Bonaparte's Retreat is the sixth album by the Irish band The Chieftains. It appeared in 1976 when I bought it on vinyl - a magnificent gatefold affair that I thoroughly enjoyed. I had to the harder stuff that the Chieftains represented by way of the softer Horslips output. I liked the fact that they were the most unfashionably dressed bunch you could imagine.
The Chieftains by this time consisted of Paddy Moloney - uillean pipes, tin whistle, bodhrán,
Seán Potts - tin whistle and bodhrán,
Martin Fay - fiddle,
Michael Tubridy - flute, concertina and tin whistle,
Derek Bell - harps, oboe and tiompán
and Seán Keane - fiddle plus the shortly to be regular Kevin Conneff. The uilllean pipes and the bodhran were genuinely new instruments in my experience as was the tiompán. I remember seeing this line up in Aberystwyth at the Great Hall and thoroughly enjoying it.
This was the first album to feature singing, though not much of it. The singers were Paddy Moloney himself (on Round the house and mind the dresser) and Dolores Keane (mainly with her acapella version of The bonny bunch of roses in the ambitious title suite).
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