[ecrea] 'Irish Blood, English Heart': Second-Generation Irish Musicians in England

NEW BOOK ANNOUNCEMENT

Sean Campbell
'Irish Blood, English Heart': Second-Generation Irish Musicians in England
Cork University Press
March 2011
ISBN: 9781859184615

http://corkuniversitypress.com <http://corkuniversitypress.com/>/

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.

'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

'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

The book will be launched by Niall Stokes of Hot Press at the Workman's 
Club, 10 Wellington Quay, Dublin on Tuesday 29 March at 6.30pm.