Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, 18 January 2008

Cherish The Ladies (photo - Celtic Connections)

EVER SINCE making their UK debut at the very first Celtic Connections back in 1994, the all-female Irish-American band Cherish the Ladies have commanded such a devout following at the festival as to be asked back on a near-annual basis.

When artistic director Donald Shaw opted to leave them out of his debut line-up for 2007, given his brief to refresh the programme, he was barraged with irate letters from their fans. And thus it was to a packed house and a truly rapturous reception that the Ladies returned, their six-piece line-up comprising Roisín Dillon (fiddle), Mirella Murray (accordion), Mary Coogan (guitar), Heidi Talbot (vocals/bodhran) and Scottish recruit Kathleen Boyle (piano), led by their larger-than-life founder and frontwoman, Joanie Madden, on whistles and flute.

They always like to lay on a little something extra for Celtic Connections, and were joined this time – at the start of their 20th anniversary year – by Irish sisters Liz and Yvonne Kane on fiddle, and ex-Bumblebees harpist Laoise Kelly, plus a top-flight troupe of Irish and Canadian stepdancers, who kicked up a storm in many of the instrumental sets.

Tastefully arranged, lovingly rendered traditional fare is the band’s stock in trade, and they served up another liberal helping here, concocting a sound that sang with vitality and shone with colour, delectably garnished by Talbot’s superb singing.

Steering its own distinctive course between prettiness and depth, honeyed delicacy and raw intensity, she breathed mesmerising life into both traditional and contemporary material, including ‘The Bantry Girl’s Lament’ and Richard Thompson’s ‘Dawning of the Day’. As she bids farewell to Cherish the Ladies, to embark on a solo career, hers is certainly a name to watch out for.

Opening the show with a splendidly red-blooded blast of testosterone were the Orkney eight-piece The Chair, promoted to the big Concert Hall stage as runaway winners of a Danny Kyle Open Stage Award at last year’s festival. (They were calling themselves Lazy Boy Chair then, but the makers of that classic American recliner didn’t see the compliment and threatened to sue.)

In the course of a three-day return visit, they ended up playing some five or six gigs in total, which at this point had already included the previous night’s Festival Club and a busking session at Buchanan Galleries earlier in the day. Despite the scale of the occasion, they were thus palpably warmed up and raring to go – but still smart enough to capture our attention first with a gorgeously tender slow air, ‘Lily and Diana’s’, penned by fiddler Douglas Montgomery, before accelerating nimbly into one of their trademark storming dance sets.

Anchored by Montgomery’s bravura partnership with fellow fiddler Fionn McArthur, The Chair – whose festival trip also included the launch of their debut album, Huinka – are a band big on both melody and rhythm, stirring in dirty blues riffs and heavy dub beats along with Celtic and east European tunes, all welded together by strikingly sharp musicianship.

© Sue Wilson, 2008

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