Music

How Clannad made Theme from Harry’s Game


Pól Brennan, singer-songwriter

The Brennan and Duggan families were all born in the townland of Dobhar [Dore] in Donegal. The two Duggans were my mother’s younger brothers and contemporaries of ours. We formed the band in 1970 and called ourselves Clann as Dobhar, which is Gaelic for Family from Dore. A few years later, we just picked the “a” and the “d” and became Clannad. Gaelic was our traditional language, but was very marginalised back then. People told us we wouldn’t get anywhere singing in that language.

In 1982, Yorkshire TV approached us for some music for a drama series called Harry’s Game, based on Gerald Seymour’s 1975 novel set during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. He, the head of music and the producer had all heard a Scottish-Gaelic song on our previous album and came over to Dublin to tell us about their project.

Ciarán [Brennan, songwriter] and Moya came over, and we wrote Harry’s Game in my house in just a week. We wanted something more ethereal than the grim reality of life in Northern Ireland depicted in the series, so wrote a hymn to the Troubles. It was a difficult time for us because Enya [Brennan] had just left along with our manager/producer, Nicky Ryan, to pursue a solo career. We’d just started using electronics and wrote the song on a Prophet 5 synth. We had the lyrics, harmonies and melody in a couple of hours, then came back the following evening and recorded a demo on a little cassette recorder. Yorkshire TV loved it.

Before Harry’s Game aired over three nights, we went to a private press showing in London to around 100 people. At the end of the first hour-long episode, the house lights came up, the song played and nobody reacted. I thought, “That’s that.” After the second hour, there were less people talking over the music. The third episode was devastating. Both main characters died. Then the music came on. Not one person stood up, and the music just played out. That’s when we knew the song had touched a nerve.

Moya Brennan, singer

I didn’t think I had much of a voice. I would have loved to have been a rock’n’roller, but gradually I realised that I had a different timbre and an ethereal feel, which is very much part of the Clannad sound. Whenever people ask where that sound comes from I say, “Go to Donegal. You’ll feel the earthiness and the atmosphere.”

The Irish Gaelic lyrics for Theme from Harry’s Game derived from a saying in a book of old Irish proverbs that our grandfather had given Ciarán: “Everything that is and will be, will cease to be. The moon and the stars, youth and beauty.” There’s no solution to war, just people killing each other. We were never a political band, but the sentiment that all things must pass inspired the lyrics.

The chorus, “Fol lol the doh, fol the day, fol the doh fol the day,” comes from ancient Irish “mouth-music”. It was common in the reels and jigs world, but Ciarán thought it would be good to slow it down. Some people thought I was singing, “On the dole, all day.” Yorkshire TV sent over an engineer, Richard Dodd, who’d worked on 10cc’s I’m Not in Love and introduced us to the idea of layering the vocals. Ciarán and I sang looking right at each other. We could feel the emotion of the song. I think we used the second take, and layered it on top of that.

There were only three TV channels back then, so we knew people would watch Harry’s Game. Noel Edmonds played the song on Radio 1 for the first time and then after the next song he said: “We’ve been inundated with people asking, ‘What was that?’” So he played it again. Bono said that when he first heard it in a car, he had to pull over. Then because of the Troubles it was taken off the radio for a day in case it was offensive, so we sent them the translation and they played it again.

One day, we were in a Transit van in Germany; the next we were being picked up in a limo to do Top of the Pops and taking pictures of ourselves jumping in and out. It was unreal for a small Irish folk band from Donegal. I was the first female Irish folk singer to break abroad. People started calling me the First Lady of Celtic Music, a title I’m really proud of.



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