Bewitching Music and the Brendan Voyage
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What personal experiences shaped the speaker's love for Clannad?
Welcome to the podcast version of Sunday Masalini, which differs from the radio version for rights reasons. We hope you enjoy the programme.
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. My intense fascination with cars was maybe less of a secret. Our car at the time, red Toyota Corolla OIJ 1763, if you need to know, was in the garage for a couple of weeks and we got the lend of this silver blue Renault 9. Now, in the annals of motoring history, the Renault 9 merits hardly a mention. It was an unremarkably boxy French four-door saloon with skinny tyres. But in the two weeks we had it, it became a wonderland because it had two very important features. One was the novel monotrace seats. See, I told you I was a car nerd. The front seat was mounted on a single rail that ran down the middle, rather than the traditional two rails on each side of the seat, so passengers in the back had more room to put their feet.
A brilliant idea, if you've a clown in the back seat. But the other feature, the one that really lit up my life, was the built-in cassette player. In our Corolla, you had an AM-FM radio with six preset buttons that physically shifted the little dial to the station you wanted. But in this French saloon, with its sumptuously soft seats, I could put a cassette into the slot, fast forward or rewind, to my heart's content, and listen to whatever I wanted. The temporary lend of this reno coincided with me getting the latest Clannad album, Foim, on cassette. The album was a collection of songs, as Gaelic agus a Merle, traditional songs, new songs, magically arranged with synthesisers and clarinet, drums, electric guitar, all wrapped up in pure Donegal Irish.
It was a heady mix. I was captivated by this album as a teenager growing up in Urie and I spent my evenings sitting in the driver's seat of the Renault 9 in the drive of 23 Ashgrove Avenue with foam on a loop, singing along in the half dark and reading furiously through the words. Impossibly beautiful Donegal phrases, dhifas and lofas, like in the song Burra in Fosta, about the dangers of marrying for money, not love, with a funky synth riff and a saxophone in there as well, for good measure. Later that same year, Clannad became the first group to sing a song, Ask Gaelic, on Top of the Pops, and I can remember exactly where it was when I heard it announced. In my final year of school, I entered a competition for songs in Irish called Molinoige and our group came second.
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