Eileen Heron

Camp on Anogh wasn't really the Gaeltacht.

It was a summer Irish college in O'Meath, so too close to home in Newry to represent true freedom and independence.

But when you're 10 or 11, beginning of the 1980s, it was like Gaeltacht for beginners.

And if you behaved yourself, you might get to the real thing next year.

It was in Campanenog that somebody casually introduced me to a band whose music would become a soundtrack to my life.

The band was Clannad and the album was a live recording of a concert in Switzerland in 1978.

The artwork on the cover was extraordinary.

All white with Clannad spelt out in red Celtic lettering.

And then I heard the sound.

Their version of the song Nílse na Lá lasted a whopping ten minutes and it featured these mad solos on flute and double bass before it all came back together again for the last verse.

I didn't really know what jazz was.

I had no musical reference point for whatever they were doing but I was in.

After we came home from camping in Ogh that year, I got a copy of the LP, a sheet of paper, and traced the beautiful logo and copied it straight onto my school bag.

And while other bags in the class celebrated Led Zeppelin and U2 and Joy Division, my blue canvas school rucksack proudly read, Clannad.

This love of Clannad bubbled along quietly in those pre-social media days.

There was a fan club whose address I remember was Sir John Rogerson's Quay in Dublin.

But I mean, I never wrote to them.

I didn't know anybody else who shared my obsession.

I never dreamt I'd one day go to hear them in concert.

I just listened to the album, learned all the songs and then saved up and bought another cassette or another LP as I could.