A Gael At Their Backs

Irish Blood, English Heart, the excellent new book by Sean Campbell – a senior lecturer at the Department of English at Cambridge’s East Anglia University – examines the contribution made to UK music by a trio of second generation Irish artists, namely The Smiths, The Pogues and Dexys Midnight Runners frontman Kevin Rowland. Himself a second generation Irishman, Campbell – who quotes Hot Press and in particular Bill Graham approvingly throughout the text – was a long-term fan of The Smiths.

“I met them when I was a kid,” recalls Campbell, sitting in the lounge of Dublin’s Brooks Hotel. “Funnily enough, when I interviewed Johnny Marr a couple of years ago, his manager Joe Moss – who was the first Smiths manager – came to speak to me before Johnny arrived and said, ‘I just wanted to check if you’d met Johnny before?’ And of course what he meant was, ‘Have you interviewed Johnny professionally?’ I said, ‘No, not apart from when I was 15-years-old, and I met him at the soundcheck on the opening night of The Queen Is Dead tour’.
“When Johnny arrived, he was such a gentleman that the first thing he did was apologise for not remembering me. I’m thinking, ‘You were in The Smiths, I was a little kid – it’s okay!’ I was a huge fan of The Smiths and The Pogues, although probably less so of Dexys – they were slightly before my time. Because I’d grown up in an Irish family in England, The Pogues were the perfect fusion of cool pop music, John Peel and the NME, and Irish folk music.”
In Irish Blood, English Heart Johnny Marr notes that the strong musical culture of the migrant Irish gave him an excellent start when it came to playing guitar.
“That was one of Marr’s explanations of why there are so many second generation musicians in British pop,” says Sean. “They have a head start with music and an intensity with music. Because of the political situation, a lot of Irishness at that time in England was private; it was in the home and Irish social clubs. It wasn’t public and it was quite intense. The Smiths are a good example of that, because they weren’t that public themselves.
“Morrissey was once asked if he celebrated St. Patrick’s Day and I think he said, ‘Quietly and privately in my heart, not hanging from the balcony singing Gaelic sea shanties’. That was a reference to The Pogues I think, and the way they were really overt.”
As it happens, The Pogues’ version of Irishness never made any sense to me at all.
“Phillip Chevron says in the book that nowhere else in the world do people get The Pogues less than in Ireland,” notes Sean. “And they are a London-Irish band, rather than an Ireland-Irish band, as it were. But I think what has to be said is that the early Pogues were very interesting, and kind of cosmopolitan and contemporary, and Shane MacGowan sort of drew on Irish music as well as London punk. The stereotype became more and more prevalent as The Pogues went on.”
Referring back to The Smiths, perhaps Marr – whose parents were from Kildare – most overtly acknowledged his Irish heritage with the sublime ‘Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want’, a tune which was used to famous effect in one of my favourite scenes in any film, the Chicago Art Institute sequence in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
“It’s interesting you mention the movie, because ‘Please Please Please’ appears in a bunch of films,” says Sean. “Stuff like Never Been Kissed – a lot of American teen movies. Someone has written about this; that song appears in these films, and sometimes it’s a cover version and sometimes it’s the original. It’s always this moment where the character has this powerful realisation. Like, in Never Been Kissed it appears throughout the film and it’s there when Drew Barrymore’s character attends the prom.
“And it’s there at the scene in Ferris Bueller... where Cameron is looking at that painting in the Art Institute in Chicago. It’s this moment of emotional awakening, and that song has been picked up for scenes like that. Interestingly, Marr’s parents were really big fans of Del Shannon, and when The Smiths did their Irish tour to promote Hatful Of Hollow, the tape they had on the bus was The Best of Del Shannon. Marr was sort of channelling his parents’ musical tastes.”
Indeed, Campbell points out that there are big musical similarities between ‘Please Please Please’ and the output of Del Shannon.
“If you listen the Del Shannon song ‘The Answer To Everything’ it’s very close, musically, to ‘Please Please Please’,” he explains. “I mean, almost chord for chord. There’s also a mandolin solo at the end of ‘Please Please Please’. I also mention in the book that if you look at the vinyl run-out groove of Hatful Of Hollow – and ‘Please Please Please’ is the final song – the word ‘Eire’ appears. Marr had it inscribed as an oblique reference to the band’s background.
“Of course, the song had that melancholy, yearning quality you associate with Irish music, and when Marr originally gave the music to Morrissey, it was called ‘The Irish Waltz’. So you have these various Irish aspects, because it’s all quite subtle. Marr said he wanted to acknowledge it, because it was important to him. But he didn’t want to get into what some people might call the Plastic Paddy stuff that’s associated with The Pogues. Because actually he didn’t like overt Irishness.”
As noted in the Hot Press review of Irish Blood, English Heart, perhaps the most gobsmacking story Campbell uncovers in the book is that Morrissey’s anti-Thatcher politics once prompted An Phoblacht to publish an article praising The Smiths.
“It’s incredible how I found it,” says Sean. “Marr told this story about how they were about to go on the Irish tour at the end of ’84. Morrissey had made these comments about the Brighton bomb, in which he said that the only tragedy of it was that Thatcher had escaped unscathed. The next thing that happens is that they’re about to do this tour, which includes a couple of dates in Northern Ireland. A next door neighbour of Mike Joyce, The Smiths’ drummer, a guy who was affiliated to the republican movement, gives him what Marr described to me as a pamphlet, and there’s this piece praising The Smiths.
“I then interviewed Kevin Rowland, and he said, ‘I only found out The Smiths were Irish because I subscribed to An Phoblacht’. So I thought, ‘I’ve found it!’ I knew the month of the tour and I was able to dig it out. I didn’t want to push him too far, but Marr said that they then received threats from both sides. On the hand it was, ‘You can’t come to Northern Ireland’, and on the other it was, ‘You can’t pull out of playing Northern Ireland’. The Irish government contacted The Smiths in Manchester and said, ‘You need to do the tour, but you need to take one of our Special Branch guys with you and he’s going to sort everything out at the gigs’.”
“An Phoblacht said that Morrissey’s comments were ‘dangerous and foolhardy’. (Laughs) I mean, for them to say that!”

Irish Blood, English Heart: Second Generation Irish Artists in England is out now, published by Cork University Press.