Sit-down Sunday: Hail the Chief
Here’s an in-depth interview with the late Paddy Moloney, who fronted the legendary band The Chieftains for almost 60 years...
It was just two weeks after the 9/11 terror attacks and The Chieftains had flown into the city to play at a memorial for their self-described biggest fan, Matthew O’Mahoney – a stockbroker who had perished in the first tower.
The world was still coming to terms with the trauma, the death toll, the stories of incredible bravery and those pictures played over and over again of the Twin Towers collapsing and vaporising into black smoke and dust. Paddy Moloney was visiting a friend who had an apartment overlooking the carnage of Ground Zero.
‘He lived on the top storey of this building. I had a whistle in my pocket and I walked out along one of those beams on the building,’ he remembered.
‘The stench was cruel. The smoke – there was gas still coming up out of it. I played Táimse Im’ Chodladh (I Am Asleep) and I got this vision as if I were in a theatre like Carnegie Hall and there were shadows in a box. I couldn’t see any faces, just shadows. It was an experience that really got to me and I couldn’t leave without playing something else.’
It is one of many ‘visions’ that the soft-spoken late Paddy who was the driving force behind The Chieftains, had throughout his life – an otherworldly connection that for some might be frightening but which, for Moloney, was a part of his life, perhaps even part of the creative process that transforms his music into the sort of emotional experience that has the hairs on the back of your neck standing on end.
‘I believe that we are all going to meet up there one of these days,’ he said with total certainty. As a matter of fact, I have an idea for a project that brings us from here to there. I’d like to do an album of that kind of stuff.’
His certainty of a life beyond this one was reinforced by personal tragedy. Paddy believes that the band’s cherished harpist, Derek Bell [pictured below], who turned to Buddhism before he died in a US hospital at the age obf 66 in 2002, is ‘looking down’ on him.
Bell’s premature and sudden death was ‘an awful shock’. Paddy and Derek had been the core of the band for more than 40 years and they were very close. ‘He was such acharacter. Eccentric,’ Paddy recalls. ‘Everybody thought he was a bank manager – his father was a bank manager. He looked like one, even till the very end – he always had a tie and a pullover on. Stop! He used to wear a red pullover even if it was very hot.
‘I remember playing Red Rocks, and Sarah McLachlan was co-headlining. He didn’t want to wear his jacket because it was too hot but he still had on this red pullover.
‘So, the band all went out and bought red pullovers and came on stage and Derek kept playing away – he didn’t even see them. Everybody loved Derek. It was so funny to see the band dressed in the pullovers just for Derek’s sake.’
But Paddy’s grin faded as he recalled his friend’s slow decline. ‘It was a long illness. He wouldn’t let on. He used to tell me everything. First of all, we got his sight fixed for him. We were in Nashville and we brought him into the hospital there and he had his sight corrected, so he had 20/20 vision. He was delighted with that. He was opening up. He was becoming a little more personal.
‘Then we organised for him to go into – and paid for it, because he wouldn’t do it unless somebody did it for him – the Mayo Clinic in Phoenix because he had an enlarged heart and then his prostate problem, things like that.
‘We sent him in there for a whole week and they cleaned him up and he got a clean bill of health. And he was coming home to his puss cats – and that’s what he called his wife, Pussy Cat. Puss he used to call her.
‘He was sitting on the bed waiting to go home with his bag and passed out. I got this call at two in the morning. I had to trace his wife, who was at her parents in San Francisco. It was an awful, awful shock,’ said the uileann pipe maestro.
‘For a whole year we couldn’t bring ourselves to replace him with another harp player but I had a chair there with a blanket, that he used to put around the harp. Wherever we went, I would see if there was a local harp player just to come on and play a couple of songs as a tribute to him,’ Paddy recalled.
‘I always felt he was watching down on me all the time. I definitely know he was around. He believed in reincarnation. He became a Buddhist. He was into all sorts of stuff. He was into the Self-Realization Fellowship. They respect every religion and everybody’s feelings. It was a great thing he was into. He really had it down to a fine art.’
Paddy believed Derek, who was born in Belfast and awarded an MBE by the Queen, even sent him a sign when it came time to recruit his replacement.
‘It was the strangest thing – I met Derek in 1972 when we played Carolan’s Concerto with the BBC Orchestra in Belfast. Derek was the harp player. After he died, I was asked again would I do a score with the same orchestra in Belfast for the Proms in London,’ he stated.
‘I needed a harp player and somebody introduced me to Tríona Marshall who was in the orchestra. It’s very strange – we were playing in the same city where I met him, playing the same tune with the same orchestra. It only struck me afterwards.’
Bell’s death wasn’t Paddy’s first brush with tragedy. His elder brother John had been knocked down and killed by a motorbike when he was just eight years old.
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