Clannad Turas 1980

Returning to Germany in January 1980 after a 36 shows long tour through the United States of America, the longest tour for an Irish band at the time; the band was full of energy as well as enthusiasm and was warmly welcomed by the Bremen crowd. This concert was never released before and contains some songs that never found a home on any studio album. It’s this special kind of tight harmonies and pure natural ease only a strong family connection can lend. You can hear this magic in every song they performed on that night.
‘Turas 1980 Presents Traditional Irish music in an intimate and virtuosic but free flowing way with all the rain-soaked pastoralism you would expect. Bono, rarely afraid of over egging the pudding, says Clannad “distilled the rugged landscape and melancholic sky of their beloved Donegal into a music that could not be contained on just one island”. Yet, as you listen to a lamenting take on Yeats’s Down By The Salley Gardens or Moya bringing surprising jauntiness to Two Sisters, a ballad about a murder, you realise the man from
U2 has a point. Clannad captured in music the spirit of the Irish countryside better than anyone’ - The Times