The Chieftains (from left) Kevin Conneff, Paddy Moloney and Matt Molloy.
St. Patrick’s Day comes early to Madison this year, and revelers should celebrate with a bit of song in their hearts and some dance in their steps.
The Chieftains, Ireland’s esteemed musical ambassadors, make a March 3 stop at Overture Center as part of their Irish Goodbye Tour. Prior to their 7:30 p.m. Overture Hall performance, local Irish band The Kissers will fire up the crowd with a free 6 p.m. set on Overture’s atrium stage. For Kissers cofounder and mandolin player Kevin Youngs, proximity to his musical idols is a dream come true.
“When it comes to our influences, The Chieftains are at the top,” says Youngs. “This has always been a bucket list thing for me. Whenever I need to learn a new Irish tune, I turn to The Chieftains first.”
The Chieftains perhaps best embody Irish music. As a folk genre handed down through families and generations, it’s tradition that underscores Irish music today, says Paddy Moloney, who founded The Chieftains in Dublin in 1962. The music has evolved over time but has never lost connection with its roots.
“It’s the music that you inherit, that inhabits your feelings and your thoughts,” says Moloney, now 81. “It’s part of my whole being. I could never do without it.”
Moloney grew up in a home in Ireland’s Midlands where songs, stories and music prevailed. His mother bought him a tin whistle at age 6 and, after winning five youth competitions, he traded his whistle for a set of uilleann pipes, an Irish bagpipe he operates with a bellows tucked under his right arm. The instrument allows him to play a full chromatic scale, unlike traditional bagpipes, which are limited to just nine notes.
“They totally fascinated me when I was growing up, and I finally said, ‘I have to get me a set o’ pipes,’” Moloney says. “People who have never heard them are still amazed at the sounds they make.”
The pipes are responsible for the familiar drone in Irish ballads, jigs and reels, and are usually augmented by harp, fiddle, flute and a variety of stringed instruments. Moloney and members Matt Molloy on flute and vocalist Kevin Conneff on bodhrán — a flat, handheld Irish drum — are joined on this tour by multiple backup musicians, vocalists and dancers.
Throughout the band’s 58 years of existence, The Chieftains have played for popes and queens, and performed with rock, pop and country royalty. They played with The Rolling Stones on the 1995 album The Long Black Veil. And they were present for a pivotal moment in rock history: “We were in the studio with Paul McCartney in 1980 when word came in that John Lennon had been shot,” Moloney says. “It was very sad.”
Youngs grew up listening to a lot of Chieftains albums in his Whitewater home. His father was a classical music professor at UW-Whitewater who taught his son piano at age 4, but Irish music was part of his mother’s lineage.
“I remember St. Patrick’s Day starting early each year with my mother blasting The Chieftains and The Irish Rovers on the stereo,” Youngs says. The Irish influence stayed with him right up to his 23rd birthday, when he and Kissers cofounder Ken Fitzsimmons came up with the idea for the band while sharing a bottle of scotch.
“We’d been listening to Irish punk band The Pogues,” says Youngs, “and toward the end of the bottle decided to start a Pogues cover band.” The Kissers began as a side project for musicians from Little Blue Crunchy Things, of which Fitzsimmons was a member. They were rock musicians that decided to become an Irish band, Youngs adds.
Moloney chuckles when I share The Kissers’ origin story. “Ah, they saw the light,” he says. “Once Irish music is in your blood you’re never going to change back again.”
