Irish Blood, English Heart: Second Generation Irish Musicians in England by Sean Campbell (review)

For three decades, 1981 hit “Come on Eileeen” by Dexy’s Midnight Runner’s has served as fodder for ironic sing-alongs, as well as serving as a shorthand for describing the seemingly vapid landscape of early 1980s popular music. Additionally, the song often conjures images of young lads led by singer Kevin Rowland, all clad in overalls pitching woo to an unnamed blonde whilst singing an apparently nonsensical chorus “Too-Rye-Ay.” Lost to the MTV generation, the song—along with the Celtic-infused album Too-Rye-Ay—served as way for the second-generation Anglo-Irish Rowland to offer a vision of Irishness devoid of connections to the IRA and other stereotypical connotations of the drunken Paddy. At a time when the Northern Ireland “Troubles” dominated global news, Rowland sought to demonstrate that he was Irish and, in his words, “not shit.”

In this fascinating book, Sean Campbell seeks to situate properly the duality of Irish identity in Thatcher-era Britain as being more active and critical in their conceptions of Ireland and Britain, as well as their own effort to attain a certain level of agency. In doing so, Campbell refutes scholarship that has portrayed the so-called second generation Irish-English—the children of those that emigrated from Ireland in the years after the World War II—as passive, disadvantaged, or “plastic” Paddys and their perceptively disingenuous expressions of Irishness. In a sociocultural limbo between Irish and English, artists such as the Pogues, Dexy’s Midnight Runners, and the Smiths reflected a fluid, malleable identity that Campbell proposes “serves to confound the simplistic view of this generation as either essentialist or assimilated.” Underscoring the book’s thesis is a need for scholars to utilize popular culture as a prism through which to view critiques of society and government writ large.

Campbell devotes a chapter to each of the three bands, detailing the histories of each, utilizing interviews personally conducted with members of each band including Dexy’s Rowland, the elusive singer Shane McGowan of the Pogues, and the Smiths’ guitarist Johnny Marr (né Maher). Of these, the chapter devoted to the Smiths is strongest in supporting Campbell’s thesis regarding the duality and nuance of Anglo-Irish identity in 1980s Britain. While Dexy’s Midnight Runners satirized the stereotype of the ignorant Irish immigrant in search of craic, and the Pogues’ overt Paddyism, the Smiths offered a subtler and more literate expression of second generation Anglo-Irish identity. Campbell asserts that the Smiths represented “a certain second-generation venture that eschewed the constrictions of both Irish essentialism and English assimilation.” For the Smiths—especially the Wilde-quoting androgynous singer Stephen Patrick Morrissey—the position of preternatural outsider afforded the band to make snide commentary and criticisms from within. This is most evident in the 1986 title track from the album The Queen Is Dead. Intended as a sequel to the Sex Pistols incendiary 1977 track “God Save the Queen,” the Smiths’ fantasy about a wayward conversation with the Queen in which the protagonist bids farewell to England’s cheerless marshes and questions whether or not Charles fantasizes about wearing his mother’s bridal veil. The critique on what Morrissey viewed as a decaying Britain comes from one with the perspective of one having lived in a society long enough to understand the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of Britain, yet who—because of his Irishness—can offer a scathing critique that is neither treasonous or rebellious. Because he is neither fully British, nor fully Irish, Morrissey’s commentary, like that of Wilde, can either be dismissed as the ranting of an outsider, or be given a greater value.

While previous works on Anglo-Irish identity utilize a traumatic event to underscore the formation of Irish cultural hybridity, Campbell looks to more nuanced and nontraditional means second-generation cultural identity. One of the book’s...