‘What’s the story?’: rock biography, musical ‘routes’ and the second‐generation Irish in England

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Notes

Simon Frith, ‘Music and Identity’, in Questions of Cultural Identity, ed. Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay (Sage, 1996), p. 122.

Stuart Maconie et al., ‘The 100 Greatest British Albums Ever!’, Q no. 165 (June 2000), pp. 83–84.

A considerable amount of academic and journalistic cultural criticism has been published on second‐generation Irish rock musicians. However, this body of work has, with a few notable exceptions, tended to overlook their Irishness. For a discussion of this point, see Sean Campbell, ‘ “Race of Angels”: The Critical Reception of Second‐generation Irish Musicians’, Irish Studies Review vol. 6, no. 2 (1998), pp. 165–174.

Oasis began in Manchester in the early 1990s, and originally included five second‐generation Irish musicians. The group's original drummer, Tony McCarroll, has explained that ‘[the] reason Oasis came together was because we were Irish Mancunians and working class’ (cited in Robert Yates, ‘Looking Back in Anger’, Observer, ‘Review’ section, 7 March 1999, p. 3).

See, for instance, David Bennun et al., ‘Britpop’, Melody Maker, 22 July 1995, pp. 29–33; Andy Richardson, ‘The Battle of Britpop’, New Musical Express, 12 August 1995, pp. 28–30. For scholarly accounts of Britpop, see Andy Bennett, ‘ “Village Greens and Terraced Streets”: Britpop and Representations of Britishness’, Young: Nordic Journal of Youth Research vol. 5, no. 4 (1997), pp. 20–33; Martin Cloonan, ‘State of the Nation: “Englishness”, Pop and Politics in the Mid‐1990s’, Popular Music and Society vol. 21, no. 2 (1997), pp. 47–70.

Bennun et al., ‘Britpop’. Oasis may have been, to some extent, complicit in this appropriation by the discourse of ‘Britpop’, not least in their occasional identification with its principal signifier, the Union Flag. However, it is perhaps worth stating that the ‘swirl’ Union Flag graphic that has adorned official Oasis paraphernalia originates from an early demo tape sleeve which, according to the former Smiths' guitarist Johnny Marr, featured ‘the Union Jack going down the toilet’ (quoted in David Halliwell and Ste Mack, ‘The Johnny Marr Interview’, The Official Oasis Magazine no.1 (1996), no pagination). This may indicate that this image was, at least initially, not intended as a straightforwardly patriotic gesture.

Quoted in Eugene Masterson, The Word on the Street: The Unsanctioned Story of Oasis (Mainstream, 1996), p. 56.

Dave Simpson, ‘Why Two’s Company', Guardian, 13 July 1996, p. 30.

Brian Boyd, ‘Johnny, We Never Knew You’, Irish Times, ‘Arts’ section, 8 May 1999, p. 6; John Lydon, with K. Zimmerman and K. Zimmerman, Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs (Hodder & Stoughton, 1994).

The commercial success of Oasis in the mid‐1990s generated an abundance of biographical writing on the group. For a brief inventory of this literature see Peter Doggett, ‘Oasis’, Record Collector (February 1997), pp. 64–67. While the bulk of this biographical material tended to disregard the group's collective Irish background, notable exceptions included biographies co‐authored by a Gallagher family member (Paul Gallagher and Terry Christian, Brothers: From Childhood to Oasis—The Real Story (Virgin, 1996)), a former member of an embryonic incarnation of Oasis (Chris Hutton and Richard Kurt, Don't Look Back in Anger: Growing up with Oasis (Simon & Schuster, 1997)), and an Irish journalist (Masterson, The Word on the Street).

Jake Lingwood, letter from Boxtree editor to the author, dated 8 October 1998.

Paolo Hewitt, ‘Brothers in Arms’, Guardian, ‘Weekend’ section, 4 January 1997, p. 12; Paolo Hewitt, ‘First Noel: The Oasis Story’, Guardian, ‘G2’ section, 6 January 1997, p. 2; Paolo Hewitt, ‘The Oasis Story’, Guardian, ‘G2’ section, 7 January 1997, p. 4.

Paolo Hewitt, Getting High: The Adventures of Oasis (Boxtree, 1997), p. 15. Subsequent page references will appear in parentheses in the main text.

For further elaboration of this point, see Sean Campbell, ‘Sounding Out the Margins: Ethnicity and Popular Music in British Cultural Studies’, in Across the Margins: Cultural Identity and Change in the Atlantic Archipelago, ed. Glenda Norquay and Gerry Smyth (Manchester University Press, 2002), pp. 117–136.

Liam Gallagher has alluded elsewhere to this interest in The Wolfe Tones (Mike Connolly (dir.) Right Here, Right Now (BBC1, 20 August 1997)), a band whose ‘emotive accounts of the historical struggle for Irish freedom’ have, according to Philip Ullah, been ‘very popular with the second generation Irish’ (‘Rhetoric and Ideology in Social Identification: The Case of Second Generation Irish Youths’, Discourse and Society vol. 1, no. 2, p. 179).

Gallagher and Christian, Brothers, p. 131; Hewitt, Getting High, pp. 67, 69–70, 141; Hutton and Kurt, Don't Look Back in Anger, p. 165.

I use these terms quite loosely, here, to denote ‘folk’ or ‘traditional’ Irish music on the one hand, and rock or pop music on the other.

This track featured on the b‐side of the Oasis single ‘Whatever’ (Creation, 1994), and is typical of the band's oeuvre in terms of sound and structure. However, during what is ostensibly the song's coda—signalled by a characteristic burst of guitar feedback—there is a distinctive switching of musical codes. Here, an identifiably Irish melody is performed on an accordion by Paul Arthurs, Oasis' former rhythm guitarist, who had previously played the instrument in a traditional Irish band in Manchester; see Hewitt, Getting High, p. 141.

This is not to suggest that such assertions derive solely from nineteenth‐century Celticist discourses; rather, that they appear to be particularly indebted to such discourses. For a brief discussion of Celticism, see Seamus Deane, Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Literature 1880–1980 (Faber and Faber, 1985), pp. 17–27.

Terence Brown, Ireland's Literature: Selected Essays (Lilliput Press, 1988), p. 7.

See, for example, Linda Duff, ‘Brothers in War’, Daily Star, 13 September 1996, pp. 2–3; Sean O'Brien et al., ‘Wonderbrawl!’, News of the World, 10 November 1996, pp. 2–3.

See, for example, Matthew Wright and Richard Wallace, ‘Liam’s Mad For It!', Daily Mirror, 28 August 1996, pp. 2–3; Mike Darvill and John McJannet, ‘Wild Man Liam Held’, Daily Star, 5 November 1998, p. 1.

See, for example, Lewis Perry Curtis Jr, Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature (David & Charles, 1971); Liz Curtis, Nothing But the Same Old Story: The Roots of Anti‐Irish Racism (Information on Ireland, 1984).

Brown, Ireland's Literature, p. 7, my emphasis.

Hewitt, Getting High.

Conversation with Paolo Hewitt, Edinburgh Book Festival, The Spiegeltent, Charlotte Square Gardens, Edinburgh, 24 August 1998.

Gavin Martin, ‘Round are Wa‐hey!’, New Musical Express, 4 May 1996, p. 41.

The Gallaghers' support of Manchester City football club has been a prominent component of their public persona (see, for example, Connolly, Right Here, Right Now).

The fact that Best was a Northern Irish Protestant may have differentiated him, to some extent, from Manchester's Irish Catholic inhabitants. However, his public persona seems to have corresponded relatively straightforwardly with stereotypes of the Irish in England more typically associated with Irish Catholics. Significantly, Best himself was not averse to propagating Celticist notions with regard to people of Irish descent: ‘whether you’re Irish by parentage, by birth, or just have a bit of our blood in the family then it's odds on you'll be all the more interesting and entertaining because of it' (Best, George Best's Soccer Annual No. 5 (Pelham Books, 1972), p. 86).

Oasis, Definitely Maybe (Sony Music Publishing, 1994), pp. 56–57.

Kieran Keohane, ‘Unifying the Fragmented Imaginary of the Young Immigrant: Making a Home in the Post Modern with the Pogues’, Irish Review no. 9 (1990), p. 76.

Ann Scanlon, The Pogues: The Lost Decade (Omnibus Press, 1988), p. 10.

For a brief discussion of the term ‘plastic Paddy’, see Sean Campbell, ‘Beyond “Plastic Paddy”: A Re‐examination of the Second‐generation Irish in England’, Immigrants and Minorities vol. 18, nos 2 & 3 (1999), pp. 266–288.

Danny O'Connor, ‘Noel’s House Party', Irish Post, ‘The Craic!’ section, 14 November 1998, p. 7.

Hutton and Kurt, Don't Look Back in Anger, p. 149.

In Ray Coleman's biography of Lennon, he points to the ‘decidedly Irish heritage’ (Coleman, Lennon (McGraw‐Hill, 1984), p. 18) of the former Beatle, who occasionally expressed a self‐ascriptive identification with Irishness during his Beatles career (Ritchie Yorke, ‘Ringo’s Right. We Can't Tour Again', New Musical Express, 7 June 1969, p. 3). Lennon became involved with Irish republican politics during the early 1970s (Liam Clarke, ‘ “Pro‐IRA” Lennon Spied on by FBI’, Sunday Times, 5 October 1997, p. 10), a period in which his solo work began to exhibit an identifiably Irish dimension. See, for example, ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’, and ‘The Luck of the Irish’ from the album Some Time in New York City (Apple, 1972).

Andrew Perry, ‘No Pictures, Pal’, Select (October 1994), p. 22; Jim Shelley, ‘Hold the Front Page’, Melody Maker, 27 April 1996, p. 21.

Mick St. Michael, Oasis (Sound and Media, 1996), p. 12; Jemma Wheeler, Oasis: How Does It Feel? (Vinyl Experience, 1995), p. 13.

Martin, ‘Round are Wa‐hey!’, p. 41.

Mark Slobin, Subcultural Sounds: Micromusics of the West (University Press of New England, 1993), p. 90.

Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Verso, 1993), p. 99. Although Gilroy is specifically concerned with African‐Caribbean diasporic cultural production, the theoretical frames that his work proffers can be usefully employed in studies of other—differently located—migrant groups.

Mike Connolly (dir.), The Great Hunger: The Life and Songs of Shane MacGowan (BBC2, 4 October 1997); Mike Connolly (dir.), Young Guns Go For It: Dexy's Midnight Runners (BBC2, 13 September, 2000).

Gallagher and Christian, Brothers, pp. 78–79.

For a discussion of ‘independent’, or ‘indie’, music, see David Hesmondhalgh, ‘Indie: The Institutional Politics and Aesthetics of a Popular Music Genre’, Cultural Studies vol. 13, no. 1 (1999), pp. 34–61.

Slobin, Subcultural Sounds, p. 55.

Jon Savage, ‘Rough Emeralds’, Guardian, ‘G2’ section, 17 March 1995, p. 11.

The Beatles, Magical Mystery Tour (Apple, 1967).

Richard Goldstein, ‘He was the Walrus?’, Record Collector (September 1999), p. 112.

See, for example, Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties (Pimlico, 1995), p. 214; Savage, ‘Rough Emeralds’, p. 11.

MacDonald, Revolution in the Head, p. 214.

Jon Savage, England's Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock (Faber and Faber, 1991), pp. 352–353.

Simon Reynolds and Joy Press, The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion and Rock 'n' Roll (Serpent's Tail, 1995), p. 48.

Bruce Dessau, ‘Rebel without a Cause’, City Limits, 12–19 June 1986, p. 12; The Smiths, The Queen is Dead (Rough Trade, 1986).

Frank Owen, ‘Home Thoughts from Abroad’, Melody Maker, 27 September 1986, p. 16.

David Cavanagh, ‘The Good Lieutenants’, Select (April 1993), p. 38.

John Reed, ‘A Year in the Life of Oasis’, Record Collector (January 1995), p. 35; Wheeler, Oasis, p. 13.

Ted Kessler, review of Oasis at the Manchester Apollo, New Musical Express, 10 October 2001, p. 29.

Sean O'Hagan, ‘Guerrillas in our Midst’, Observer, ‘Review’ section, 20 February 2000, p. 2.

Simon Reynolds, ‘Songs of Love and Hate’, Melody Maker, 12 March 1988, p. 33.

See, for example, James L. Watson (ed.), Between Two Cultures: Migrants and Minorities in Britain (Basil Blackwell, 1977). Although such ‘marginal man’ [sic] theories may now be outdated, particularly in studies of the descendants of African‐Caribbean and South Asian immigrants, they were rarely applied to the children of Irish immigrants in the first instance.

This marginality, ‘outsiderness’, and ambivalence could, of course, conceivably pertain to other dimensions of identity‐formation, such as class and region. However, I would suggest that Irish ethnicity in England constitutes a particular form of difference that cannot be decoupled from, and is not simply subsumed by, class or region.

Philip Ullah, ‘Second‐generation Irish Youth: Identity and Ethnicity’, New Community vol. 12, no. 2 (1985), p. 319.

Savage, ‘Rough Emeralds’, p. 11.

In Ullah's ethnographic survey of the second generation, the majority of respondents described themselves as ‘half English, half Irish’ (‘Second‐generation Irish Youth’, p. 312). For a brief discussion of hybridity with specific regard to questions of diasporic identity‐formation, see Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (Routledge, 1994), pp. 41–46.

This is not to suggest that the discursive construction of such differences has been restricted to this particular Celticist moment, but instead to emphasise that this was an especially prominent instance of such constructions in the realm of cultural criticism. For a broader historical engagement with constructions of Irishness in Britain, see Curtis, Apes and Angels; Curtis, Nothing But the Same Old Story; Mary J. Hickman, Religion, Class, and Identity: The State, the Catholic Church and the Education of the Irish in Britain (Avebury, 1995).

For a discussion of the post‐war context in which second‐generation Irish identity‐formation processes have taken place, see Steven Fielding, Class and Ethnicity: Irish Catholics in England 1880–1939 (Open University Press, 1993), pp. 127–133; Hickman, Religion, Class, and Identity, pp. 203–249; Bronwen Walter, Outsiders Inside: Whiteness, Place and Irish Women (Routledge, 2001), pp. 162–193.

Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (Routledge, 1996), p. 209.

E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Penguin, 1963), p. 484.

Savage, ‘Rough Emeralds’, p. 11.

I take these terms from Paul Gilroy's allusion to rap artist Rakim. See Gilroy, ‘ “It Ain’t Where You're From, It's Where You're At”: The Dialectics of Diaspora Identification', Third Text vol. 13 (1991), pp. 3–15.