Ladies’ Day

Ten years on and they’re finally rising to a gallop. Cherish The Ladies are the kind of band who’ve been used to garnering applause, while letting louder mouths hog the headlines. Long schooled in the fine art of ensemble playing, Joanie Madden and her all-female quintet have ploughed a particularly neat and fulsome furrow all of their own for the past decade. Comfortable in the knowledge that the music could talk for itself, they didn’t need any verbose decorations to bolster its selling power.
It’s not that Cherish The Ladies haven’t been cherished, but simply that they’ve been too busy plucking their bows and pumping their squeeze boxes to really bother with the whole media thing. Then again, that’s not to say that Joanie Madden is a shrinking violet. Like the rest of the band, she’s first-generation Irish American, schooled in the finer points of accordion, flute, and tin whistle, with a pair of eardrums that’d corner a flea in a swimming pool. Her excitement at the band’s recent move to the major label, RCA (here, BMG) for the release of their latest opus, Threads Of Time, is palpable, and boy is she basking delightedly in the sun . . . at long last.
“It is great to be where we are right now”, she admits with a grin as wide as Brooklyn Bridge. “We’re in the right spot at the right time. You just couldn’t pick a better time to be playing Irish music. It’s just so popular.”
The mega-sellers such as Riverdance can’t take all the credit for this revival, Madden maintains.
“I have to give Riverdance and Lord Of The Dance a huge clap for what they’ve done”, she says, “but it hasn’t just been them. It’s been the likes of Enya, and The Chieftains, who’ve been on the road for 36 years, and other great groups who’ve come before like De Danann who’ve educated the audiences out there. Then you see Altan doing a great job, and Solas, and well, I just think that in America they’ve run out of words to put ‘Celtic’ in front of!”
The band’s longevity, despite a number of personnel changes, is something that doesn’t surprise Madden, who’s long used to the electricity produced by CTL, and other Irish traditional groups on the road in the States.
“When we used to do the National Folk Festival, for example”, she offers, “where you’d have 100,000 people there for the weekend, the Irish music was always the thing that caught everybody’s imagination, because of the virtuosity amongst the musicians and the dancers and the singers. It was always the big draw, I tell you.”
Madden has that quintessential New York enthusiasm that insists on drawing you in, on seducing you into submission. Although only first-generation Irish American (her father is the fine Galway player, Joe Madden, and her mother is a Miltown Malbay native who dances a mean set), she’s certainly taken the best ‘can do’ ingredients of the U.S. and married them with an extraordinary ear for the authentic. Having founded the group with Eileen Ivers, who’s since left for Riverdance and a solo career, there’s little doubt that Madden’s drive has been a major factor in keeping the band together.
“There are four of the original six still in the band”, she hastens to clarify, “that’s Siobhan Egan, Mary Coogan, and Eileen Golden [Garten]. But naturally there have been women who’ve become mothers. It is a life that you choose. I suppose I am the undisputed captain of the team. I was the one who rang up the members of the group and said, ‘Look, quit your jobs and I’ll keep you working’. Not an easy thing to say but I tell you, we’ve become road warriors for sure, and we’ve learned how to tour more successfully. In the last six months we did Scotland, England and Wales and Argentina in May. I think we were the first Irish traditional band to play Buenos Aires.”
Not content to tinker with the traditional tunes they have in their heads, Cherish The Ladies have written eight new tunes on Threads Of Time, and have found themselves in some stellar company of late.
“Boston Pops approached us to do some Irish music”, she says, barely able to conceal her glee, “and they were determined not to fall back on the tura lura lura stuff. I mean, they were used to playing to audiences raised on shillelaghs and green shamrocks. They’d seen the real thing, and they didn’t want the green shawl. So we got a chance to work on arrangements for orchestra, which has been just great. We’re out front and they’re backing us! It’s a thrill, that’s for sure.”
With some 200-plus gigs a year, Cherish The Ladies are unlikely to be unstringing their fiddles or plugging their tin whistles for a while yet.
“You know the best part?”, Madden asks, grinning. “Whatever audience you play to, whether in Argentina or Boston, if they leave the room feeling that their hard-earned money has been well spent, that’s the name of the game.”