Piping Hot and Cool

Sean Potts and Sean Keane work for the Irish post office. Martin Fay is a purchasing agent for a Dublin electronics company. Paddy Moloney is an administrator. Derek Bell has been an orchestral harp player for ten years. Peadar Mercier is a construction foreman and the father of ten children. Michael Tubridy is a consulting engineer. They are, in short, about as average a bunch as any country can produce and not the usual candidates for pop stardom. But when they sit down together to play, they are something else again: the Chieftains, Ireland's leading folk band.

No Lullabies. Their music is climbing the pop charts in England, which is surprising -- not because they are Irish, but because they sing no songs and in stead spin out purified instrumentals of the reel, jig, slide, Kerry polka and other such traditional forms. On their last two visits to London, they packed Al bert Hall. Midway through a three- week American tour in November, they sold out Avery Fisher Hall at New York City's Lincoln Center, where young Irish-Americans danced jubilantly in the aisles. Last week they were back in Manhattan to highlight an all-Irish program at Carnegie Hall. They are also getting transatlantic exposure through their soundtrack performances for Stanley Kubrick's new film, Barry Lyndon (TIME cover, Dec. 15). After 15 years of semiprofessional status, the Chieftains seem to have arrived.

"We thought we'd let things build up," says Moloney, the group's leader.

And they have. Britain's foremost pop paper, Melody Maker, has named the Chieftains not just the folk group of 1975, but the Group of the Year -- "for making unfashionable music fashionable." Actually, what the Chieftains play derives from music that has been fashionable in Ireland for centuries and comes as close as anything to being the classical music of Eire.

It is not the lullabies of a John McCormack or the beery ballads of the Clancy Brothers. "No Mother Machree and all that sort of garbage," says Moloney. As can be heard on their new LP, Chieftains 5 (Island Records), or the Barry Lyndon sound-track album (Warner Bros.), the Chieftains' music consists of dances and airs played on tin whistles (surprisingly debonair in sound), bones (animal), the bodhran (a goatskin drum), fiddles, harps, an oboe and, most glorious of all, the Irish bagpipes, more precisely known as the uilleann (elbow) pipes. Unlike Scottish bagpipes, which are breath-blown, the Irish pipes are pumped by a bellows under the right arm of the player, who must be able to finger and pump at the same time.

The music of the Chieftains is an amalgam of two distinct Irish traditions: the single-voiced, unaccompanied pipe tunes of the folk people, and the richer, harmonized rustle of the Irish harp. It is the careful blending of the two that gives the Chieftains their special sound. Superficially, that sound seems fairly unsophisticated, resembling something halfway between a Renaissance dance ensemble and a bluegrass band. Bluegrass, of course, owes much to British folk music.

Sheer, unabashed virtuosity is the Chieftains' strongest selling point, whether they are piping hot or cool. When they take off together on a madcap reel or jig, the effect is electrifying. Similarly, a tin-whistle solo by Potts or a melancholy lament on the pipes by Moloney can create the tenderest of moments. Up on stage, the Chieftains look less like a band than a group of old friends taking some Saturday-night relaxation in a Dublin pub, which indeed they used to do in their early years. They wander out haphazardly in sweaters, odd jackets and tweed pants, sit in a big semicircle, tap their feet and boast to the audience that Irish music is "the best in the world."

They know that their act lacks polish, and they do not care a whit. The music is what counts. Anything else would be mere show business. Says Moloney: "We can go back to our jobs any time. We know exactly what we want and we're not going to do it any other way." The pop world may just not have seen the Chieftains' like before.

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