Derek Bell seems pretty tense. He snaps "forget it, the interview is off" the moment I enter his hotel room in New York. The reason is that I’ve been detained by about 20 minutes while talking to his fellow Chieftain Sean Keane and the phone-relayed apology obviously hasn’t placated the harpist. Not only that. Pointing out that he has "people to meet at midday", Bell really throws down the gauntlet by saying, "I don’t see how anyone, who knows absolutely nothing about my work, could come in here and hope to do it justice in 40 minutes." Explaining that I am "pretty familiar" with the music of the Chieftains elicits only a "maybe so". The interview is rescheduled for three hours later, with this reminder: "try not to be late".

I’m not, and by mid-afternoon Derek is his more customary charming self. And charmingly eccentric, which seems as good a place to start as any. So let’s hurl the gauntlet in his direction and ask why a man patently committed to music and the parallel "spiritual path" he walks in life, so often allows himself to be seen as a buffoon? As in, ‘Ding-Dong’ Bell, the sixtysomething musician who asks audiences during concerts if they want to see a picture of his ‘pussy’ and who infamously titled a solo album Derek Bell Plays With Himself.

"That title was an unfortunate accident, a joke. But knowing what an ignoramus (Claddagh Records chief) Gareth Browne was, I would have to be prepared for anything [Gareth might suggest]," he explains. "Yet, as for this perception of me as someone who’s ‘not-all-there,’ I don’t worry about that. I know who I am. If I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing or where I was, by definition I’d be lost, but I don’t feel that way. My spiritual life I prefer to keep hidden for those who have a sincere interest in the subject, while I smokescreen it out from people who aren’t devotees."

Even so, telling audiences about how he loves "pussy" has many connotations.

"I know, and it could get you fired," Bell says, laughing. Likewise, he admits that stories about how he used to place an open copy of Playboy on the music stand while he was rehearsing with a BBC Orchestra at the start of his career, might strike some as paradoxical in the context of his life-long interest in religion.

"Firstly, I’m Irish and, secondly, I’m interested in paradox," he says. "But I just read the bloody thing! I looked at the pictures and I enjoyed the rude remarks, or whatever. Yet I was a little surprised to find every fucking instrumentalist in the orchestra coming round to his place, walking by my music stand! Then it became funny! And when it started to annoy the conductor it became funnier still! I happen to enjoy upsetting or challenging people in that sense."

But this pivotal interest in the sacred and the profane Bell doesn’t regard as a "tension" in his psyche in the sense that it may define Van Morrison.

"It probably would be tension with him, but it doesn’t affect me that way at all," he explains. "Yet I am interested in questions like ‘what will people think or say in situations like that?’ Where someone is known to have a strong religious base but is seen to be reading Playboy in public. How will they judge me? Some people will have a complete misunderstanding of that person because the paradox is there. And many paradoxes do seem to be peculiarly Irish because we have paradoxical minds. I, on the other hand, have been told, since I was a boy, that I have a ‘complex’ mind which doesn’t mean it is paradoxical but it is often contradictory. Yet I never had any problem accepting those contradictory aspects of my own nature."

But was the ‘complex’ mind of Derek Bell ever riddled with complexes? For example, did he ever feel dislocated as the only Protestant in the Chieftains?

"I got over that long before I was in a band," he replies. "But it is true that I grew up in a background where people thought Catholic children and Protestant children lived in totally different worlds. And that ‘the other side’ you do not mix with. Yet once I reached the age of seven I realised ‘this is totally wrong’ and that was the end of it, as far as I was concerned. Though I was ordered, by my father, not to play with a certain violinist because he was ‘not our sort’ and told ‘we don’t mix with those people and haven’t, since the Civil War’. Yet if I wanted, say, to kiss a girl, I kissed her, whether she was Catholic or not! I didn’t give a shit what religion she was! I had to, respectfully, listen to those people, because they lived through the Civil War, but I just went my own way. Even then."

This, Derek suggests, also helps explain why he never felt it necessary to publicly comment on The Troubles.

"I didn’t feel that political teachings were any of my business," he says. "I didn’t think it was up to me to bother about it very much. And the Chieftains are apolitical. I don’t know if that’s what attracted me to the band but I can say, for certainty, it kept me in it. I had no focus on that bloody stuff either. I didn’t see any reason to disparage a person because he didn’t believe what I believe. My wife, for example, doesn’t believe any of the strange religions I join up with. Or their books or the Masters. She doesn’t give a shite about them. If she looks at the universe, she doesn’t think there’s any bloody God or a grain of wit there at all. I take a different view. I consider that you have the choice to believe in God, or not. But it’s much easier to live your life, better, if you feel there is somebody there. So why not accept there may be higher beings, more evolved people and that to be in harmony with them is more meritorious than just to deny their existence!"

But does a situation where Derek’s wife and "soul-mate" Steffie – ‘The Snow Leopard’ as he calls her – is a "disbeliever" not create division in their relationship?

"No, we just agree to differ. But Steffie is the snow leopard, the king and queen cat rolled into one! She gives the orders! We’ve been married nineteen years and in no instance has she been wrong about anything. So she’s a bloody good thinker. When she was a child she was put in the genius class because the teachers didn’t know what the fuck to do with her. She knew it all!"

Is Derek still in love with his wife?

"Yeah," he says. "As I was, in the beginning! It took me five seconds to bring her home! The mother was deeply shocked and wondered if we’d been ‘at it’ and had to get married! Was there a little bun in that oven! But we assured her there wasn’t. Yet !"

Derek and his wife, Steffie, have no children.

"But we have eight cats," he says.

Does Derek feel less than fully fulfilled not having children?

"I feel happy to accept what God brings each day, good or bad. There are things in life you can change, and better. And there are things you can fucking do nothing about. All you require is the wisdom to tell which is which."

Wanting then finding you can’t have children would cause many people pain.

"It would."

So was there ever a moment that this realisation hurt Derek and his wife?

"Steffie’s first reaction was ‘children are a bundle of fucking trouble, anyway’," Bell says. "But she, quickly, took another viewpoint. Yet we haven’t, selfishly, decided not to have children. If you’re going to have no children then you must find a bigger, human family to deal with. Both of us have found that. We each have our individual harp students, that we take care of, directly. And a family of audiences, listeners and concert organisers, all sorts of things. That feeds the same need. In fact the Great Master’s poem is very appropriate in this sense. ‘I will be a divine gypsy/I will sing and I will roam all over the place/And I will go where none has gone before and sing a new song/That none has sung before.’ I expect everyone to go through life with that attitude. I certainly adopted that attitude in the early ’70s."

This talk of a new song presents a timely opportunity to discuss Derek’s claim that Van Morrison once said he was "under Paddy Moloney’s apron strings", wasting his talent singing the same song ad nauseum. And that he should actually leave the Chieftains and join Morrison’s band.

"But what Van was saying is fundamentally untrue because Paddy never fucking did that himself," Derek responds. "As in play the same song over and over. So if I was under Paddy’s strings, I had a very good mentor. So fuck Morrison. And, yes, Van was asking me to leave Paddy’s band and fucking join his, as a keyboardist. But I did not feel I was sufficiently qualified to be in his band, because I’m not a jazz musician. And I told him that. But he said he didn’t want me to play jazz, he wanted me to play my own way, as a contrast to the others."

But has Derek ever felt inhibited, as a composer, "under the strings" of Moloney?

"Not at all. I found a way to read his mind. I was invited to write about a hundred pieces of his for a symphony orchestra. I turn myself into a receiving radio set and try to read his mind to the utmost, within the laws that are self-made by the music. Then I submit that to him and to the world. So my ideal, when working for Paddy, is to write what his mind would write if it had utter freedom and technical know-how. That was a point-of-honour, to try and achieve that."

On this question of who creates what in the Chieftains, one perception is that Derek merely arranges music that is created by Paddy; another is that Paddy’s original ideas are simply rough sketches and Derek is the creator.

"I regard those two statements as different expressions of what happens," Bell says. "I really don’t mind which way it is. Because if he’s the composer then the next step is that he must tell me what he feels, in every part of his being, give me a picture of exactly what he wants the final outcome to be. Then I must try to suppress ego and personality and see what he is saying."

In other words, the music of the Chieftains is co-created by Derek Bell and Paddy Moloney?

"It should, eventually, end up that way. So that you couldn’t tell, with certain proof, to which of us it belongs. It should be one voice. And that would be what I aim for. And if I fail and he wants it done a certain way, I must do it again."

Derek obviously succeeds more often than he fails.

"Well, I am uniquely qualified because what we need in our music is pure art. Music that doesn’t destroy the concept and the feeling and the age in which the music was originally conceived. So we need someone who studied modal harmony, counterpoint and medieval music. To Americanise it, like certain pop traditional musicians do, isn’t the answer for me. I will not write a pile of shite, no matter whether it’s ‘hip’ to do it or not."

So would Derek see some of the collaborative works the Chieftains have recorded with their superstar friends as shite?

"I am ashamed to admit I have described them as that myself!" he says.

Are there moments during these collaborations when Derek wants to stand up and walk away simply because his soul says ‘go’?

"Yes. There are indeed. And I swear about it for months afterwards and try to forget it. But if I feel it is fundamentally incongruous and destroys the music, I do think about what you’re saying. But Krishna said you must live your life and not get too personally involved. He taught us never to get too attached to the results of our actions but to concentrate only on him. That gives you incredible freedom and lack of attachment to things that seem to be annoying everybody else."

Nevertheless, Derek has stressed the Chieftains collaboration with Van Morrison on Irish Heartbeat was far from disgraceful.

"I thought Van’s art was valid," he explains. "And that saved it from disgrace. Because there are ethnic specialists in Irish music who like to have it as pure as a new born baby and they find his improvisation in things like ‘My Lagan Love’ and it’ll-not-be-long-till-our-fucking-wedding-day and all that, to be totally grotesque. Partly because of his vocal tone and partly because of him distorting the text. He growls it rather than sings it."

Derek, who has described Van’s reading of ‘My Lagan Love’ as a Hindu chant, now says that man’s art can be "positively transcendent" when he gets it right. And when Van gets it wrong?

"Well, that’s the vicissitude of being an artist. But Van feels very intensely. Though some people, who should know better, also say he’s the best poet in the English language since Yeats. I heard that said at Coleraine university when Van and I were on a panel together."

Discussing ‘the Healing Power of Music’ – a subject that, it’s said, led to Van and the Chieftains working together on Irish Heartbeat ?

"Yes. And that’s why, when we met, over supper, a year before our own record was made, we tried to come to some decision as to how far spiritual forces could influence Western Music."

Expanding on this theme, Bell observes that music has to have good and evil, light and shade, contrasting sections.

"Though I must say that a lot of contemporary rock music strikes me as very vacuous, at this level," he adds. "There’s fuck-all in it because fuck-all, in terms of a true vibration, has gone into it. I’d say, for example, that two-thirds of what RTE radio broadcasts is pure shite. And people like Yehudi Menuhin were deeply concerned about the crap young people pour into themselves. And wondered, in future generations, what in hell (type of) human beings we are going to breed. Because it’s known that the most occult of the arts is music. Music is the most immediately effective of all the arts, so it’s quite right to be concerned about this question."

At the beginning of this interview Derek said he would "happily" talk about sex if interviewers raised the question but when he does "it is rarely reported" or "misrepresented." Why does he think this is so?

"I said I would talk about controversial subjects, including sex, if I’m asked, but that I might answer in monosyllables, if I want to," he explains. "You must remember that the world still thinks sex is unclean."

Does Derek think sex is unclean?

"No. I feel it is a natural function."

Did he always have this lack of inhibition?

"No, but when I heard the Swami say it, I knew it was right. I feel about this the same way I feel about Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. I feel what he does with any women he’s intimate with is none of anybody’s goddamn, fucking business."

The same applies to Derek?

"The same would apply to me. If I want to go out and whore around in night clubs or strip clubs or topless bars it’s actually none of anybody’s business."

So what of the story which holds that one night, certain Chieftains ended up in a New York brothel apparently under the impression they were in a bar?

"That’s reasonably true. We were probably looking for a late night drink! And back in 1975 New York was really a more intriguing place, before Guiliani started to clean it up. We went into what seemed to be a bar, with these lovely girls running around, dressed in thin, red dresses. And one was from Liverpool and she asked would we like to see her diddies. I broke up laughing and Paddy didn’t know what to fuckin’ say! And in the end she pulled the bloody dress up and showed them to us! Then Paddy and I saw some rough looking characters and decided to get out. Now, only two others in the band were involved in this particular escapade. But then Paddy enticed us into a film on the pretext that it would interest me because it was called Misty Beethoven. The mist was the mist steaming up on your glasses when you saw all these things! And Beethoven appeared very little in it. But Sean Potts said his Hail Mary’s very loudly and left the theatre! And Peadar stayed by me. Paddy was on the other side. But Sean Keane followed Sean Potts out because both of them thought this was a disgraceful thing to be led into. They were all good living, devout boys. The most devout in the band."

Whereas Derek stayed and enjoyed this porn movie?

"Oh yeah! Then we went out for supper afterwards and just took the whole thing in its course. But I felt being able to show such things in New York was a freedom that would be desirable, rather than the restrictive censorship we had at home."

So, presumably, Derek sees as ‘healthy’ the loosening up of such restrictions in terms of, say, the Internet?

"Oh yes. Now you can watch anyone’s boobs on the Internet! That’s right. You can watch anything you like."

Would Bell see any of the music made by the Chieftains as purely sexual?

"The playing of music that is strong can become sexually magnetic, that’s more the word I’d use. According to how it’s played. Or what it tends to mean. It’ll have a different effect on each person. A lot of the result of listening to music says something about the listener rather than the performer or composer. And to find out what the total effect is you’d need to be a clairvoyant who could see the colours that are set up, in the inner plains, by the music. And at that level, the music of the Chieftains could be highly sexual, at points. But, in terms of the new album, Water From The Well, what I love about it is the fact that there are no slow dirges that would bore the hell out of you. Like there were on the last three albums. That bloody Tears Of Stone and, worse still,The Long Black Veil . One dirge after another. I like to see a record that has at least enough music to make people want to get up and dance.

"Life-affirming music, to me, means music with positive effect," he concludes. "Life-denying music would be something that is on the boring side, a dirge, something that outstayed its welcome as a result of its length. In other words, if music is not life-affirming why bother your arse about it?"

Martin Fay certainly remembers the first time music affirmed its place in his life. He was "five or so", had been to see the movie The Magic Bow, starring Stewart Granger as classical violinist Paganini and rushed home afterwards to tell his dad that he wanted to learn the fiddle.

"Most kids in my time were sent to music lessons as an extension of their education but nobody pushed me in that direction, it was my own choice," he recalls. "But I was exposed to music long before that. My sister was a good pianist and she’d teach me things like Schubert’s march. And there were thousands of Irish records at home, every ceili band you could mention. But I had no specific interest in Irish music. I was geared more towards classical music because of that film. Not knowing, of course, that it actually was Yehudi Menuhin who played those Paganini pieces and Stewart Granger just mimicked the movements. Either way, I loved it. And I loved studying at the College of Music in Dublin where I was known to be a great sight reader, could pick up a tune as soon as you placed it before me on the music stand."

From playing violin as a teenager, in operas and ballets at the Gaiety, Fay graduated to the Abbey Theatre orchestra in the ’50s, playing "purely classical" music. But it was also there that Sean O’Riada first drew his attention to traditional music.

"I knew Sean before he was particularly interested in Irish music," Martin says. "He was a classical pianist and he’d be playing Rachmaninoff, or whoever, in the Abbey. Then at intermission times he’d throw in a little solo. Slow airs. And I’d say ‘what was that you were playing?’ and he’d say ‘Irish traditional music’ and that was what hooked me, initially. The slow airs. And they were lovely airs. Then O’Riada decided to start a group. There was an Irish play in the Abbey and he needed an Irish band, that’s when he got Paddy, Sean Potts and a few more Irish musicians. Then O’Riada started ‘a folk band’, Ceolteoiri Chualainn. I hadn’t been involved but he asked me to join them. So I went to his house to meet the guys and I’ve known them ever since."

This, of course, brings us to what many see as the single most contentious question in the history of the Chieftains: the extent of Sean O’Riada’s influence on Paddy Moloney and, by extension, on the music of The Chieftains.

"O’Riada had an influence on Paddy, no doubt," Martin reflects. "Paddy was playing Irish music long before any of us met O’Riada, but Paddy’s base was straightforward traditional music and what Sean did was arrange the music. Prior to that, everybody played the melody line. O’Riada started arranging it, using counterpoint, counter-melody. That’s why he brought me in. Because it was unheard of, at the time, to play down the octave. Everybody played in the same register. He knew I could transpose from one octave to another. So when people say he made Irish traditional music ‘classical’, it was his arrangements that changed things. And that’s what Paddy has been doing ever since. But Paddy did swap notes with O’Riada in the Abbey. I saw them doing so. So, in fact, Sean was milking Paddy for ideas, when he himself was becoming interested in Irish music. That kind of to-and-fro was more the case than anything else. And Paddy probably taught O’Riada more about Irish tunes than Sean taught him. The most Paddy picked up from O’Riada was, as I say, the idea of arranging. The tune was still the tune. But Paddy doesn’t want people to be saying he started his style of Irish music through O’Riada. And rightly so. Paddy was well established, long before he met O’Riada. And he just hates anyone saying O’Riada got him started in music."

O’Riada did, however, get Martin Fay started when it came to alcohol!

"I was 19, still working in the Abbey and he gave me the wink, over the piano one night," Martin recalls. "As in ‘I want to talk to you’. Then we went up to the bar and Sean says ‘have a chaser’ and I didn’t know what that was! So he hands me a glass of whiskey and a bottle of stout. And O’Riada had such an influence on people you couldn’t refuse him anything. To walk down the street with the guy made you feel good. There was a great charisma there. So, of course, I knocked back the whiskey and stout for the first time ever. And I’ve never stopped since."

Did Martin ever develop a problem with drink?

"Not really. I have a few drinks before a show, but I pace myself. Yet I have been pissed during shows, once or twice, because the show was brought forward, or I met my family for a few drinks or something."

Fay, unlike Kevin Coneff and Sean Keane, claims to have "no problem" when it comes to the gruelling Chieftains tour schedule.

"Meet me a week before we go on tour and I’m like a bear with a sore arse," he says. "I hate the idea of going on tour. But once I put my foot on the plane I’m into the thing, I forget about home! In fact, it suits my wife, at times, to have me out of there! I do have a perfect home life and I wouldn’t swap her for anyone, but she’d say to me, now and then, ‘when are you going away again?’ Sometimes I’m home for four weeks and I probably am getting in the way! So it gives us both a break."

What about Martin’s children? Did they ever feel, growing up, that they had an "absent" father?

"Yeah. There would be tears every time I’d be going away, which didn’t do me any good either. Yet the Chieftains were never really away for that long. Five, six weeks maximum. So if, say, Kevin says touring damaged his marriage, I can’t see that. I don’t think our job would split up a marriage. It depends on how things are to begin with. As I say, my marriage always was particularly stable. I married when I was pushing 30 and I’d met my wife, Grainne, when she was a dancer in a cabaret I was working in. And I fell for her right away."

Has Martin ever wished he followed his original dream and became a solo concert violinist?

"Not really. Once I’m playing music I’m satisfied. And I do love what I do with the Chieftains. But in terms of the ‘superstar’ collaborations I can take them or leave them. I’d prefer to be without them, to tell you the truth. Some of these guys I’d rather not be involved with at all. Because I don’t feel they are on our wavelength. They just have this ‘rubbing shoulders’ with the Chieftains attitude. And we, sometimes, have the same attitude in terms of those ‘superstars’. But if we never played with The Rolling Stones it wouldn’t bother me. As for Art Garfunkel singing with us in Carnegie Hall? Paddy may think the audiences expect a ‘superstar’ during our concerts but what, then, are they coming to see us for? The Chieftains or the superstar? I think audiences should come to a Chieftains show expecting to see the Chieftains and if there is something thrown in, well and good."

Martin once said his life’s ambition was "to get a job that pays well enough to retire in style at 65." Will he be able to realise that ambition?

"That was the kind of advice your father gave you," he reflects. "But I won’t be able to retire, comfortably, at 65. As in live on my pension? No way! We haven’t made a fortune. I probably have twice as much as a bricklayer, put it that way. But I also have twice the free time. And when I have that free time there is no money coming in. I spread my double or treble wages over a blank period as well, which is what people tend to forget. I may get a thousand pounds one week, great, but I may not be working for four weeks after that. That’s two hundred and fifty quid a week. So I am going to have to stay at the day job! But I can’t complain. Overall, looking back, I’ve had a great life with the Chieftains. And, as I say, I love the music we’ve made. Most of it, anyway. I am doing what I always said I wanted to do, as in, be a professional musician. And I get to play Carnegie Hall!"

Paddy Moloney can’t stop laughing his impish laugh. He’s reflecting on the musical roots he returns to for the Chieftain’s latest album, Water From The Well, those songs sung in his grandfather’s home, the ‘piles of old 78’s’ and the times his uncle played bagpipes locally and used the young Paddy himself as a mascot!

"I was eight or nine and I’d started playing the pipes," he says. "And they used to bring me around towns and set me up on the big drum in Birr, or someplace, and I’d play a tune and people would throw money into the cap! But it all really got started for me when I’d listen to people like Leo Rowsthone’s pipes quartet on the old steam radio back in those days. Before that my mother had bought me a whistle when I was six. For one shilling and nine pence! Then, when she got me the pipes, they were a fiver, a lot of money in those days. And, to tell you the truth, even when she was 83, my mother said to Rita, my wife, ‘the terrible thing about Paddy is that he never got himself a real job!’ Though I think she changed her mind when I got my honorary doctorate in Trinity. That’s when she said ‘what did I start, when I bought him those pipes!’ But she probably was even more impressed because Gay Byrne got his doctorate the very same day! And was up there beside me!"

Perhaps Paddy’s ma forgot that back in 1947 her son was described as Ireland’s living hope for pipers.

"In the ’40s there was, of course, the Piper’s Club and so on, but there was no piper coming through, so I became the great, young hopeful, the one who got all the attention," he explains. "And I’d won three or four All-Ireland medals for the Fleadhs in the early 50s. But there were, at the time, great fears that the music was going to die so people really were focusing on who was coming along that could pass it on."

We’ve had Sean Keane and Martin Fay speaking about the influence Sean O’Riada had on the Chieftains; what is Paddy’s position on O’Riada’s claims The Chieftains were just a "sub-division" of Ceolteoiri Chualainn?

"Well, it’s really not fair to say I, or the Chieftains, took all our ideas from Sean O’Riada," Moloney responds. "He came up with some beautiful tunes and we – the Irish musicians working with him from the start, including myself – contributed some beautiful tunes. In fact, one of the tunes my grandfather played turned up in the soundtrack for Mise Eire. I gave it to O’Riada. And Sean did have that great genius for doing arrangements. Yet before he did Mise Eire, in 1959, he was known as John Ready and that score is, basically, brilliant arrangements of airs I already was playing at the Feis Ceol, like ‘Roisin Dubh’. But people do make outlandish claims about how much he influenced me. The truth is that during the ’50s I had various combinations of groups, before Ceolteori Chualainn and I was building my Chieftains long before Sean arrived."

But is this question of who-influenced-who still Moloney’s Achilles heel?

"Sean was a very charismatic person and he influenced a lot of people and maybe that’s why so many rush to take his side in all this," Paddy responds. "But he and I had our differences about music, even then. For example, I didn’t like accordions. So when he was putting Ceolteori Chualainn together I was saying ‘I wouldn’t have accordions, Sean’.

"But the point is that, overall, there wasn’t any bitterness between Sean and myself. Later he reviewed Chieftains 2 and criticised some of my ideas on harmony – said they were ‘clumsy’. But when people say he wrote arrangements, that isn’t necessarily true. He never wrote anything down. It was all spontaneous harmony. And we, the musicians, would provide it. In fact, it’s only in recent years that people have started to come at me about O’Riada and that is beginning to irritate me. Forget about it. There was Ceolteori Chualann, there was the Chieftains and those were good days, even if we all, finally, ended up going our separate ways. Let’s leave it at that."

Not quite, Paddy. There also is the perception that O’Riada did finally disband Ceolteori Chualann because he felt the Chieftains had out-paced him.

"There was a bit of that because when I did ‘The Fox Hunt’ he criticised it and maybe felt it was the kind of stuff he’d liked to have done," Paddy says. "But, at that stage, I thought the man still had a lot to offer and Ceolteoiri Chualainn should have kept going because there was room for two bands. But I think he felt he had nothing more to offer. In fact, before he disbanded the band, it had disbanded. Yet Eamon De Buitlear kept encouraging him to get it back together. In fact, the day he made the announcement he was officially disbanding Ceolteori Chualainn I rang up his wife, Ruth, and said ‘don’t let him do this’. But, as I say, he really felt he had nothing else to offer."

In the end, Paddy Moloney went on to produce Sean O’Riada’s final album, and put a cassette copy of the final mix on his death bed to which, say Paddy, O’Riada "gave a sign of approval, with his hand, because, at that stage, he couldn’t speak."

If the influence of Sean O’Riada is an old bone of contention, a more recent Chieftains controversy concerns the group’s collaborations with heavy friends, as reflected in the negative comments other members made to this writer about Art Garfunkel’s appearance with them at Carnegie Hall.

"We did 25 years gradually building up the popularity of the band, okay?" Paddy responds. "And we were playing endless tours and not enjoying the lifestyle we’ve got at the moment. The money wasn’t that great. And we had to work twice as hard, tour twice as hard. So I started to build on it, where I had associations with other musicians. I had been asked to guest on other artist’s albums – be that Art Garfunkel or Paul McCartney – back as far as the mid ’70s. And, in terms of our shows, though 80% was good, solid traditional music, we always had guests.

"For example John McColgan and Moya Doherty told me a year ago that I started the idea for Riverdance. Back in the Hollywood Bowl more than twenty years ago when I had Michael Flatley zipping out dancing during our set, and Jean Butler, as well as twenty-four young girls in their short skirts and black stockings. Or we’d have someone like Richard Harris performing with us. So having guests was always a part of this. And often, like last night, with Art Garfunkel, the artists would ask me if they could perform with the Chieftains. So I said ‘yes’."

As for the claim that the Chieftains had a ‘great set’ sans guests?

"I heard that twenty years ago," Paddy says, laughing. "And I honestly do believe the popularity of the band would only be half of what it was fifteen years ago, if I hadn’t taken on board the idea of these guests. I’ve always done projects like that. Whether it was doing the score for Barry Lyndon, playing for the Pope, performing in China, touring with James Galway or recording with Van Morrison. It’s all part of my own personal masterplan for the Chieftains. But I never meant any of that to take us away from our fundamental base, which is playing pure traditional music."

Can Paddy admit he may have gone too far in some of his ‘superstar’ collaborations, creating music that was, ultimately, a betrayal of the Chieftains?

"I think I avoided that, from the beginning," he suggests. "Because anyone I chose to work on those collaborations I believed in. Whether they were ‘friends’ or not, it had to be a musical marriage. And there were difficulties in some cases, I admit.Tears Of Stone was no easy album to do. It took three years to get that right. And some people I didn’t get. Like Aretha Franklin. Now I know every song on that, or The Long Black Veil, or Irish Heartbeat or The Bells Of Dublin may not be to everybody’s tastes, but there’s always someone, somewhere who will love those various recordings. You wouldn’t believe how many people said the track with Tom Jones was the best on The Long Black Veil, whereas the record company was trying to persuade me to leave it off the album because it ‘didn’t fit’. But I told them they were wrong. And I was right."

What about tracks like ‘Oh Holy Night’ with Ricky Lee Jones? Or the infamous ‘Rocky Road To Dublin’?

"Kevin hated ‘O Holy Night’ from the beginning but, again, some people love it. Though I must admit that when I first heard it I got a little twinge of ‘is this the way to sing it?’ Then I realised Rickie Lee Jones wanted to sing it that way. Maybe I didn’t arrange it properly. As for ‘Rocky Road’, that is a fun piece and we still are playing it every day, at every concert, during every damn television show. It’s not a great musical masterpiece. It never was meant to be. But as the lads said to you, it is great fun to do!"

Not for Bono, obviously. Why did Paddy mix Bono’s voice way down in that recording?

"It just didn’t work. Though he is a beautiful singer and I’ve been trying to get him to do something ever since! He came into the studio three days or so after the original recording and tried to do a counter-melody against Mick Jagger but he knew himself it wasn’t working so he had no problem with us mixing his voice way back. Yet I’m convinced he could have made it work, if he’d given it another shot on another day. His voice is still there on the record, but you have to strain hard to hear him! And the point is we didn’t even include his name on the CD sleeve."

On the subject of real "superstars" is it true Van Morrison ‘owns’ the version of ‘Have I Told You Lately That I Love You?’ he recorded with the Chieftains?

"Van got such a raw deal in the music business, at the start, that he told me he’s never going to let that happen again," Paddy explains. "So if he does something for you, you have it for so long, then it’s his and he can use it any way he wants. But apart from all the mental battles we have with Van, it’s all good fun between us."

Good fun? Even when Van tries to "steal" Derek Bell from the Chieftains, tells him he’s wasting his time under Paddy’s apron strings?

"It may appear that way because – as Matt Molloy often says – I am the ‘mammy’ of the Chieftains and I have to keep things going. But that doesn’t mean anyone is tied to my apron strings! Including Derek, who does tell the Van Morrison story that way. Either way, there is a democracy among the Chieftains. And they trust me. Even when I do some project before they ever hear I’m doing it, which, I guess, is very unfair. But if there was any hassle about something like that I’d scrap the project. If there is any major thing they weren’t gong to be able to stand by and get up on the stage and play, I don’t want to know about it."

So is Paddy saying, basically, that he has accommodated the musical vision of each member of the Chieftains, rather than oppressed their individual talents?

"Very much so," he says. "And with this new album I’ve tried to dig deeper in terms of their talent, draw even more out of them."

And what about individual members of the Chieftains? What about Derek’s claim that he and Paddy are "one voice" as composers?

"That might only apply, with Derek being a classical musician, when it comes to scoring, but that’s it," he says, categorically. "I would be interpreting the form of a tune and how it should flow. If, for instance, I’m doing the score for a film, I’ll have my arrangements done out – as in ‘horns come in here’ and all that – then I come to Derek and say ‘dot this out.’ I have it set down but not with all the articulate things you need, so he will orchestrate it, add in the bass sounds, put in the necessary harmonies. That’s what Derek probably means."

So Paddy wouldn’t describe himself and Derek as co-authors?

"There’s no such thing as double-authorship. It’s all, to me, this visionary thing I’ve done from the start. And as producer, I still produce the music. Even in terms of Derek’s own pieces which I alter to make them fit what, to my mind, often is better than what was written. So I’m the musical director and composer. And anything I compose is never interfered with. I come up with these melodies and that’s it. Whatever goes underneath is just accompaniment."

Paddy Moloney rejects the notion that the new album, Water From The Well is a return to roots.

"We never lost touch with our roots," he argues. "So I’d say this is just a different approach. Tears Of Stone, for example, was inviting in friends and guests to do our music. There are four songs on that, in the Irish language! So how much more ‘trad’ can you get? And we’d already done so many trad albums before we started doing collaborations and moving back and forth between those projects and the more obviously trad albums like The Celtic Harp. That album actually won a Grammy as the ‘Best Trad Album.’ And it was a celebration of Bunting’s music, 1792, so, again, that’s as ‘trad’ as you’ll find anywhere. And that album came after The Long Black Veil. As for Water From The Well ? Well, it’s just another part of this whole gameplan. I’m not doing this to placate anyone. For me it’s just a great showcase for Irish traditional music, end-of-story."