Ahead of the worldwide release of the highly anticipated book ‘Real to Reel: Garech Browne & Claddagh Records‘, on Friday, 29th September (pre-order it here), comes an animated video in honour of Garech Browne, ‘One Night in Luggala‘.
This stunning, playful animated video and an original poem is set to music by Paddy Moloney & Sean Potts, ‘Port na bPucaí’, from their album Tin Whistles (Claddagh Records, 1974).
As mentioned in our previous post relating to Garech Browne and Real to Reel: Garech Browne & Claddagh Records, Browne had many personas, and there are many tales of eccentricity, wealth, lavish parties and countless famous friends – Mick Jagger, Brendan Behan, Kofi Annan, Brian Jones, Sean Connery, Pierce Brosnan, Seamus Ennis, Picasso, Samuel Beckett, Anita Pallenberg and Lucian Freud, to name just a few.
At his Luggala country estate in County Wicklow, gifted to him by his mother, Oonagh Guinness – one of the famous ‘Golden Guinness Girls’ – he hosted parties that became legendary.
But for those who knew him best, Garech Browne was, first and foremost, one of the greatest archivists of Irish culture of all time. In establishing Claddagh Records in 1959, he made it his life’s work to preserve Ireland’s musical and spoken-word culture against the backdrop of an emerging pop-culture scene in the UK and further afield.
Author James Morrissey writes: “Garech Browne knew what he wanted to achieve with Claddagh, namely, the preservation of Irish traditional music, song and spoken word. He wanted the recordings to be simple and made in a manner that was sympathetic to the roots of the Irish tradition. It was a goal that was perceived as audacious by some and a folly by others, but what others thought bothered Garech little”.
The animation is by Bárbara Oliveira & Cian Hughes, the team behind the videos that accompanied Claddagh Records’ chart-leading 2022 release Patrick Kavanagh… Almost Everything.
Real to Reel: Garech Browne & Claddagh Records is released on Friday, 29th September – a new large-format hardback book together with a vinyl box set celebrating the life of Guinness heir Garech Browne and his quest to preserve Ireland’s musical and spoken-word heritage with Claddagh Records.
Listen to our recent Claddagh Records special Folk Show: