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From 'Boys' to 'Lads': Masculinity and Irish Rock Culture
Sean Campbell
Reader in Media Culture, Anglia Ruskin, UKIntroductionMusicality
has been an enduring trope in constructions of Irishness since at least
the twelfth century (Smyth 2009: 2-3). Moreover, music making has
played a major role in Irish culture at home and among the global
diaspora (Cullen 2012; Murphy 2012). However, as late as the 1990s, the
musicologist Harry White could observe that ‘music does not form
much (if any) part of the vigorous discourse which preoccupies thinkers
in their assessment of the condition of being Irish and of
Ireland’ (cited in McCarthy 1999: 5). This curious lacuna has
been counterbalanced in recent years via a series of texts on popular
musical practices in Ireland and among the diaspora (Campbell 2011;
McLaughlin and McLoone 2012; O’Flynn 2009; Smyth 2009). While
this emerging address has been useful in opening up our understanding
of Irish music, it has – with few exceptions (McLaughlin and
McLoone 2012; Sullivan 2006) – sidelined issues of gender
generally, and masculinity particularly. This is unfortunate, as the
Catholic-nationalist ideologies of independent Ireland have
unquestionably had ‘specific implications for the construction of
young masculinities’ (Mac an Ghaill 2000: 52). Moreover, male
Irish musicians have often engaged with gender issues in noteworthy
ways (Frith and McRobbie 1990: 374, 382; Gilbert 1999: 45; Reynolds and
Press 1994: 48, 68-9). This article explores invocations of masculinity
in Irish popular music culture, addressing how they operate alongside
ideas of marginality in the work of key Irish-associated rock acts.
Masculinity is, of course, ‘not static or essential’,
as Taylor Houston explains, but it does have hegemonic
modes that stress certain values such as ‘strength, competition,
violence, prestige, rationality, heterosexuality, sexualization of
women, homophobia, and suppression of emotion’. Its alternate
modes, meanwhile, have comprised less conventionally
‘masculine’ or (what might be socially perceived as)
feminine values, including, for Houston: ‘expressing emotions
such as caring, joy, sadness, anxiety, and fear; being openly
affectionate with peers; maintaining stylized/fashion forward dress
codes that accentuate the body … and performing activities that
sexualize the body and draw the gaze of onlookers’ (Houston 2012:
159). This article explores the enactment, contestation and restoration
of hegemonic masculinities in Irish rock culture across three decades
(1970s-1990s) and different musical milieus (hard rock, post-punk,
indie), whilst addressing instances in which alternate modes of
masculinity served to challenge hegemonic norms. Beginning with a
reflection on Thin Lizzy, the bulk of the essay focuses on the work of
the Dublin-based band U2, and the Manchester-Irish act Oasis. ‘The Boys Are Back in Town’: Thin Lizzy
In
the first scholarly account of masculinity in rock, Simon Frith and
Angela McRobbie (writing in the late 1970s) observed a trend they
called ‘cock rock’ (1990: 374). Describing this practice as
‘an explicit, crude, and often aggressive expression of male
sexuality’ (1990: 374), they claimed that it was best evinced in
the work of Thin Lizzy (1990: 374-5), the Irish band led by Phil
Lynott, who came to international fame via the hit song, ‘The
Boys Are Back in Town’ (1976). Frith and McRobbie cite the cover
of the band’s album, Live and Dangerous (1978), which comprised,
note Noel McLaughlin and Martin McLoone, ‘a low angle
“crotch shot” of a bare-chested Lynott, his phallic bass
guitar resting on his upper thigh as he (seemingly) groans in sexual
ecstasy’ (2012: 94). Such imagery was underlined, for Frith and
McRobbie, by a comment that Lynott would make during the group’s
live shows of this period. Prior to his band’s performance of the
song ‘Emerald’ (1976) (which invoked Irish themes and
styles), Lynott would address the audience with an ostensibly affable
enquiry: ‘Is there anybody here with any Irish in them?’
Amidst the affirmative cheers from innumerable members of the audience,
Lynott would affix an audacious follow-up question: ‘Is there any
of the girls who would like a little more Irish in them?’ (cited
in Frith and McRobbie 1990: 382).
Such
moments invoke what critics have seen as the two sides of
Lynott’s persona: the ‘soft’ sentimentalist
(‘Is there anyone here with any Irish in them?’) and the
‘hard’ chauvinist (‘Is there any of the girls
who’d like a little more … ’). The co-existence of
these modes is said to account for Lynott’s popular (and
enduring) appeal (Campbell and Smyth 2005: 45-7). Whether or not this
is the case, it is clear that his band’s rendition of
‘Emerald’ staged a highly gendered conception of Irish
ethnicity, in part via Lynott’s low-register opening words
(‘Down from the glen came the marching men/with their shields and
their swords’), but also through the ‘cock rock’
rhetoric that Lynott deployed in his spoken-word preface, in which he
conjoined a rather crude form of male sexuality with an overt
expression of Irish ethnicity, presenting himself as a kind of fount of
Irishness, and offering to infuse fans with this identity.
Such
posturing had the effect of obscuring Lynott’s own rather complex
position vis a vis Ireland, for the singer had been born in England to
an Afro-Guyanese father and an Irish mother, and spent much of his
early life in England, where his mother continued to live after Lynott
relocated to Ireland at the age of four (Lynott 2011). Lynott’s
biography was, then, profoundly diasporic (and his national identity
marked by de-territoriality). In this context, Lynott’s onstage
bravado arguably served as a means to offset his own outsiderness, with
the singer perhaps (over-) compensating for the ostensible absence of
an orthodox Irish identity through the adoption of an overblown
mannishness. This appears to be the view of McLaughlin and McLoone, who
suggest, in their account of Lynott: ‘When you are doubly
“othered” it is not surprising that a lot of the songs you
write tend to glorify being “one of the gang”’ (2012:
95). In this sense, the machismo that was manifested in ‘The Boys
Are Back in Town’ and ‘Emerald’ – not to
mention the ‘little bit of Irish’ comment – might be
seen to mollify the anomalousness that attended the experience of a
black-skinned, English-born boy in 1970s Ireland. This matrix of
mainstream masculinity and social marginality would emerge in other key
Irish rock projects, albeit in markedly different ways.
The
‘swaggering chauvinism’ of Thin Lizzy (Reynolds and Press
1994: 69) was largely eschewed by the wave of musicians who emerged in
the 1980s. This new generation came of age in the immediate aftermath
of punk, whose ‘year zero’ effects brought significant
aesthetic and ideological shifts to popular music (Savage 1991). While
this was most obviously registered through sound and style, it was also
evinced through punk’s inchoate gender politics, which (at least
initially) displayed a disdain for rock machismo (Mueller 1989; Savage
1991) and afforded a space to what Jon Savage calls ‘weird boys
[and] hopeless boys’ (Thomson 2010). In an Irish context, early
post-punk bands, such as U2, aligned themselves with anti-sexist
projects (Breen 1979) whilst mining an expressly male imaginary, most
notably through the title, songs and artwork of their debut album, Boy
(1980). The latter’s sleeve comprised a stark close up of a young
boy and featured songs such as ‘Stories for Boys’, a
self-conscious address to male interests. However, in marked contrast
to the noted machismo of Thin Lizzy, such efforts staged a quite
reflective address to the in-between space of male adolescence. From Boy to Man: U2
The
figure of the boy in popular music has often functioned, note Ian
Biddle and Freya Jarman-Ivens, as ‘a site of slippage’,
occupying ‘the border between childhood and adulthood’. In
this context, the authors note that
The
androgyny that underpins the boy’s body – the hairlessness,
his ‘pretty’ face – also positions him at a point on
the borderline between the sexes … [and] between effeminacy and
homosexuality (Biddle and Jarman-Ivens 2007: 6).
The
transitioning space implied here (and particularly the moment of coming
into male adulthood) became the focus of U2’s early work:
‘In the shadow/boy meets man’, sang Bono in the quiet
refrain of ‘Twilight’ (1980), a key song on the
band’s debut album. Such songs conjured, through voice and
instrumentation, a somewhat liminal sense of self. Thus, Bono’s
singing (which drew on the vocal styling of English punk singer
Siouxsie Sioux) often sounded self-consciously child-like (and even
‘like a girl’, as Bono later acknowledged) (Moolallem and
Guggenheim 2011). Meanwhile, the Edge’s guitar playing was
informed by what the musician claimed at the time were more
‘feminine’ tones, with the guitarist developing
‘highly personal theories about the “sex” of guitar
strings and creating chords that left out certain “male”
notes to give them a more fluid “female” character’
(McCormick 2012: 17). The Edge’s guitar playing thus eschewed the
power-chords, blues-based riffs and virtuosic soloing associated with
more ‘masculine’ modes of rock (and, notably, with 1970s
Irish musicians such as Thin Lizzy and Rory Gallagher). It is worth
noting that certain listeners felt that there was a ‘queer’
sub-text to the Boy album (Stokes 2005: 11). In this context, Bono
notes a conversation with one such critic: ‘he was saying
he’d always thought of us as a gay band ... He made the point
that within the gay community, people were excited about the fact that
we were the first band to deal with sex outside machismo’ (cited
in Stokes 2005: 11).
Whether
or not this is the case, it is clear that the post-punk musicians who
came to prominence in 1980s Ireland would present a more complex
address to issues of masculinity than their 1970s predecessors. Indeed,
even figures such as Lynott would evince, in the eighties, less
traditionalist modes of masculine rock. Thus, the singer’s best
known solo track, ‘Old Town’ (1982), which featured
synthesizer instead of guitar, included the memorable hook-line
‘this boy is cracking up/this boy has broken down’, a much
less celebratory invocation of the ‘boy’ than that which
informed ‘The Boys Are Back in Town’. If such
self-reflection served to correct the ‘cock rock’ persona
of Thin Lizzy, then the early eighties milieu in which U2 emerged also
sought to cast itself against the more hegemonic modes of male identity
in 1970s Ireland. Thus, the members of U2 often stressed their
rejection, in their formative phase, of the normative codes of Irish
masculinity, eschewing the ‘macho’ spaces of the sports
field and the pub. ‘We didn’t drink’ and
‘didn’t play soccer’, says Bono of this period
(Wenner 2005), adding that he viewed Gaelic sports as
‘neanderthal’ (Waters 1994: 71). Thus, U2 defined
themselves against the ‘hard’ masculinities of late 1970s
Dublin, not least (what Bono calls) ‘the jocks’, ‘the
skinheads’, and ‘the bootboys’ (Heffernan 2000;
Wenner 2005).
It
is clear, then, that U2 felt a sense of difference in 1970s Ireland. In
this context, it is worth noting that the Protestant and British
aspects of the musicians’ upbringings were at odds with the
(Catholic, nationalist) ideologies that infused Irish life at this
time. Thus, Bono, the band’s singer, was raised in the
(Protestant) Church of Ireland, while U2’s guitarist, the Edge,
was born in London to Welsh Presbyterian parents (Dunphy 1987).
Reflecting on this point, the Edge explains: ‘Growing up as a
kid, I always felt that I didn’t quite belong [in
Ireland]’. He goes on: ‘in a weird way, that’s why I
got into music … in an attempt to resolve that to some extent
(Waters 1993: 289). Bono also felt at variance with conventional Irish
identities, suggesting that, as a youth, he ‘didn’t
know’ whether he was ‘Protestant, Catholic, English
… or Irish’ (Waters 1994: 71). This aspect of U2 would
evidently inform the band’s reception. Thus, at the band’s
early shows, anti-Protestant comments were shouted from the crowd
(McElhatton 1979), alongside other sectarian gestures from a group
known as ‘the black Catholics’ (Graham 1989). Even
the band’s supporters, such as the Dublin music paper, Hot Press,
noted U2’s social difference, describing them in early reviews as
‘Church of Ireland rock ‘n’ roll’ (Lynch 1979).
Not unlike Phil Lynott, then, U2 were in certain ways seen as outsiders
in Ireland. And like Lynott, they seem to have found a symbolic
‘home’ in the realm of Anglo-American rock.
In
this respect, the creative sources that informed U2’s early work
were David Bowie and Patti Smith (McCormick 2012: 16). Such figures had
of course staged transgressive disruptions of pop’s traditional
gender codes in the 1970s (Whiteley 1997). Despite this point, though,
post-Boy U2 would assume, throughout the 1980s, a highly masculinized
set of personae, from the quasi-military posturing of War (1983) to the
pioneer poses of The Joshua Tree (1987). Indeed, when the band came to
perform a major ‘homecoming’ concert in the mid-1980s at
Dublin’s Croke Park (the headquarters of the Gaelic Athletic
Association [GAA], an institution imbued with nationalism, Catholicism
and male athleticism) (Cronin et al 2009), Bono rhetorically compared
the band to a Gaelic sports team. ‘The Jacks are back!’, he
exclaimed from the stage, alluding to the nickname of Dublin’s
GAA team. ‘And what an All-Ireland we have for you
tonight’, he went on, conflating the concert with a sports event.
Such jocular gestures arguably had echoes of Phil Lynott’s acts
of overcompensation, with Bono eliding the band’s outsiderness
via an association with official Irish culture. Despite their
masculinized performance, though, U2 made little direct address to
issues of gender or sexuality in their creative work. Thus, Simon
Reynolds and Joy Press observe that U2’s songs prior to the 1990s
elided bodily themes, both in terms of their pleasures and their
politics. Reflecting on this point, Reynolds and Press suggest (with
reference to the song lyrics and stage persona of the young Bono) that
For
the young warrior, ardour for lofty abstractions and cosmic intangibles
is a way of sublimating sexuality; male-bonding is purged of
homoeroticism because passion is projected outwards to a distant goal
or vision. It was very apparent, at the height of U2’s success in
1987, that their mission spirit involved a similar evasion of sexuality
and gender. Everything about U2 – from their lyrics to
Bono’s bellow to the Edge’s ionospheric guitar – was
‘uplifting’, veering towards the sun and away from seething
male hormones and sticky female secretions. It was remarkable that for
a band with five albums under their belt, that not a single U2 song
dealt with desire or love – unless it was universal rather than
flesh-and-blood (1994: 82).
This
aspect of U2 also extended to interviews. Thus, when Bono, a famously
effusive (and articulate) interviewee, was faced with questions about
his own sexuality, he was unusually reticent (Block 1989). Such
restraint was seen to confirm critics’ claims that U2’s
oeuvre was ‘sexless’ (Block 1989).
This
feature of the band would undergo a striking transformation, however,
at the start of the 1990s. Following a period of creative crisis (after
the perceived failings of their most retrogressive effort, Rattle and
Hum [1988]), the band embarked on a process of reflection and
experimentation. This would, in turn, bring issues of gender and
sexuality to the fore of their work. Thus, the sleeve of U2’s
first record of the nineties, Achtung Baby (1991), replaced the stark,
pre-pubescent boy of their debut LP with a multihued collage of,
amongst other things, the Edge’s crotch, a naked Adam Clayton,
and Bono aside a bare-chested woman. Such imagery echoed the themes of
the band’s new songs, which comprised allusions to such hitherto
uncharted topics (at least for U2) as oral sex, divorce and male/female
relations in general. As Reynolds and Press observed, ‘there were
more instances of “she” and “her” in the lyrics
of a single song on Achtung Baby than in the rest of the U2 oeuvre put
together’ (1994: 83). This thematic turn towards sexuality and
the feminine was also played out at the group’s live shows, where
a leather-clad Bono would self-consciously cavort with a belly dancer,
before spraying female fans with a (phallic-like) bottle of champagne,
and directing on-stage video cameras towards his lips or crotch (Godley
1992). Such signals marked a distinct loosening of the aesthetic and
ideological stance that U2 had assumed in the 1980s. Indeed, this new
persona appeared to serve as a re-working of 1970s ‘cock
rock’ for the (postmodern) nineties, refracted through the (then)
fashionable prism of irony and play. Thus, Bono was seen to be
self-reflexively masquerading as the ‘macho’ rock star,
rather than simply being one.
If
this (re-) staging of U2’s sexuality was assuaged in part by its
ironic inflection (and by the group’s hitherto sincere personae),
it was also allayed by the band’s accretion of androgynous
styles, most notably in the video for ‘One’ (1992), which
featured the musicians in full make-up and drag (Corbijn 1992). This
visual foray into feminine modes was enhanced by Bono’s vocal
experimentations with falsetto styles on key tracks like ‘The
Fly’ (1991), ‘Lemon’ (1993) and ‘Numb’
(1993). Such songs marked a departure in the U2 sound, not only via
their singer’s incursion into uncharted registers, but also
through the band’s increasingly synthetic and dance-oriented
styles, which invoked pop artifice more than rock authenticity
(Keightley 2001). If this shift carried certain gender implications
(pop has been seen as a less masculine form) (Reynolds and Press 1994:
4-5), then the gendered connotations of Bono’s new voicing were
made clear by the band in interviews, where they called it his
‘fat lady’ voice (McCormick 2006: 225). Indeed, falsetto
arguably acts as ‘a form of drag’, a ‘vocal
masquerade’ that affords male singers more ‘feminine’
positions (Miller 2003) and thus ‘confuses gender
distinctions’ (Whiteley 2007: 31). In this respect, falsetto
functions as
the
stuff of ‘anti-masculine’ musics, situated in a dialogic
relationship with the traditional ‘cock-rock’ canon, and
thereby exposing something of what we perceive to be
‘masculinity’ in musical expression (Biddle and
Jarman-Ivens 2007: 7-8).
Thus,
Bono’s ‘fat lady’ voice – in conjunction with
other sonic and visual shifts in U2’s persona at the start of the
1990s – signaled new possibilities for how masculinity might be
configured in Irish rock. While U2 continued with this project in the
1990s, most notably in the video for ‘Discothèque’
(Sednaoui 1997) (which included an homage to the Village People), they
returned to more mainstream masculine modes after 2000, with Bono
describing himself in interviews as ‘a macho, Irish guy’
(Degeneres 2011).
Outside
of Ireland, of course, alternate masculinities had often been explored
in the sphere of Anglo-American rock, which has served as a site of
gender transgression and experimentation, offering a visible space in
which men can assume less hegemonic modes of male identity (Hawkins
2009; Whiteley 1997). While this was less evident in pre-1990s Ireland
(where rock was dominated by relatively conventional figures such as
Van Morrison, Rory Gallagher and Philip Lynott) (Smyth 2005), it had
certainly been the case in Britain. In this context, McLaughlin and
McLoone explain that Irish popular music culture, with its stress on
notions of the ‘organic’ and ‘authentic’,
did
not develop the same kind of ‘plastic arts’ or
‘androgynous pop’ familiar to British culture, especially
in the gender-bending days of glam rock in the early 1970s (David
Bowie, Marc Bolan and others) and the era of The Human League, Soft
Cell, as well as The Pet Shop Boys, Jimmy Somerville and Boy George in
the 1980s. British, especially English, popular music, in other words,
has long embraced the plastic arts, and much interesting English music
sits in the hinterland of pop plasticity and art-rock complexity, of
the authentic and in-authentic (one need only think of the hybrids of
the pop song and electronica in punk’s aftermath and the threat
it posed to ‘real’ music and ‘creativity’, and
dominant, ‘naturalised’ conceptions of masculinity). This
provided an experimental, risk-taking musical and performative culture
that allowed for sexual ambivalence and playfulness. But in Ireland,
the climate was very different (McLaughlin and McLoone 2014).
While
this might have been the case for island-Irish popular music, it was
perhaps less true of the Irish diaspora in England, many of whose key
figures had critiqued pop’s gender norms. Masculinity and music making among the Irish in England
This
section of the diaspora has, since the 1970s, played a key role in
popular music, via figures like John Lydon, Kevin Rowland, Boy George
(George O’Dowd), Morrissey, Shane MacGowan, and Noel and Liam
Gallagher (of Oasis) (Savage 1995). Morrissey and Boy George, in
particular, were at the forefront of challenging masculine norms in pop
in the 1980s. They were also perceived to be on the margins of Irish
life in England. In this context, the young Boy George was seen –
amongst his Irish migrant milieu – as ‘the Irish-Catholic
clan’s odd duck’ (Fricke 1983). The young Morrissey was
also seen to be at odds with the normative codes of Irish migrant life
(Rogan 1992: 69). Moreover, when the singer came to public attention,
as the ‘unmanly’ front man of The Smiths (Reynolds and
Press 1994: 48), his work would ‘take the cock out of
rock’, as the NME put it (Brown 1988). Whether or not this is the
case, the gestures of Boy George and Morrissey would (in their
different ways) expose rock’s masculine modes, for as Biddle and
Jarman-Ivens have explained,
those
places where masculinity becomes most legible are precisely those
places where it leaves normatively ‘masculine’ musical
expression, when it ceases to be the music of self-assuredly normative
‘masculine’ bodies (2007: 7).
Despite
their achievements and significance, however, figures such as Morrissey
and Boy George were not always acknowledged as Irish in the 1980s (the
decade when they came to attention), as England’s Irish were
assumed (at this time) to be located outside of the
‘authentic’ territorial space of Irishness (Scully 2010),
despite the sense of Irish difference evinced by Ireland’s
diaspora in England (Ullah 1985; Ullah 1990). At the turn of the 1990s,
though, this strand of Ireland’s diaspora would become
increasingly visible (and increasingly acknowledged as Irish) in
Ireland. This shift was born, at least in part, of the new stress on
diaspora that was made by the (then) President of Ireland, Mary
Robinson, through the symbolic ‘light in the window’ that
she placed for Ireland’s diaspora at the President’s Dublin
residence in 1990, and via the celebrated speech (‘Cherishing the
Irish Diaspora’) that she made to the Irish government in 1995,
which argued that ‘the men and women of our diaspora ... remain,
even while absent … a precious reminder of the many strands of
identity which compose our story’ (cited in Gray 1996: 182).
This
discursive weaving of Ireland’s diaspora into the web of Irish
identity coincided with a conspicuous increase in the visibility of
England’s Irish in popular culture. This visibility was largely
brought about by the role of the second-generation Irish in the
Republic of Ireland football team during the early 1990s. This
incarnation of the Ireland team (which reached the quarter finals of
the World Cup in 1990) had the effect of increasing awareness of
Ireland’s diaspora in England (Holmes 1994). The invocations of
Irish ethnicity associated with these athletes (and their fans) were,
of course, highly gendered (Free 2007). Such modes of masculinity were,
moreover, of a piece with perceived ideas of Irish manhood in England
which have been infused, note Mary Hickman and Bronwen Walter, with
notions of physical strength and bibulousness (1995: 12). While this
narrow index of Irish maleness had been eschewed by Irish diaspora
musicians (such as Morrissey and Boy George) in the 1980s, this was
less evident in the 1990s, when popular culture (particularly in
Britain) became imbued with an especially regressive form of
masculinity centered on the ‘new lad’, a term coined in the
1990s to denote the increasingly loutish young masculinities that
became prevalent in popular culture. As Joanna Knowles has observed:
‘The New Lad represented a brash, regressive mode of young
British male culture that dominated the 1990s’ (2004: 569). This
figure was, Knowles notes, ‘consciously immature and
anti-intellectual, preferring a lifestyle of drinking, casual sex and
“masculine” leisure pursuits – particularly football
and violence’ (2004: 569). For Knowles, this new pop-cultural
figure was ‘epitomized by Oasis singer Liam Gallagher’
(2004: 569). Whether or not this is the case, it is clear that the
‘new lad’s emergence on the popular-cultural landscape
coincided with the advent of Oasis, who became one of the
decade’s most high-profile rock acts.
The
‘laddishness’ of Oasis was staged in myriad ways, not least
via their ‘vacant hedonism’ (Reynolds 2001: 28), cocky
persona and sporting attire, as well as through certain musical means,
including the generally low-register – as well as strained and
throaty singing style – of lead vocalist Liam, which was
augmented by the band’s use of high volume, distortion, and
lengthy (and often blues-based) guitar solos. The latter, in
particular, was an inheritance of the 1970s ‘cock rock’
that had been disavowed by U2 and The Smiths, and had become
antithetical to the British ‘indie’ scene with which Oasis
were associated (Bannister 2006). As Houston explains, indie rock had
often comprised a certain challenge to ‘hegemonic constructions
of masculinity’ (Houston 2012: 160). Despite their aesthetic
inheritance to indie, however, Oasis would come to restore rock’s
conventional gender tropes in the 1990s, leading to claims that they
had revived a ‘reactionary rock masculinity’ (Gilbert 1999:
45).
‘Irish lads’ and Oasis
Emerging
in the English city of Manchester in 1991, Oasis comprised five
musicians of immediate Irish descent, and centered on the brothers,
Noel and Liam Gallagher, who served as songwriter and lead singer,
respectively. Irish ethnicity was a key aspect of their persona, and
served as a crucial point of commonality amongst the band members.
‘The reason Oasis came together’, explained Tony McCarroll,
the group’s drummer, ‘was because we were Irish Mancunians
and working class’ (Yates 1999). If this context informed the
group’s formation, it also played a role in their demise.
Reflecting on the intra-group acrimony that impelled Oasis’
split, Noel Gallagher claimed this was an effect of the band’s
Irish masculinity. ‘If I could turn the clock back’, he
suggested, ‘I’d go for a walk [and] consider what I was
going to do’. ‘But we’re Irish lads’, he
continued. ‘When the red mist comes down you’re going to
kill some cunt’ (Hodgkinson 2011).
Such
conflations of violence and Irish ethnicity are highly problematic,
particularly in light of the fraught history of Anglo-Irish relations
(Hill 1987). The point to note for the moment, though, is that this
casual invocation of Oasis as ‘Irish lads’ was somewhat at
odds with the ambivalence the band expressed towards orthodox Irish
masculinities. In this context, one of Oasis’s best-known songs,
‘Whatever’ (1994), a major UK hit, was informed by Noel
Gallagher’s wish to throw off (what he saw as) the rather rigid
form of Irish ethnicity that (he felt) had been imposed on him by his
Irish-born father. Reflecting on this point, Noel’s elder brother
Paul recalls that
Noel
was never into the Irish clubs and all that; he found them depressing,
with too many bad associations. I reckon that’s why my dad picked
on him. Noel didn’t want to be what he always called me –
‘a plastic Paddy’. He didn’t like the music …
the bad jokes and the strange level of hypocrisy that existed in
Manchester’s Irish community. Everybody knew everybody else. You
were expected to go out with a girl who was of Irish descent, get
engaged, get married, have kids and steer them through the same rituals
of school and that community which really belonged to another time and
idealised itself … I think Noel felt shackled by it and stifled.
If there was anything he was going to rebel against, it was all that
hypocrisy as he saw it; a life being mapped out before him. Those Irish
tunes were the sounds of oppression. When Noel wrote the lyrics to
‘Whatever’, was he singing about escaping from our father
and the Irish heritage he felt being forced down his throat? He
didn’t want to be that typical Irish lad at all (Gallagher and
Christian 1996: 67-8: emphases added).
Noel’s
refusal of his father’s wish for him to be a ‘typical Irish
lad’ has resonances with the accounts of other diaspora
musicians, not least those outlined above (Campbell 2011). One of the
means by which Noel appears to have expressed this resistance was via
an occasional gravitation towards Englishness and/or Britishness
(Gallagher and Christian 1996). In this context, it is worth noting
that Gallagher appeared on stage with Oasis playing a guitar adorned
with the British flag, an apparent gesture of affiliation with the host
culture, and a tacit endorsement of Britpop, a phenomenon associated
with British nationalism (Bennett and Stratton 2010). As David
Hesmondhalgh suggests, however, ‘the Irish roots of the two
brothers, Noel and Liam Gallagher, at the centre of Oasis, make [their]
relationship ... to the phenomenon [of Britpop] quite complex’
(1999: 52). Indeed, when Oasis were asked to record a song for the
England football team in 1996, the band responded with a robust
assertion of their Irishness: ‘over my dead body’, Noel
Gallagher said, ‘we’re Irish’ (Masterson 1996: 56).
These
ostensibly incongruous gestures point to the ambivalence that has been
observed among the Irish diaspora in England (Arrowsmith 1998; Ullah
1985). The music critic, Jon Savage, suggests this ambivalence is
evidenced in Oasis, and originates in ‘an aspirant will to
succeed, to move on up and out, to go further than their parents were
allowed to go, allied to a fierce pride and anger about their
background’ (Savage 1995). Such ambivalence is arguably evoked on
the ‘Whatever’ single cited above, for despite that
song’s allusion to eschewing Irish ethnicity, the track’s
B-side, ‘(It’s Good) To Be Free’ (1994), comprised
Oasis’ only foray into Irish-sounding styles. Although this track
was largely typical of the band’s oeuvre in terms of style and
delivery, during its coda – signaled by a burst of guitar
feedback – there is a distinctive switching of musical codes
(Slobin 1993: 87). Here, a jaunty folk-style melody is performed on an
accordion by Paul Arthurs, the band’s (then) rhythm guitarist,
who had previously played the instrument in a traditional Irish band in
Manchester (Hewitt 1997: 141). Arthurs’ accordion is accompanied
by a set of male voices laughing and cheering, as if to replicate the
ambience of an Irish social club. This
implied conjunction of Irish ethnicity and male camaraderie was invoked
in innumerable ways in the band’s oeuvre. Thus, in a promotional
film made for British television in 1997, the band members were seen
returning to their Manchester home, where they surveyed the key
locations of their youth, including the fields where they played
football, as well as a local record store that, as Liam explained in
passing, ‘sold some good old Wolfe Tones records’ (Connolly
1997). The Wolfe Tones (a folk band associated with Irish nationalist
views) have enjoyed a certain degree of popularity among the Irish
diaspora in England (Ullah 1990: 179). However, it was not the
Wolfe Tones, but Thin Lizzy, that supplied the soundtrack to this Oasis
film, with the latter’s track, ‘The Boys Are Back In
Town’, being played over the film’s opening scenes (which
tacitly framed Oasis as the titular ‘boys’). Admittedly,
Oasis’ masculinity was somewhat different to that of Thin Lizzy
(the former were seen more as ‘yob rock’ than ‘cock
rock’) (Stud and Price 1996), but the band’s use of
‘The Boys Are Back in Town’ underlined their
self-ascription as ‘Irish lads’, and invoked the mode of
Irish masculinity that was evident elsewhere in their work.
Performing Irish masculinity
One
of the key means through which Oasis invoked their Irish ethnicity was
via their authorization of a biography that expressly located them
in an Irish diasporic context (Hewitt 1997). This book achieved this
act of cultural self-location, moreover, in markedly gendered ways.
Thus, the book’s opening pages observed: ‘Hard people, the
Irish: hard workers, hard thinkers, hard players’ (p. 15). This
‘hard’ Irishness is then inferred in Oasis’ oeuvre.
Here, Hewitt suggests that an Irish ‘sense of freedom aligned
with a drinking culture’ became a ‘principle’ that
the band ‘would stand for’ (p. 69). Similarly, he observes
that Noel Gallagher’s professional commitment to Oasis was
‘a direct result of his Irish blood and a Catholic upbringing
which demands full and utter dedication’ (p. 102). Elsewhere,
Hewitt notes Noel’s involvement in Gaelic sports (Gallagher had
played Gaelic football at Croke Park in the 1980s) (Sweeney 2012),
seeing this as invaluable preparation for his later lifestyle:
‘this is where Noel would have gained his strength from,
developing a strong constitution that would be constantly tested by
drink and drugs in the coming years’ (p. 84).
The
band’s laddishness is illumined by this mode of Irishness.
Throughout the biography, displays of physical violence become a
recurrent trope, underlining the simplistic caricatures of Oasis that
emerged in the British tabloid press (Duff 1996; O’Brien et all
1996; Wright and Wallace 1996; Darvill and McJannet 1998). Thus, we
learn of Liam’s bar room brawling in Manchester (p. 310) and are
informed of Noel’s ‘violent side’ (p. 100). The
source of this behaviour is expressly located in the band’s
Irishness: they had, notes Hewitt, ‘undoubtedly inherited large
doses of that wild-hearted spirit which sustains and propels all Irish
rebels’ (p. 149). This invocation of archaic – and highly
masculinized – archetypes was, moreover, echoed in the
band’s other performance media, such as record sleeves and song
lyrics.
The
sleeve art of the group’s debut album Definitely Maybe (1994),
for instance, features a horizontal Liam Gallagher framed by a packet
of cigarettes and an alcoholic drink, while in the lower right hand
corner of the sleeve is a photograph of football player George Best.
The decision to include an image of Best – who, as a former
Manchester United player, would be unfavourable to Manchester City
supporters such as the Gallaghers (Connolly 1997) – is
clarified by Noel, who notes that Best ‘was first and foremost an
Irishman’ (p. 280). However, Best was not simply an Irishman, but
a hard-drinking and professionally erratic Irish sportsman living in
England in the 1960s.
As
some of Oasis’ songs evoked such sensibilities, this image of
Best arguably served as an index of the mode of Irish masculinity that
Oasis engaged in their persona. Perhaps the most striking instance of
this was found on the album’s eighth track, ‘Cigarettes and
Alcohol’, which seemed to animate the sleeve image: ‘Is it
worth the aggravation/To find yourself a job when there’s nothing
worth working for?/It’s a crazy situation/But all I need are
cigarettes and alcohol!’. If such sentiments evoke the
‘laddishness’ of the mid-1990s, they also echo certain
stereotypes of the Irish in England, not least those regarding
alcoholism and indolence. As outlined above, such stereotypes had
largely been eschewed by Irish diaspora musicians in the 1980s.
However, a notable exception in this regard was Shane MacGowan and his
group, The Pogues, whose work confirmed certain stereotypes of the
Irish, not least those pertaining to ‘drunkenness’ and
‘aggression’ (Smyth 2005: 75). This accretion of archaic
archetypes has been chastised for its regressiveness (Smyth 1992).
Oasis’ allusions to alcohol consumption, read in conjunction with
the group’s ‘hard’ persona (and ascription as
‘Irish lads’) arguably points to a similarly retrogressive
conception of Irish masculinity. As English-born (and English-accented)
musicians, the ‘Irish lad’ appears to have offered an
accessible means by which to assert Irish ethnicity in the
popular-cultural matrix of the 1990s.
Coda
Eschewing
the alternate modes of masculinity that emerged in the 1980s, Oasis
assumed an unashamedly ‘laddish’ persona that served to
restore to popular music culture a highly conventionalized masculinity,
with expressly Irish inflections. In this sense, Oasis’ persona
had more in common with the pre-punk machismo associated with Thin
Lizzy than the post-punk innovations explored by U2. The enactment,
contestation and restoration of hegemonic masculinities across three
decades, and shifting musical milieus, brings to light the different
modes of masculinity deployed in Irish rock culture, from the
‘boyish’ bravado of Thin Lizzy to the reflective
‘boy’ of early U2, and via the playful men of 1990s U2 to
the laddish regression of Oasis. Some of the most striking engagements
with masculinity in Irish rock culture have, moreover, emerged from
musicians who in many ways were marginal to mainstream Irishness,
whether through religion, ethnicity or place of birth. In this sense,
masculinity seems to have served as a means for marginal figures to
slip, through a certain musical sphere, into the stream of Irish
culture, enabling outsiders to assume more orthodox identities. While
scholarly work has recently addressed Irish rock as a popular-musical
practice, this address has often sidelined issues of gender. This
article has outlined the salience of masculinity in Irish rock culture.
The task that lies ahead for scholars in this field is to theorize
notions of nation and ethnicity alongside those of gender in making
sense of this often overlooked strand of popular music culture.
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Oasis (1994) ‘(It’s Good) To Be Free’ (‘Whatever’) Creation.
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U2 (1983) War. Island
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