Irish Blood English Heart: Second Generation Irish Musicians in England

3. ‘Oscillate Wildly’: Ambivalence, Elusiveness and The Smiths

102 3 ‘Oscillate Wildly’: Ambivalence, Elusiveness and The Smiths I think I had the best of both places [Dublin and Manchester] and the best of both countries [Ireland and England]. I’m ‘one of us’ on both sides Morrissey1 I don’t consider myself either [Irish or English] … I hate nationalism of any kind. I feel absolutely nothing when I see the Union Jack, except repulsion … and I don’t feel Irish either. I’m Mancunian-Irish Johnny Marr2 [Music] can stimulate inter-cultural understanding at a deeply personal level, with the result that a person is no longer a member solely of one culture Catherine Ellis3 In December 2004 Morrissey concluded his most successful worldwide tour for several years with a concert at Dublin’s Point Depot. Adorned in the vestments of a Catholic priest, the singer made a series of playful references to local places (showing his affinity with Ireland) before performing the tour’s signature song, ‘Irish Blood, English Heart’, which invoked his ethnic provenance.4 This display of Irish Catholic ethnicity was in marked contrast with Morrissey’s earlier persona as frontman of The Smiths (1982–87), which appeared to evince little sign of his – or his fellow musicians’ – immigrant Irish origins.The vast bulk of scholarly (and journalistic) writing on the group has, in turn, shown scant concern for this aspect of The Smiths, with most accounts stressing the group’s Englishness while making little or no reference to their Irish ethnicity.5 The band would often be seen, moreover, as an archetype of Englishness in rock. Michael Bracewell, for instance, has claimed that The Smiths were ‘organically English’, deeming Morrissey the popcultural ‘embodiment’of ‘English sensibility’.6 Mark Sinker,meanwhile, maintained that The Smiths ‘sang for or of England … with a music that could only come from the urban heart of England’.7 Elsewhere,the 103 Ambivalence, Elusiveness and The Smiths NME inferred,from the band’s œuvre,‘avowedly Anglo-Saxon’qualities, arguing that The Smiths had aspired to a ‘myth of English purity’.8 Such readings did not go unnoticed by The Smiths themselves.‘It was always odd’, explained Morrissey of The Smiths’reception,‘when I was described as being “extremely English”because other people would tell me that I looked Irish, I sounded Irish and had other tell-tale signs.’9 Notwithstanding this, it is clear that The Smiths eschewed Irish sounds and styles in their eclectic venture into ‘independent’rock (which drew on pop and funk as well as folk and country music).10 Moreover, their work would often evoke an expressly English milieu via the citation of local places in song words, interviews and record sleeves (as well as the regional accent of much of Morrissey’s singing).11 The band’s Irish provenance was, then, less pronounced than that of their second-generation Irish contemporaries, such as Kevin Rowland or Shane MacGowan. In stark contrast to such exteriorised invocations of ethnicity, The Smiths would arguably dramatise (in oblique and abstracted ways) certain second-generation sentiments, not least via the trope of ambivalence in their address to both origins and ‘home’. With this in mind, the band’s work might be seen as less an effacement of Irish ethnicity than as constitutive of a complex Irish-English musical ‘route’. As Marr explains, the band became more – not less – aware of their Irishness during The Smiths’ career. ‘The Irish thing’, he says, ‘we became more conscious of as we went on.’12 Accounts of the second-generation Irish suggest that identities amongst this group are marked less by an affiliation with either England or Ireland than by an ambivalence towards both the host society and the ethnic ‘home’. Rather than taking a clear-cut subject position on either side of a neatly forged (Irish-English) binary, then, many second-generation people have expressed ‘in-betweenness’or uncertainty .13 Several Irish-English creative figures have also located themselves in this way; for instance,the London-Irish playwright,Martin McDonagh, has explained: I always felt somewhere kind of in-between [Irish and English] … I felt half-and-half and neither, which is good … I’m happy having a foot in both camps. I’m not into any kind of definition, any kind of -ism, politically, socially, religiously, all that stuff. It’s not that I don’t think about those things, but I’ve come to a place where the ambiguities are more interesting than choosing a strict path...