Irish Blood English Heart: Second Generation Irish Musicians in England

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www.corkuniversitypress.com Front cover photographs: (from left) Kevin Rowland (© Colm Henry); Shane MacGowan (© Steve Pyke) and Morrissey (© Russell Young). Cover: Burns Design Second Generation Irish Musicians in England Sean Campbell I R I S H B L O O D ENGLISH HEART IRISH BLOOD ENGLISH HEART Second Generation Irish Musicians in England Sean Campbell Second-generation Irish musicians have played a vital role in the history of popular music in England. This book explores the role of Irish ethnicity in the lives and work of these musicians, focusing on three high-profile projects: Kevin Rowland and Dexys Midnight Runners, Shane MacGowan and The Pogues, and Morrissey/Marr and The Smiths. The book locates these musicians in a hyphenated ‘Irish-Englishness’ marked by ‘in-betweenness ’ and explores the different ways that they engaged with this in-betweenness through their creative work and their engagements with audiences, the media and the music industry. The book draws on extensive archival research of print and audio-visual media as well as original interviews with the key figures, including Shane MacGowan, Johnny Marr, Kevin Rowland and Cáit O’Riordan. Combining its assiduous research with fresh critical insights, the book offers new analyses of the musicians, as well as previously undocumented accounts of their lives and work. The book highlights the diversity and complexity of second-generation Irish identities and experience and details the diverse ways in which this generation has shaped popular music in England. Accessible and original, ‘Irish Blood, English Heart’ will be of interest to students and scholars in the fields of popular music, media/cultural studies, and ethnic/migration studies. It will also appeal to a wider audience of those interested in the musicians with whom it deals. Sean Campbell is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Media at Anglia Ruskin in Cambridge. The first scholarly book on the secondgeneration Irish in England, ‘Irish Blood, English Heart’ is also the first full account of popular music-making amongst the Irish diaspora. It explores the diverse ‘routes’ pursued by second-generation Irish musicians, tracing their different styles and personas, and discrete social contexts, from London (Shane MacGowan, Cáit O’Riordan) to the Midlands (Kevin Rowland) and Manchester (Morrissey/Marr). The book disputes the view of England’s Irish as a peripheral and problematic presence, seeing the second generation as a highly active and creative presence at the forefront of British culture. This is a highly valuable book on the Irish diaspora and the politics of post-imperial popular culture in the UK. It reveals how Irish-English musicians struggled and succeeded in making the nation’s multi-ethnic history and culture more audible and visible in a particularly inhospitable climate for the Irish. The book makes a significant contribution to the cultural history of the 1970s and 1980s, and contains lessons for the present in which England and the United Kingdom continue to fashion other ‘enemies within’. Nabeel Zuberi, author of Sounds English This is not just a subtle and sophisticated scholarly contribution to popular music and Irish studies. It is also a fine and exciting account of how music can be used to make sense of the complexity, anxiety and exhilaration of contemporary cultural identities. Simon Frith, Tovey Professor of Music, University of Edinburgh The role of the second-generation Irish in shaping British pop has, until now, been all but overlooked. Sean Campbell looks deeply and thought-provokingly at the second-generation Irish 'in-betweenness' of Kevin Rowland, Shane MacGowan and, perhaps most surprisingly, Morrissey and Johnny Marr of The Smiths, that seemingly most English of pop groups. He sheds new light on their songs and on the strategies of protest, resistance and assimilation articulated therein. ‘Irish Blood, English Heart’ is a constantly intriguing and often provocative book about the complex process – and peculiar freedom – of not wholly belonging to one culture or the other. Sean O’Hagan, The Observer IRISH BLOOD FINAL ARTWORK:Layout 1 22/12/2010 11:46 Page 1 www.corkuniversitypress.com Front cover photographs: (from left) Kevin Rowland (© Colm Henry); Shane MacGowan (© Steve Pyke) and Morrissey (© Russell Young). Cover: Burns Design Second Generation Irish Musicians in England Sean Campbell I R I S H B L O O D ENGLISH HEART IRISH BLOOD ENGLISH HEART Second Generation Irish Musicians in England Sean Campbell Second-generation Irish musicians have played a vital role in the history of popular music in England. This book explores the role of Irish ethnicity in the lives...