Moya Brennan: the first lady of Celtic music

It was like nothing your average Top of The Pops fan had heard before.

Anyone watching the BBC's Thursday evening rundown of the new UK singles chart in mid-November 1982 would have been treated to a very fine Top 10 featuring Tears For Fears, The Human League and Dionne Warwick but there, nestled at No 5, was a song that seemed like it had arrived from a different age altogether.

It was Donegal family band Clannad with their track Theme from Harry's Game , the ethereal and epic lead music of a TV drama of the same name about the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

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It narrowly missed the top spot in the Irish charts but it seemed to arrive by osmosis and sounded like it had been around forever.

Amid a pop parade which had taken a turn to the determinedly modern and even futuristic, Theme from Harry’s Game was unique and spellbinding.

It is still the only British hit single ever to have been sung entirely in Irish.

It won an Ivor Novello award, it appeared in several US movies, and almost inevitably it was used in a car ad.

Clannad has already been around for more than a decade by the time they scored their biggest hit but Harry’s Game propelled them to global success.

And they were much more of a radical proposition than people realised - blending Irish traditional songs from Donegal with swirling New Age atmospherics and harmonies inspired by The Beach Boys and The Mamas & The Papas.

Singer, songwriter and harpist Moya Brennan, who had died aged 73 , was the voice and face of the family band from Gaoth Dobhair in the Donegal Gaeltacht.

She achieved a lot over her long and prolific career, releasing over 25 albums both with Clannad and as a solo artist, with her most recent, Voices & Harps IV, arriving in 2024.

She won a Grammy, a Bafta, and was recognised with a lifetime achievement honour at RTE Folk Awards.

She sang for the Pope and duetted with Bono .

The eldest of nine children, Máire Uí Bhraonáin was born in 1952 into a hugely musical family headed by musician parents Máire (Baba) and Leo in the remote parish of Dore in Gweedore.

Moya played the harp and sang with her brothers, Pól and Ciarán, and later her younger sister Eithne (who went on to have a zillion-selling career as Enya) and their uncles, Noel and Pádraig Duggan.

Then called Clann as Dobhar, they made their live debut in 1970 when they made a last minute entry to a singing competition during the Slógadh Youth Festival in Letterkenny, which they won.

They were soon signed to Phillips Records Ireland and a string of albums - Clannad (1973) Clannad 2 (1974) Dúlamán (1976) Crann Úll (1980) and Fuaim (1982) - sang in both English and Irish were to follow and they began to attract a bigger audience outside Ireland.

Use of synthesizers and electric guitar gave the band a contemporary edge but at their core, they always remained a trad band.

By the time Harry’s Game rolled around in 1982, Clannad were a highly successful recording and touring act but the song marked a musical departure for Moya, Ciarán, and Pól.

With a Prophet-5 synthesizer at its centre, the track featured over 100 multi-tracked vocals, the very approach Enya would go on to employ.

Clannad went on to more success and a full embrace of a more commercial pop sound was to follow on albums like The Magical Ring , Macella , and Sirius .

Moya also enjoyed a successful solo career and released 15 albums of her own.

A deeply spiritual woman, she always took success in her stride and the unassuming and graceful singer might even have been a little bemused by the trappings of fame.

As she ruefully observed in an interview on The Tommy Tiernan Show in 2020, "You weren't warned of everything that was out there as far as drugs and rock `n’ roll, and whatever."
Her music travelled the world and took Irish trad and folk music to a whole new audience but it also remained deeply rooted and ingrained in Donegal.

Speaking to John Creedon on RTÉ about the local landscape of had influenced her and Clannad, she said, "I think we allowed the atmosphere of the countryside and the mountains and everything to be part of our music, without really realising.

Especially the Clannad sound.

"When people would say to me where did you get the Clannad sound and I’d say go to Donegal.

It’s that earthiness and that kind of ethereal atmosphere and feel and space and everything.

The royalty of the mountains is just exquisite."
Her grieving family led the many tributes to the singer today, with her brothers Pól and Ciarán speaking for everyone when they said, "Her voice was the signature sound of Clannad and will live on forever."