Musical madness is always a relative thing. A mid-set jump from a wistful Scottish ballad to an accordion-pumped cover of a Sly & The Family Stone song may seem like a crazy leap, but the Canadian quintet Mad Pudding pulls it off with such a sense of fun that you barely notice the transition. Their take on modern Celtic-rooted music is based around funky bass and swing fiddle as much as the energy of two strong singers, befitting an adventurous band from one of North America's most cosmopolitan cities, Vancouver, B.C. Mad Pudding consists of co-founders/lead singers/multi-instrumentalists Andy Hillhouse (guitar, bouzouki, and mandolin) and Amy Stephen (accordion, guitar, recorder, and pennywhistle), fiddler Cam Wilson, bassist Boris Favre, and drummer John Hildebrand.

Hillhouse and Stephen talked about the band and their music one morning last February during the Folk Alliance conference in Toronto. The origin of the name was an obvious question. "We wanted a name that described us somehow," Stephen explained, "and we had this band where everyone had different sorts of musical influences thrown in. We happened to be looking through a book of Irish fairy tales one day, and there's one called 'The Mad Pudding.' It described a village tensely divided along religious lines where a magical pudding eaten at a mixed wedding leads everyone to start dancing together uncontrollably. "We thought it suited us, the pudding thing, throwing all the influences in," she says. And as Hillhouse adds, "Everybody's dancing together, united — we liked that idea, too."

Hillhouse, Stephen, and Wilson began playing together while students at the University of British Columbia in the late 1980s. "From the beginning, Andy and I would sing together, and we made a couple of tapes on our own," Stephen recalled. "We went to Ireland and Scotland, and we'd take our instruments and sing and hang out."

Bands like De Dannan and Capercaillie were early influences, especially through their arrangements of modern songs interspersed with traditional tunes. "Cam is a resource of traditional Canadian fiddle tunes which he learned from his father and grandfather," she continued. "We had no idea when we first met him that he knew all these tunes, and then we just started playing together." Original bassist Richard Ernst completed a quartet that played locally in the Vancouver area for a couple of years.

Hillhouse credits the addition of drummer Hildebrand in 1993 for moving the group in a professional direction: "It seemed that when it was just the four of us we were quite casual, but when our drummer joined it gave us the opportunity to play in more places. It helped propel the group forward, and he as an individual was quite focused and into it." A debut CD, Bruce's Vegetable Garden, followed in 1994. When Ernst had to step aside due to other commitments, French-born bassist and piano player Favre completed the current quintet. "He's neat because he's got a lot of interest in folk music and especially French-influenced folk music," says Stephen. "So he brings a whole different angle, and he's been writing tunes."

Mad Pudding's live sets include an assortment of traditional and original songs featuring tight duo vocals, coupled with bass- driven jigs and reels heavy on fiddle and accordion in which the band merrily bounces around the stage as if they had indeed eaten some of that magical pudding. Hillhouse described how they see themselves: "What I've sensed among some reviewers and audience members is a tendency to bring certain expectations to our music, and to immediately draw us into a larger 'thing' that is happening — the huge boost in the profile of Cape Breton music in Canada and Irish music worldwide. We've had to put a label on what we play, and although I see Irish and Scottish music as our number one inspiration, the reason we don't sound like those musicians is that's not who we are. We grew up in the West, raised on Joan Baez, Dougie MacLean, The Beatles, Shostakovich, and Ottawa Valley fiddling. How do we incorporate these diverse influences? We have fun with it. As a model, I give kudos to Spirit of the West, a band who have taken chances, a uniquely Western Canadian band deeply affected by Celtic music."

The band's second CD, Dirt & Stone, was nominated for a 1996 West Coast Music Award in the folk/roots category. Hillhouse's title song is a powerful, trad-sounding anthem to the Canadian landscape that questions what humans have done to it. "I wrote that after hearing a lot of emigration songs," he remembered, "but I wanted to write from my point of view, someone who's been on this side of the Atlantic for a couple hundred years. It's Canada that I was thinking about, but it could be applied to the States, for sure. The ultimate thing in the song is how in a relatively short span of time we've really altered our environment, sometimes so much that you wonder whether we should have come here at all." Stephen's contributions range from "The Ploughman's Son," a sly, trad-sounding story of lust on the farm, to a modern rant about surly store clerks called "Service." She explained the diversity in her writing: "I love to write with a traditional bent to songs, because I love traditional music. But I'm from here, so I like to make it from me. There's an honest connection that we feel, but at the same time we acknowledge that we didn't grow up in that culture."

Their third CD, Rattle on the Stovepipe, was scheduled for release in June. The title track combines jive-chorus vocals with fiddle/accordion reel breaks, followed by another eclectic mix of songs and tunes ranging from Favre's French spin "Beaujolais Nouveau" to Stephen's evocative, ancient-sounding romantic ballad, "Punjabi Market." Hillhouse feels that "on Dirt & Stone, I think we were trying to let you know that we could play and arrange and all that. This one, I believe, has a little more of the spirit of flat-out fun and a little less self-consciousness."

Like the handful of other North American bands performing Celtic-rooted folk/rock, Mad Pudding swims in neither the singer/songwriter nor rock mainstreams. "There are some advantages and some difficulties," Hillhouse says. "The advantage is that you're adaptable. With the drum set we can do dances. We like to think of ourselves as a band that you can listen to, but at the same time there's no doubt that it's danceable music — we love people jumping up and down to it. So we can play rooms that have dance floors and rooms that are concert halls. The commercial side of it is that with five members, if you go to a folk club that's used to one or two singer/songwriters, the pay is very difficult, especially if you're going into an area where no one knows you. That's a bit of a struggle."

Mad Pudding is off to the U.K. this summer for a month-long tour, followed by another swing across North America in the fall. "You can't be in it for the money as a big band!" Stephen concluded with a laugh. "We could go our separate ways, but it's so much fun putting the music together with five people who all have something to say. It's an incredibly rich process. We all really like that. I think that's why we keep doing it."