FROM EMERALD TO GOLD

By RICHARD CORLISS

They are perhaps the world's best-loved instrumental group. For more than three decades, in exotic venues from the Vatican to the Great Wall of China, the Chieftains have played traditional Irish music--half a millennium's worth of jigs and reels--on such contraptions as the tiompan, the uilleann pipes, the bodhran and the tin whistle. The only instrument they lacked was a charismatic human voice. It's true that one band member, Kevin Conneff, was given to "singing the odd song now and again, when we let him," as the Chieftains' chief, Paddy Moloney, said in 1991 on their Grammy-winning album An Irish Evening. Still, these gifted sidemen knew they could use a strong lead singer.

So for their new album, the Chieftains called in a few: Mick Jagger, Sting, Van Morrison, Sinead O'Connor, Tom Jones, Mark Knopfler, Marianne Faithfull. The result is The Long Black Veil, which after only five weeks in release has become the band's first gold record (500,000 copies). Moloney, 56, may not have smelled gold, or cared if he did. "Who knows how these things will go?" he says, taking a rare breather in a 20-city U.S. tour that includes a St. Patrick's Day concert at Manhattan's Avery Fisher Hall. "But we had so much fun doing the set, I thought something good might come of it."

The Long Black Veil is a lovely introduction to this musical Irish institution, with a cogent, eclectic choice of material and Moloney's smart matching of song to singer. Sting leads off with the rapturous Mo Ghile Mear--Our Hero, a tribute to Bonnie Prince Charlie that makes the listener shiver, and sing along, with its manly melancholy. For three other star studs, Moloney provided tales of faithless women: the dirty dancer in Jones' giddily melodramatic version of Tennessee Waltz, the vixen who leads a beau to murder in Knopfler's The Lily of the West, the adulteress refusing to save her lover from the gallows in Jagger's sepulchral rendering of the title tune.

For equal time, Moloney has O'Connor sing The Foggy Dew; she represents "the young mother of Ireland" whose lover is killed in the 1916 Easter Uprising. In the lamentation Love Is Teasin', Faithfull's crone contralto makes the phrase "What cannot be cured, love,/ Must be endured, love" sound like hard wisdom delivered from a deathbed.

Each session took on its own character, Moloney says, "like chapters in a book." The Rolling Stones, who did The Rocky Road to Dublin, a roistering waltz with an impish touch of Satisfaction thrown in, showed up with their own bar. Moloney's tight charts soon surrendered to jam-session chaos. At gig's end, the genial mob adjourned to a pub and quaffed Guinness until 6 in the morning.

In a way, the Chieftains owe their existence to Guinness: in 1963 an heir to the company financed the band's first record. For years Moloney, an accountant, and the others kept their day jobs; some dropped out. Of the original five, only Moloney and fiddler Martin Fay remain; the others are Conneff (percussion), Sean Keane (second fiddle), Matt Molloy (flute) and Derek Bell (harp and keyboards), whose dour banker's visage is uncapped onstage to reveal a wily mischiefmaker. "We keep the humor going," says Moloney. "I grew up in an atmosphere where music was about happiness and song." But the group's approach to their traditional airs is one of unawed connoisseurship. They are not a bar band playing the classics; they are concert virtuosi who can go on a lark.

Their music, so serene and intimate, can fill the biggest arenas. In 1979 they played before 1.35 million people in Dublin as an opening act for John Paul II. Later, the Pope had them play at his place. "After the Vatican show," Moloney recalls, "he gave us rosary beads. But we were a little disappointed he didn't invite us to stay for lunch--we were starved!--or for any of his Polish vodka."

So a hit record won't turn Moloney's head. "It's been building up for years," he says. "I thought we were hot in 1976 when we got an Oscar for the Barry Lyndon sound track. And playing on the Great Wall of China in 1983 was a highlight. So this is just another step."

Now everyone loves the Chieftains. Almost. "The diehards don't like us," Moloney says. "But with The Long Black Veil we've made a million more friends than we've lost. We are not going off our rocker. And we are not going to become rockers." Moloney hopes to go in a different direction. "If I can only find some quiet time, I want to write the symphonic music I've been dreaming about since I was a child." His face is illuminated with delight as he says this. It beams again when he offers this innocent credo: "The great leaders of the world should learn the tin whistle and have a party. And the world will be a happier place."

Listening to this timeless music, you can almost believe that a song could save the world. It's tempting to offer each Chieftain the toast from Mo Ghile Mear--"So wish him strength and length of days"--but these old boyos already have both.

--Reported by James Greenberg/ Los Angeles

With reporting by JAMES GREENBERG/ LOS ANGELES