Dónal Lunny, who has died of cancer aged 79, was a multi-instrumentalist in three of the most influential folk bands of the late 20th century: Planxty, the Bothy Band and Moving Hearts. He played the guitar, keyboards and bodhrán, but he is best remembered for popularising the bouzouki in Irish traditional music. The round-bodied bouzouki from Greece was adapted by Lunny, resulting in a flat-backed instrument with a shorter neck known as the Irish bouzouki.

Lunny often worked in collaboration with the singer and songwriter Christy Moore and the musician Andy Irvine. In all the bands with which he was associated, Lunny played a vital role in arranging the music, being instinctively drawn to developing new harmonic and rhythmic structures. He produced many Irish music albums, also working with artists including Elvis Costello, Kate Bush, Sinéad O’Connor and Mark Knopfler. As a composer, he wrote and arranged the music for films, documentaries and television programmes. In 1991, he was the musical director of the joint BBC and RTÉ television series Bringing It All Back Home, which won an Emmy.

Born in Tullamore, County Offaly, Dónal was the fifth of nine children of Mary (nee Rogers), a teacher, and Frank Lunny, an engineer. The family moved to Newbridge, County Kildare, when Dónal was five and he attended Newbridge college before studying at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin. He played drums in a pop band, the Cyclones, at school, and then, alongside his brother Frank and schoolfriend Moore, Dónal played the guitar in a band called Rakes of Kildare. In Dublin he played in the Parnell Folk; with the band Emmet Spiceland he even had a No 1 hit, Mary from Dungloe, in 1968.

Lunny was introduced to the bouzouki by Irvine, who brought one back from his European travels in 1970. Together they formed a duo in Dublin but were soon recruited, along with the uilleann piper Liam O’Flynn, by Moore to play on his groundbreaking album Prosperous (1971). The four musicians soon decided to form Planxty.

Planxty took the Chieftains’ concept of group instrumental playing to a new level with different instrumentation, combining it with traditional and new songs, in contrast to the ballad groups, such as the Clancy Brothers, who relied mainly on guitar and banjo. Planxty’s first gigs were as support for Donovan. An eponymous album in 1973 was followed by The Well Below the Valley in the same year. Moore recently reflected that Planxty would not have succeeded without “the genius and creativity of Dónal”.

Despite Planxty’s immediate success, Lunny left the band in 1973, only to return for a reunion of the four original members in 1979. Extensive touring, both in Ireland and internationally, followed. In 1981 they played the interval music at the Eurovision song contest in Dublin, as composed by Bill Whelan and Lunny. Called Timedance, this was the original idea behind Whelan’s later hit show Riverdance, though this was composed without Lunny. Planxty albums included After the Break (1979) and Words and Music (1983), after which the band split up.

Wishing to develop his music in new directions, Lunny joined the Bothy Band in 1975. The band had a rock music vibe, in part created by the clavinet, a type of electric keyboard, played by Tríona Ní Dhomhnaill. The solid traditional music sound came from Paddy Keenan on pipes, Tommy Peoples on fiddle and Matt Molloy on flute. The band’s distinctive percussive, rhythmic sound was created by Lunny on bouzouki and Triona’s brother Mícheál Ó Domhnaill on guitar. They recorded on the Mulligan record label, newly created by Lunny who, by this time, was becoming well known as a record producer. The Bothy Band enjoyed great success but, as Lunny said, they “ran out of energy”; they split up in 1979.

After the Planxty reunion, Moore and Lunny formed Moving Hearts in 1981. Lunny wanted to further explore the use of bass and percussion alongside his rhythmic and percussive style on the bouzouki, and Moore had songs that did not suit the Planxty sound. Moving Hearts featured a rock/jazz drummer, a rock guitarist and a saxophonist as well as the uilleann piper Davy Spillane. The combination of contemporary sounds and styles plus Moore’s political songs about Northern Ireland and the hunger strikes further pushed the boundaries. After several changes of personnel, the band split up in 1984.

Mozaik was Lunny’s next band: an ambitious collaboration between Lunny, Irvine, the Hungarian singer Márta Sebestyén, the Scots singer Dougie MacLean and the uilleann piper Declan Masterson. The band went into abeyance after several tours but returned in 2002 with different musicians alongside Lunny and Irvine, including the Bulgarian-born Nikola Parov. They toured internationally and made three albums, the most recent in 2019.

There were other collaborations, many short-lived because of the difficulties of scheduling busy musicians. There were tours with Irvine and Paul Brady, a 1998 album and tour titled Coolfin, and the Atlantic Arc Orchestra, an ensemble of European artists from countries touching the Atlantic. The band Usher’s Island involved two generations of musicians, and there was a trio with Zoë Conway and Máirtín O’Connor, with whom Lunny performed in August this year.

In 1996, Lunny produced an album, Common Ground, for EMI, which featured mainly Irish traditional songs sung by himself and a range of performers including Bono, Sinéad O’Connor, Costello and Bush, the last of whom sang a song in Gaelic that she learned phonetically. In the same year, Lunny played on Knopfler’s album Golden Heart.

In 2018, Lunny received a lifetime achievement award at the BBC Radio 2 folk awards, and in 2025 a similar award at the RTÉ Radio 1 folk awards, presented by Moore, who also read the citation. In August this year, RTÉ broadcast a biographical documentary film, In Time: Dónal Lunny.

Lunny was first married to Judy Slott, with whom he had a son, Oisin. With Julia Buthe he had a daughter, Cora Venus, and with Sinéad O’Connor he had a son, Shane, who died in 2022. With his second wife, Hideko Itami, Dónal had a daughter, Sora. Both marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by his partner Una O’Boyle, and by Oisin, Cora Venus and Sora.

• Dónal Lunny, folk musician, born 10 March 1947; died 23 October 2026