about Northern Ireland and what it shows is that no one wins in the end. So it's really in keeping with us, because we're not really a political band. When they approached us, they wanted to use a track from the album Fuaim which was a Scottish Gaelic song. We thought it would be inappropriate to use it for something concerning Ireland. So we said we'll write something. My two brothers got together with me, and Ciarán had an old book of proverbs which belongs to my grandfather. In it was this proverb saying:
Imtheochaidh sor is soir
A dtáinig ariamh An ghealach is an ghrian;
Everything that is and was will cease to be.
He elaborated on it with the moon and the stars, the East and the West, a young man and his fame. It was a kind of lament. The Fol lol the doh part was really mouth music, if you think of a fiddle playing; Fol de liddle, taddle do, diddley idle oh. Well we just slowed it down because of the sentiment of what we were singing, we sang it very slowly. We wrote it in a couple of hours and thought, great, it's a nice tune and everything, but we didn't realize the sound we created had developed over the six albums before with all the experimentations we did with words and voices and harmonies.
"So when somebody approached us and said; Where did you get that song? We had to stand back and say `What song?' We were completely taken back by the response. We were in Germany on a tour, when `Harry's Game' was on TV and we came back to do the main `Top of the Pops' kind of show. People were saying to us, `What's it like to write a hit song?' and we'd say, `Oh come on, be serious, if you were trying to write a hit song would you have written it in Gaelic?' Entering the British charts at #5 with a Gaelic song was really something, oh it was brilliant. It was obviously a big turning point in our life with getting a major record deal with RCA and having more time in the studio and writing our songs, because Magical Ring was then half traditional material and half our own."
The album features some of Clannad's best and most enduring original compositions like "Tower Hill," "Passing Time" and "Newgrange" as well as the Jim (Gerry's brother) Rafferty penned "I See Red." This album lead to their next commission, the soundtrack for the 26-episode TV drama "Robin of Sherwood." The resulting album, Legend [RCA, 1984], won a BA FTA trophy for the score.
The next proper Clannad album, released in 1986, was called Macalla ("echo" in Gaelic) and there were no apologies offered for the heavy use of electric instruments and synthesizers. It featured all original material except one traditional song and yielded the group a hit single "In a Lifetime," a duet between U2's Bono and Máire. "We did Macalla and the track with Bono which was wonderful to do because it was totally spontaneous and the whole song happened in three days."
The album featured the core quintet plus a large number of backing musicians who have continued to tour with them, including ex-King Crimson sax man Mel Collins, Moving Hearts' guitarist Anton Drennan and Davy Spillane's rock 'n' roll drummer Paul Moran.
The following album, Sirius, was released by RCA in 1988 and was recorded in Los Angeles with rock producers Greg Ladany and Russ Kunkel (James Taylor's drummer). The album included a duet with Bruce Hornsby and guest appearances by Steve Perry and J.D. Souther. The resulting sound was typical of what American producers do with ethnic roots music bland, over produced and formatted for easy radio play.
Even the band members themselves are mildly apologetic about it. "Experimenting with using an American producer on Sirius was something we wanted to do. It wasn't us trying to push ourselves anywhere. We never had before, so why then? We wanted to see what an American producer would do with our sound. There are tracks on it I love: `Skellig,' `Something to Believe In' (the Hornsby duet), `The Turning Tide,' there are some great songs on it. It was just such a top heavy album, the production turned out to be so heavy. But that's what you learn, there are things we learned doing that album that went into all our others."
Between 1988 and 1991 there were some interesting side projects for the band, including Atlantic Realm [RCA, 1989] and The Angel and the Soldier [RCA, 1990]. "Atlantic Realm was a lovely little album we did for the BBC documentary about the Atlantic Ocean. It's really beautiful and we love doing something like that, because it's really different and really challenging. It was mainly instrumental as our voices were used as instruments. The Angel and the Soldier Boy was a half hour animation. It was wonderful. It was all music with animation and no voice overs, the actual music tells the story."
Two retrospective albums were done in 1990: Past Present [RCA] and The Collection, which actually came out on K-Tel. A further change occurred when brother Pól Ó Braonáin (now called Paul Brennan) left the group to pursue a solo career and work with the WOMAD (World of Music and Dance) organization in Britain. He released a rather disappointing trio album in 1993 with Guo Yue and Joji Hirota under the new name Trísan (DL #46).
The band continued on as a quartet and recorded their most satisfying album in some time, 1991's Anam [RCA]. It marked a return to the Clannad sound of such albums as Magical Ring and Fuiam and was recorded in just two and a half months at the band's home studio in the hills of Dublin.
The title Anam means "Soul" in Gaelic and the album's 10 songs showed a very nice blending of their traditional roots, their rockier later-period style and the Enya-influenced new agisms. The album was finally released in America in 1992 with a different cover and the addition of the previously released Bono duet "In a Lifetime" and, of course, "Harry's Game," which had been included in the motion picture Patriot Games. As a result, it got used on the Volkswagen commercial. "A friend of ours played Anam for Atlantic's A&R person Jason Flom. He couldn't believe it was never released in America. He came over within two weeks to Dublin and asked if we'd mind, would we like a deal in America with Atlantic and we were absolutely thrilled.
"They were really into our music in a big way because `Harry's Game' was in Patriot Games, they thought, `Well, let's make it available to people who might have heard it on that.' When the Volkswagen ad came out, lucky enough, it was available on Anam. Isn't it nice that Americans get to know Clannad from a song like `Harry's Game,' which is older? It's a nice introduction to the band and in that way it's really special for us. We really like the way Volkswagen used it; it was very subtle and we had no qualms about giving them permission to use a song that was 10 years old, as long as they weren't going to change it.
"We were really stunned by the public response. We were here making this new album, nearly at the end of it and a friend of ours rang us up and said there's a buzz about this ad on TV with your music. We said, `Oh, great, so they used our music,' because they had a choice of three songs and we didn't know which one they were going to go for. So we said, `Oh, that's nice,' but we really didn't know... it's funny, I was in Tower Records and they said, `You wouldn't believe the amount of people who come in looking for "The Volkswagen Song".' It kind of worked out really well, being in the charts for the first time. We thought America had passed us by."
Now the band has a new album, Banba, to quickly follow up on the heels of Anam. Marking their 20th Anniversary of recording, Banba starts to bring their musical journey full circle. "We're all quite pleased with it. I feel our songwriting has really matured, all the things we've been learning through all the albums we did, influenced this one. I feel it's the best Clannad album we've done for a really long time. It's a blend of the new sound and the old. It's what we've wanted to achieve, but you can't force these things. There's a song on it called `Banba Oír.' Oír means gold and Banba is a very romantic mythical name for Ireland. There were three kings and three goddesses; one was Fola, one was Eriu, if you think of Eire, which is the Irish for Ireland, and there was `Banba.' Ciarán wrote a song about the `Golden Age' of old Ireland, really talking about mythic Ireland. Each line is a visionary image of scenes you might see around Ireland. Unfortunately, there are no translations because of the speed with which the album came out. `I Will Find You' was specially written for the film The Last of the Mohicans. I actually sing in Mohican and Cherokee on it. Michael Mann rang up Ciarán and he loved the sound of the band, but he also loved the songs we sing in Gaelic. He wanted us to sing in Gaelic, but Ciarán said it wouldn't really be right because there were no Irish people around America in that time. So he said leave it with me and he researched it. Later, Michael said, look, there're only 16 people in America who speak Mohican, but Ciarán somehow got the 17th at Yale or somewhere.
"We got that, and the most amazing thing is, the words in Mohican were so melodic and it was nearly like singing in Gaelic. The Cherokee part we got from the actor Wesley in the film, he helped us with the pronunciation and all. It was really lovely to get involved in something like that, being authentic with what it was about.
"I think our music is quite visual, I think people who would sit down with our albums, can let their minds wander and our music does go well with pictures. There's a movie, Into the West, with Gabrielle Byrne and Eileen Barkin which has been released in Britain and they'll release it in America in August. They're using `In a Lifetime' as the theme for it. It's all been amazing, all this has happened within six months and we're saying, `Hey, hold on now'."
Clannad's live shows still mix the old and new material. At a recent concert they played a mainly acoustic set of tunes in the beginning that spotlighted Máire's harp playing. Accompanied by longtime backing musicians Drennan, Collins and Moran, they also had Ian Parker from Scotland on keyboards and Karen Hamil on backing vocals with the young Bridin Brennan (yet another singing sister).
1992's Máire (RCA; Atlantic in the States) marks a return to the more acoustic side of her early work with Clannad and features more harp playing as well as less echo on Máire's still beautiful and full voice.
"I wanted to approach it a bit differently than Clannad, there was no point to making a solo album if it was going to be very Clannad or like Enya's. It was a total challenge for me and it was something I really wanted to do; it took years to do. I knew that with all the influences and all the things we've done for years, I must have something to write. With Clannad I only dabbled in songwriting. I suppose I got lazy and let my brothers do most of the writing. So when I decided to do it, it took four and a half months to write, but I was surprised how much I also involved my three sisters (Dee, Olive and Bridin) in it. I thought it would be really interesting to add another dimension of the Brennan clan. I stayed away from male harmonies that would be on a Clannad album. It was great, and I came away saying, `Goodness, do I know why I'm still in music?' I really needed it and then I looked forward to doing Banba.
"Dónal Lunny produced it; he's like a big brother to me. We did our second album with him and he's always been around. I always wanted to work with him again. The album was co-produced with Calum Malcolm, who is the [Scotland band] Blue Nile producer. I love his work. He and Dónal never met and now they're working together. They get on so well. The three of us in the studio together were brilliant; there was such a buzz. I'm hoping to do another album with them at the end of the year."
One of the album's standout tracks is a tune called "Oró" (pronounced Oh-row) and is dedicated to her daughter Aisling, who appears with her on the album's cover. "Oró is a lullaby and one of the reasons I was able to do the album was because I was pregnant at the time and the band decided not to tour.
"When I started to write I was three months pregnant and by the time we finished, I was eight and a half months. `Oró' was just a lullaby that came out of me. It was a lovely song in Gaelic, because it's one of those songs if sung in English would sound naff. It was just very, very precious. That's why she's on the front cover. It wasn't meant to be at all; it was the record company's suggestion. It was a family picture my husband (photographer Tim Jarvis) took, during a moment that she turned around and kind of kissed me.
"I took it to the record company and said, `Look, there's a lullaby on this for her and I'd like to put in a little picture in the corner in the back and just put "Song for Aisling" on it.' About two days later, they rang up and said, `Say, this is a great picture, what would you think about using it for the front cover?' I said, `What?' Then I thought about it and she was very much a part of the album, the confidence I had and everything. Aisling is a Gaelic name meaning dream, or vision; she's that, indeed."
Vision is a term one could use for Clannad as well, now in their 20th year of recording. It is gratifying to see them still touring and producing experimental and vital music. Banba should be in the record stores by the time you read this and another tour of America is planned for early 1994.
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