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Clannad: The Spirit of Ireland
| Article
# : |
11225 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1993 |
1,780 Words |
| Author
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William Ruhlmann
William Ruhlmann is a critic based in New York. His seventh
book, The Rolling Stones, was published last September. |
It is the evening of June 14 at the 2,500-seat Beacon Theatre on Manhattan's Upper West Side, and there are all the indications of new pop music success. The "buzz" is palpable--from the scalpers who stand outside selling tickets well over face value to the anticipation of the crowd inside. When the evening's stars hit the stage, there's an ovation, and late in their set, when they launch into their hit song, the evening reaches its peak.
The hot band onstage is Clannad, whose album Anam is high on the pop charts and has sold upwards of four hundred thousand copies, well on its way to "gold" status (half a million), the music industry's first marker of mass popularity. "Harry's Game," their hit, is all over television and is the theme song for a recent successful movie.
But that's where the similarity to a typical pop breakthrough ends. In fact, Clannad isn't some new rap act from the Bronx or heavy metal outfit from the suburbs. More than twenty years on stage, Clannad is an Irish family band (clannad means "family" in the ancient Irish language of Gaelic). In its early years, the group performed mostly traditional Irish folk music, but it has gradually evolved a style that is sometimes called "new age," sometimes "world music," combining elements of folk, pop, panoramic instrumental, and choral music into a new hybrid. And the story of their recent success is one of the most unusual in the annals of pop, illustrating the ways in which unconventional music can reach the marketplace outside the rigid confines of radio and typical promotion.
For one thing, there's that hit. "Harry's Game," though everyone in the Beacon knows it well, is not your typical pop song. You won't find it on Top 40 radio or in the singles charts. Instead, it reached its cult status as the background music to a TV commercial. A haunting Gaelic lament originally written in 1982 for a British TV thriller, the tune was picked up for another thriller, last year's film Patriot Games, and then by Volkswagen, which used a snippet of it in a thirty-second ad starting last December. The commercial featured an 800 number viewers could call for information about Volkswagen's new Passat, but all anyone wanted to know was, what was that music?
Clannad is now a quartet consisting of lead singer Maire (pronounced Moya) Brennan, her brother Ciaran (pronounced Keeron), and their twin uncles Padraig (pronounced Poric) and Noel Duggan. The band evolved out of family performances of traditional Irish music at a pub run by Leo Brennan, Ciaran and Maire's father, in Donegal in
...
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