Round the House but Mind the Dresser

Rip It Up, Issue 3, 1 August 1977, Page 4

Round the House but Mind the Dresser

William Dart

It was sad to see empty seats at the Chieftain’s concert in Auckland late last month. These seven fine Irish traditional musicians gave us a fine earful of evocative Irishry with music that (for once) was not ruined by tons of distorting electrical hardware. With a range of instruments from fiddles and Uillean pipes to the bodhran, harp and timpan, the Chieftains did treat us to some rapturous sounds. At their most romantic, like the love theme from Barry Lyndon, the group produced a rippling translucent wall of sound a sort of Gaelic Phil Spector. When they get a beat going, their reels live up to titles like “Round the House but Mind the Dresser’’. There were some personal highlights. Paddy Moloney's inventive playing on the pipes and his strong leadership of the group; Derek Bell’s stunning harp work and the timing of the two fiddlers. Generally, their music took the form of collections or medleys of various traditional airs or dances. However, at centre of the concert was a more ambitious work, Bonaparte's Retreat.

This was an attempt to portray the rise and fall of that unfortunate Frenchman in music, a few sung verses of the ballad being sung by Kevin Conneff. I went to this concert with some mixed feelings, but I was won over completely. Within twenty-four hours I was on the record-shop-crawl looking for Chieftains' records. Don’t miss them next time.