Clannad Concert Tour Program
Clannad Concert Tour Program
C L A N N A D T O U R P R O G R A M M E 1 9 9 6
THE CLANNAD STORY - A PERSONAL EXPERIENCE
by Dermot Hayes
Once upon a time in a land called Eirann in the Western Atlantic where music flowed like life's blood ...
There is a memory that lingers, somewhere in a deep recess of the brain of a music that makes the spirit soar, a music that causes the spirit to seek and explore a primal home.
For those of us of a certain age, children of the '60's, the music of our ancestors was wrapped in Aran sweaters, black shawls and the accordion's wail. It was a music of ruddy, sweaty faced men and rosy cheeked colleens.
It was not, for us who knew the Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who and Bob Dylan, our music. It was not what we could listen to with comfort. Because we were a new generation who had begun to march to a different drum in our denim jeans and tie dyed teeshirts.
Slowly this detachment faded. Slowly we rediscovered the roots of our own primal rhythms. Slowly but surely we began to rediscover, resurrect and reclaim the music that had been chased from the crossroads, the music that had gone with the emigrants.
Some people, the braver spirits, even began to re-invent. Their explorations brought them to their own primal source.
I was always one of the passengers, never a pilot on these journeys. We used to encounter each other at Fleadh Ceol (Festivals of Music) around the country or in the back room of some smoky shebeen or at a three day festival of folk music in some rural backwater.
Clannad were among those pioneers, a family of musicians from County Donegal. They wore the uniforms of rock 'n' roll, rebellion, youth - long hair, denim, earrings. They played the music of the ages, familiar but so seductively different.
There was an upright bass, a harp, a flute, electric keyboards, guitars and mandolins. And there were harmonies, heavenly harmonies, echoes of the wind that blows across the purple heather, echoes of the seawaves that carried the boats on the ocean.
There were echoes too of rock 'n' roll and jazz. Their music was the music of ancients dressed up in the bold, bright colours of our brave new world.
Although I had heard their music on vinyl, my first live encounter with the music of Clannad was at the Ballysodare Folk Festival near the County Sligo village. There, surrounded by their peers and a backpacking army of pioneers, Clannad unfolded their magic for me for the first time and enveloped me in a warmly familiar blanket.
That year they had released Dulaman, an album of ancient songs and tunes from their native Donegal. It was the beginning of a new journey of exploration, a new journey of discovery.
It brought me back to Donegal, the county in the north west of Ireland that I had left in my youth. It was the home of my mother's family.
Clannad, who derive their name from the Chlann As Dobber, a Gaelic speaking family from the Atlantic coastal village of Gaoth Dobhair, were then two brothers, Ciaran and Pol Brennan and their sister Máire and their twin uncles, Pádraig and Noel Duggan.
Their home is steeped in a rich, cultural heritage of Gaelic song and dance. Like the ancient derivation of the word, dobhar, meaning water that is torrential and flowing, inspiration poured from their surroundings. To know the meaning and origin of the music of Clannad, Ciaran Brennan once said, you must understand their homeland of Donegal.
Clannad hailed from a corner of Ireland where an ancient and native culture had weathered the rigours of famine, emigration, religious and political persecution and often the harshest poverty, to persevere and flourish.
It's a place where landmarks like "the Bloody Foreland" do more than describe the violent thrashing of the broad North Atlantic waves. They evoke the ocean's remorseless savagery.
And Mount Errigal stands proud on the landscape, in inverted cone of multi-hued heathers, grey stone and mist. A Mount Figi for Donnegal and the Atlantic hinterland of Gaoth Dobhar (Gwee-dore), Errigal could be a home for a pagan Irish god.
Happily, the privations of history and nature have shaped their own match in not just heroic human endurance but an inventive, creative, energetic, poetic and rugged people.
Flanked by bog and mountain on one side and the vast Atlantic ocean on the other, the north west Donegal Gaelic speaking regions of Gaoth Dobhar, Rann na Feirste and Gorahork have kept and nurtured the ancient traditions of dance and music and song.
Isolation has also meant they make their own entertainment. Leo Brennan, their father was the leader of the Slieve Foy dance band, a show-band that could turn its hand to a popular tune just as comfortably as a celidh set of traditional dances.
The music never stopped. Leo and Bab Brennan opened Leo's bar and singing lounge twenty six years ago. Their children, nine of them, grew up surrounded and steeped in the music of their parents and their soil.
Formal musical training was matched by an intimate knowledge of the older, oral culture of song and music which they collected and recorded from people who sang in their own family bar or who lived in the local area.
Most significantly, Clannad are a family group. Vocal harmonies and the uncanny sense that the music they have always made has been somehow, organic in the way people who are close communicate almost telepathically. The Beach Boys and their influence on Ciaran Brennan should not be underestimated either.
For aside from the classical training and the natural infusion of the traditional culture, the airwaves crackled the hopped with the sound of rock 'n' roll and the counter culture.
Performing as a family in their family pub Clannad came together as a response to the contradictions of their own, new culture. Clannad have always done something different, never followed the flow.
The music that began to emerge was like no other music anyone else was making. It was traditional Irish music and songs but swathed in breathy harmonies backed by evocative, echoing, haunting melodies, elusive and soulful at once.
Clannad underwent a lengthy apprenticeship to shape the style and flavour of their own distinctive sound. Throughout the '70s, from the debut release of 1973's Clannad on the Phillips label (won by the young family group as the first prize in Slogadh, a national talent contest for school students in Ireland) through Clannad II and Dulaman, which they made for Gael Linn to 1978's Crann Ull and Fuaim, for Tara Records, they honed and shaped an original and distinctive sound.
Although the first resonance of the Clannad sound is there for the explorer in almost every stage of their development, it was with Magical Ring that Clannad found their own unique voice.
It was in Fuaim the musical director of a new three part Grenada tv thriller set in Northern Ireland heard that sound. The band were commissioned to write some music for the thriller's theme. The series was Harry's Game, based on a book set in Northern Ireland by Gerard Seymour.
The theme was included on the album, Magical Ring while the tune itself made it into the British top five singles' chart. A plethora of prestigious awards followed including a BAFTA nomination and an Ivor Novellow Award. Clannad had arrived.
In retrospect a subtle change had begun to bear fruit. Since Crann Ull and Fuaim the external musical influences of jazz and rock had begun to take more tangible shape in instrumentation and composition. It was a Scots' Gallic tune sung with those distinctive Clannad harmonies and synthesizers that attracted the Harry's Game musical director.
More television theme work followed. Clannad were invited to write music for an adventurous new series on the Robin Hood legend, Robin of Sherwood. The music was later condensed into an album, Legend.
Another Clannad career landmark, Legend was the first of their albums to be released in the US and it earned them a BAFTA (British Oscar) for the best soundtrack of the year.
Writing and composing their own material became the stepping stone for songwriting. Their next album, Macalla, was recorded in the mid '80's with producer Steve Nye. It featured a duet between Maire and Bono of U2 called "In A Lifetime".
Their next project can be seen in retrospect as the album that brought all of their influences together in one seamless product. At the time of its release, Sirius was seen as a radical change for Clannad.
It was an album of songs, many of them written with English lyrics about modern themes of ecology and the environment. Recorded in Wales and London, it was mixed to dramatic effect in Los Angeles.
Sirius featured an impressive line up of backing musicians. It was coproduced by Russ Kunkel and Greg Ladanyi and featured Bruce Hornsby, Steve Perry, J.D. Souther, Russ Kunkel, Robbie Blunt, Phillip Donnely, Mel Collins and Paddy Keenan.
Received with critical apprehension, Sirius was stoutly defended by the band as a change, a bold statement of intent. The following year they embarked on their first world tour and within a year the album had become their best selling work to date.
More on tv and film work ensued. The band recorded music for Atlantic Realm, a BBC tv natural series, which was released by BBC Records in 1989. They also began work on the music for animated feature film, The Angel and The Soldier Boy.
It was the release of Pastpresent in 1989 that crystallised the developments of the decade, consolidated the band and its sound and opened a window for the '90's.
Clannad's music, forever characterised as ethereal, dreamlike, mystical and evocative could be seen to its roots and a rich lore of tradition and knowledge. It was visual music too.
There were lineup changes. Pol left the band before the release of Pastpresent to pursue some solo goals particularly within WOMAD. Enya, a younger sister, had joined the band for two of the earlier albums but had since left to pursue her own musical direction.
Pastpresent was an inspired cocktail of the band's better known television and film theme work and their lesser known studio compositions. It had the added bonus of reaffirming the band's own confidence in their true musical direction.
The next big studio album, Anam, released in 1992 brought with it even more dramatic developments. Included in the tracklisting was "Theme From Harry's Game" which had been included in the new Harrison Ford thriller, Patriot Games.
Its selection as a theme for a nationwide Volkswagen tv campaign in the United States brought even more dramatic results. People began jamming the Volkswagen information line to find out about the music. The song went on to win the Billboard "World Music Song of the Year" accolade.
Banba followed soon after to rave reviews and the band's first Grammy nomination. The album jogged comfortably to the number one spot in the World Music Chart while yet another classic Clannad theme tune, "I Will Find You: The Love Theme from The Last of the Mohicans" secured extensive airplay for the record.
The latest Clannad album, Lore, opens with the magnificent Croi Croga (Braveheart) which was written as a theme tune for the film but which, unfortunately, never made it onto the soundtrack. Its inclusion as the first track on an album though sets the scene for what might be, arguably, Clannad's most complete album to date.
It includes all signature Clannad features of vocal harmonies, haunting melodies, mellifluous musical patterns woven into an ethereal, misty and mystical cloudscape. It's what has always been true of Clannad's music: you don't listen to it, you live in it.
It is part of everyone's memory and imagination. It creates pictures and stories, fashioned by your dreams and lived by your hopes. It is the lore of ages, timeless and storied. It is the music of the realm of dreams. Enjoy.
Clannad are:
Ciaran Brennan: Vocals, Bass Keyboards
Noel Duggan: Guitar, Vocals
Máire Brennan: Vocals, Keyboards, Harp
Padraig Duggan: Mandolin, Guitar, Vocals
Guest musicians:
Mel Collins: Saxophones
Ian Parker: Keyboards
Vinny Kilduff: Uillean Pipes, Mandolin
Ray Fean: Drums
Ian Melrose: Electric and Acoustic Guitars
Deirdre Brennan: Backing Vocals