Sunday Times Music Book of the Year 2011 Sean Campbell analyses the 1980s, when English-born Irish musicians such as the Pogues and Morrisey were at the forefront of British popular culture, to tease out the complex relationships between the artists and their nationality, and the influence it had in their output.

We long ago embraced Wilde, Shaw and Sheridan, all Irish playwrights living in England, as integral to a lively British theatre culture. Until now, we have heard less about Morrissey, MacGowan, Rowland and the rest of the second-generation Irish in British popular music. Sean Campbell's enthralling study, with its direct access to these musicians, incisively opens the discussion and sets an exceptionally high standard against which all other interrogations of post-colonialism in pop culture are likely to be weighed.

This is an excellent piece of scholarship, offering an erudite mix of rigorous cultural history and insightful musical analysis. It is a major contribution to popular music scholarship generally and Irish popular music in particular. It very deftly opens up and gives critical texture to the complexities of the in-between spaces of the English/Irish musical world, and significantly forwards discussions of hybridity.

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'.

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

Four stars-Brilliant

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