Clannad singer and guitarist Moya Brennan dies at the age of 73 | music

Moya Brennan, lead singer of Irish folk band Clannad, has died at the age of 73.

In her final years, Brennan suffered from pulmonary fibrosis and faced the possibility of a double lung transplant. A statement issued by her family said that she died peacefully in the company of her loved ones in her native County Donegal.

Founded in 1970, Clannad has been credited with pioneering Celtic music. Brennan has received praise from artists including U2’s Bono, with whom she later duet, and the Grammy and Emmy Award-winning singer and guitarist has appeared on the soundtracks of major films including Titanic and King Arthur.

Mair Philomena née Braunwyn was born on 4 August 1952 in Dublin, the eldest of nine children. It was a musical family: the siblings would sing to packed crowds in the family pub – despite the local belief that no one wanted to see music in such venues – and Brennan pursued her musical education at the Royal Irish Academy of Music in Dublin.

Clannad was formed by Brennan and her brothers Paul and Ciarán along with their mother’s twin brothers, Noel and Padraig O’Duggan. Having been raised on the combination of traditional folk melody and pop harmonies of acts such as the Beach Boys, they made their live debut at the Slugad Youth Festival in 1970 and won the festival’s prize, which included a record contract with Polydor that the band members were too young to sign.

Clannad made its name thanks to its defiant embrace of the Irish language. “They took it as poor man’s language,” Brennan told the Irish News in 2022. Singing it was “as if we were letting them down somehow, but we fell in love with the Gaelic tunes and Irish was my first language.”

Their commercial breakthrough came in 1983 with the release of their seventh album, Magical Ring, and its hit single “Theme from Harry’s Game”, the soundtrack to a TV drama about the Troubles. It reached number five in the UK Top 40 and made it the first act to be performed in the Irish language on Top of the Pops. Its success led to them doing the soundtrack to the 1984 ITV series Robin of Sherwood, which in turn made them the first Irish band to win a BAFTA.

The band’s lineup would change over the decades: Brennan’s sister, Eithne née Braunwyn, played with the group in the early 1980s, before leaving to pursue a hugely successful solo career as Enya; Meanwhile Brennan became known as the “First Lady of Celtic Music”. Their combined career made them the most commercially popular music family in Ireland.

In her later years, Brennan was open about the toll it took on traveling to England to have an abortion in 1972. She began using alcohol, cannabis and cocaine, and from 1985 was married for 18 months to fellow musician Pat Farrell. In 1987, she had a miscarriage and found God. That year, she also had a brief relationship with U2’s Adam Clayton, before meeting British photographer Tim Jarvis, whom she married in 1990, an event she said curbed her drug use for good.

Brennan released a popular solo album, Máire, in 1992, beginning a solo career that lasted until 2024, when she released the album Voices & Harps IV with Cormac de Barra. She is also known for her charitable work, working with Christian Blind Mission Ireland in countries such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, Brazil and Tanzania. She also worked to benefit those affected by drug and alcohol addiction.

In 2002, she officially began using the name Moya Brennan, instead of Mair Philomena née Braunwyn, and in 2009 she changed her name by deed poll.

Over the course of her career, she has collaborated with artists including Shane MacGowan, Robert Plant, Bruce Hornsby, The Doobie Brothers and Ronan Keating.

Brennan is survived by Jarvis and their two children. In 2022, she credited her Christian faith with helping her endure, including performing through her lung condition. “I know God is with me. When we do things on our own, we feel pressure. I’m not saying I did it perfectly, we all fall, but that’s where my strength comes from.”