![]() A decade later it would reappear in the soundtrack of the 1992 thriller Patriot Games starring Harrison Ford and during a Volkswagen car advert.īono was so moved by the song on first listen that he parked by the roadside to absorb the moment. The synthesisers and ambient mood of the track sung in Irish was an unlikely hit. With only three terrestrial channels and the series being screened over three consecutive nights Harry's Game set in motion a zeitgeist moment for the song which would become a top-five hit in Britain and Ireland. "It then started to be played all over the UK, it was taken off the radio for a day until they got a transcription of the lyrics because it was at the height of the Troubles." The song just captures a moment in time, it wasn't deliberate, we probably wouldn't have sung it in Irish if we knew we were going to be on Top of the Pops. Ciarán opened an old book of my grandfather's ( Proverbs from Connacht) and there was a line, 'Everything that is and was will cease to be, the moon and the stars, and youth and beauty.' We took the theme of sadness and loss of life. "I went to Derry for ballet lessons and people would come to visit from the north you never thought about what side people were on but suddenly certain friends didn't come over any more. ![]() ![]() "We were never political, for us it was always culture, Donegal is quite separate from the rest of Ireland and we were very conscious of that but you were still very close to it. "When they approached us we were unsure what it was about, it was quite brutal but we liked that it was about two guys on opposite sides that both die in the end, no-one wins, it was very poignant," says Brennan. Instead a new track was suggested that was sung in Irish utilising the band's distinctive harmonies. Based on Gerald Seymour's 1975 novel Crossfire, the author and producers requested to use their version of the Scottish song Mhórag's na Horo Gheallaidh. It was while on tour with luminaries including The Dubliners, The Fureys and The Chieftains that Brennan would become known as the 'First Lady of Celtic Music' after tourists visiting her father's pub signed Clannad for a 23 city tour of Germany, one of the band's early strongholds.Ī decade later Clannad's fortunes would shift irreversibly after they recorded the theme for Harry's Game, a British mini-series about the Troubles. My mother was a music teacher and she would teach us the songs of old but we also would blend the 1960s pop harmonies of The Beach Boys." "We would delve into the harmonies that all our grandparents had taught us. "It was all about the singing," adds Brennan, who turns 70 this year.
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