POPULAR BLOKES : Paddy Moloney and the Chieftains Always Make Time for a Good Time

Where does Paddy Moloney find the time? On his own or leading the world’s foremost traditional Irish band, the Chieftains, Moloney turns up on recordings and concert stages with the varied likes of James Galway, Elvis Costello, Burgess Meredith, Van Morrison, Midge Ure, Eric Clapton, Don Henley, the Pogues and the Boston Pops Symphony. That’s when he’s not off rubbing elbows with Tip O’Neill, Paul McCartney, Jack Nicholson, Mick Jagger or the Pope.

Moloney’s Chieftains have played to the largest live audience in history, before 1.35 million people at Dublin’s Phoenix Park in 1979. They’ve performed at the Great Wall of China. The music the 53-year-old composes or arranges for his group has won Grammys and Oscars. Moloney’s film scores include “Barry Lyndon,” “The Grey Fox” and John Boorman’s upcoming “I Dreamt I Woke Up,” in which he also acts, as he has done in several other films. And Moloney still finds time to be a family man and yet hoist a “great few jars” with the boys down at the pub.

Part of Moloney’s trick is that he hits the ground running. In interviews, for instance, he scarcely has time for such formalities as questions. To start off a chat by asking him what’s new is like asking Gracie Allen about her brother: You’d best have a cigar handy because you might not get a word in edgewise for 30 minutes.

Reached by phone recently in Paris--he was supposed to be home in County Wicklow, Ireland, but flew off suddenly on a new project--Moloney said: “I just work from day to day right now. My life is not my own. We’ve done so many things this year and now we’re heading into promoting this crazy Christmas album.”

That album is “The Bells of Dublin,” the group’s first Christmas effort in its 28-year career. With guests such as Meredith, Costello, Marianne Faithfull, Jackson Browne, Nanci Griffith and Rickie Lee Jones, the Chieftains do to Christmas what they do to everything they touch: Apply their abilities as an outstanding six-piece orchestra to create such sweeping pastoral beauties and cobble-stoned romps that one could be convinced Ireland is just like heaven, except with better beer.

Along with Moloney on Uilleann bagpipes and tin whistle, the band has Derek Bell on harp, hammered dulcimer and harpsichord, Martin Fay and Sean Keane on fiddles, Matt Molloy on flute and Kevin Conneff on Bodhran drum and vocals. They bring their music--which promises to include a thick slice of their Christmas cake--to the Performing Arts Center tonight.

The Dublin bells that inspired the album title are those of Christ Church Cathedral, a 12th-Century Norman contribution to the center of Dublin. Their ringing is also the sound that opens the album.

“Its bells are very famous,” Moloney said. “We went up on the roof and recorded them. But the 12 bell ringers have a special numbering system they use for ringing the bells. I tried to get them to learn my melody for the bells, and it didn’t quite work out. But it went on for about two hours.

“Martin Fay of the band is quite a pint drinker, and there are some tremendous pubs near the church there, so he was in one of them. And the boys beside him were going ‘What in the name of Jaysus is going on up there?’ There was a terrible noise coming out of the bells. It probably caused an awful stir in the pubs all around.”

Much of the album was recorded in Los Angeles in May. Moloney said: “You can imagine what it’s like going into the Christmas thing in summer. There was a bit of winding up to be done all right. We also shot a video for it where I’m down on the Venice Beach boardwalk at one stage playing the tin whistle. I think I actually collected $2.50 in coins from passersby while I was there for the 20 minutes or so.”

While in Los Angeles they and Browne recorded “The Rebel Jesus,” a song Browne wrote specifically for the project, finishing it only a few days before the session. Jones was recording in an adjacent studio, so she was coaxed into recording “O Holy Night.” Meredith’s contribution was even more spontaneous. Moloney is old friends with the veteran actor and just happened to mention to him that he had an English translation of a fine 8th-Century Irish carol sitting about. Two hours later Meredith was recording it for Moloney.

While Griffith, Faithfull and sisters Kate and Anna McGarrigle recorded traditional songs, Browne’s wasn’t the only original. The Chieftains’ Conneff composed one number and Moloney wrote two, along with collaborating with Costello on the album highlight “The St. Stephen’s Day Murders.”

Moloney said, “Elvis lives outside of Dublin now, and he’s a lovely man. He’s sort of the James Joyce of the moment, a very interesting lad. He wrote the words and I wrote the tune. He told me the mood of the thing and I really had to go think about it. I struck on a mood of music that’s sort of funny and at the same time sad that I think suited his writing.”

St. Stephen’s is a feast day on Dec. 26, when the families gathered for Christmas get together for one final blast. Moloney explained, “Elvis’ idea of it was you get everybody ringing up and saying ‘Let’s get together for Christmas,’ and they all do. The family all comes home, and by St. Stephen’s day they’ve all had enough of each other and they want them out of the house. He was so good about putting it down that I think it must have been a practical experience that he had.

“When you say murders in Dublin it’s often a figure of speech. You know, ‘There was a murder around your man’s house the other night.’ And that means there was a bit of a skemozzle or a bit of a row or dreadful upheaval. It’s usually something that’s the result of having too much to drink. And I think that comes across very much in the song.”

Along with the star-flecked Christmas album, the Chieftains’ next release, due in March, is to be “The Chieftains and Friends in the Opera House, Belfast,” featuring Griffith, the Who’s Roger Daltrey and other guests. Moloney said, “I felt this was the year to invite guests onto our albums, because over the last 25 years we’ve been doing it so much for other people.”

The group still does quite a bit of that, having recently recorded some additional Christmas songs with country singer Steve Wariner. They also appear on “I Can’t Stop Loving You” on Van Morrison’s current album. Other things crowding Moloney’s schedule are an appearance at a Midge Ure concert, preparing for a second album of music from Brittany--the first being “Celtic Wedding”--and a scheduled appearance Sunday at Amnesty International’s benefit concert in London.

There is still talk of them touring the United States with Van Morrison. They recorded the “Irish Heartbeat” album together and toured Europe, but tour plans for the States keep falling through. They did perform together at one concert in Santa Rosa. “He just turned up in the last minute,” Moloney said. “We were in the middle of the second half of our show and the boyo himself jumps up on stage. We did about eight songs, totally unrehearsed.”

Group harpist Bell plays synthesizer on several tracks on Morrison’s “Hymns to the Silence” album. Moloney doesn’t think the instrument will find much of a home in the Chieftains, though, where even the harpsichord is considered something of an newfangled intrusion.

Looking just a bit like a bloated spider, Moloney’s own Uilleann pipes are among the more cantankerous instruments on the planet. No matter what city he’s in, you can usually find him cursing the local climate and its effect on his precious reeds. The worst times he’s had with them, he says, were in China during the rainy season and in Los Angeles during some particularly bad smog.

Uilleann means elbow, because this variety of bagpipe is inflated by arm-operated bellows, leaving his mouth free, he said, to “yahoo and slag the rest of the band.” The group’s performances do tend to be free-spirited affairs, with no two alike. Their material may be centuries old, with their original inclusions being thoroughly grounded in Irish tradition, but they also keep their arrangements flexible and improvise quite a bit within them.

They’ve been known to get audiences roused in such typically reserved concert settings as China and Japan.

Moloney enthused, “In Japan at every concert we played there the audience got up and danced, everybody in the hall. I couldn’t believe it. They’re usually so reserved. Granted, they were helped along by some of our fellow Irishmen who happened to be in the halls and couldn’t contain themselves. But that was a great joy.”

For all their globe-hopping, Moloney feels it’s also important that they and their music not lose touch with the community they spring from. But can one be a normal bloke after hanging with the Pope and the Stones?

“If I’m walking in Dublin I stop and talk with 10 people on one street alone. That’s tremendous in a way--you get very worried when that kind of thing stops. People are great to us. They seem to have a tremendous admiration for the band. They sort of consider us, as the government does, as the official musical ambassadors of Ireland.

“But people really don’t treat us as if we’re set apart from them now. I’m always meeting up with local musicians just to have a session. And Matt Malloy, for example has his pub up in Mayo and he has music every night of the week, and he’s always involved in it. Most of the lads go out to sessions, playing about in their neighborhoods.”

Then there’s New Year’s Eve at the Moloney household.

“I usually have me own little party, with pipers, musicians and guests. You never know who will drop by. It’s sort of an open house. Two years ago Jack Nicholson and Anjelica Huston came, and she sang a couple of songs and did a bit of a dance.”

When he formed the Chieftains 28 years ago, all he knew was that he loved Irish traditional music and wanted to play it. It amazes him still the way that the world makes a path for those who pursue their dreams.

“It was always a dream to me that maybe someday Irish music would be played in all the world’s great auditoriums, that it would find its place in the world. And now that’s getting strong. We paved the way and have done a tremendous amount of letting people know what real Irish music is all about. It doesn’t begin and end with ‘Danny Boy’ or ‘Mother Macree.’ When we go to other countries--Italy, China, Japan--I’m amazed at the reaction we get. They don’t understand a word of the garbage I’m pouring out, but they respond to the music.”

Who: The Chieftains.

When: Thursday, Dec. 12, at 8 p.m.

Where: Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa.

Whereabouts: San Diego (405) Freeway to Bristol Street exit. North to Town Center Drive. (Center is one block east of South Coast Plaza.)

Wherewithal: $9 to $27.

Where to call: (714) 646-6277.