This is book is that has the feel of an album – somewhere between a kind of ‘best of’ and a home for great tracks that didn't make an appearance elsewhere – from an author coming towards the end of a long and venerable career who displays a real passion for music and words. With its disparate essay topics placed under the rubric of ‘Music and Irish Identity’, the tagline ‘Celtic Tiger Blues’ suggestively positions Smyth's work within the period following the 2008 global economic crash that brought about the abrupt demise of the high-performing, Celtic Tiger economy in Ireland and featured an extended period of government-sponsored austerity (hence the ‘Blues’ which followed). Given that music and the economy are intrinsically linked, changes in fortune suggest a concomitant change in the production and circulation of Irish music in Ireland and beyond. Did it herald a fallow period or new level of creativity, as so often occurs during boom and bust cycles, the title seems to ask, pivoting on the double meaning of ‘the blues’?

As with an album, the ‘Celtic Tiger Blues’ chapter is the book's ‘single’, but like a single it doesn't necessarily provide a thematic arc for the contents in their entirety. Coming at the end of the volume, it is a culmination point of 10 rather loosely sutured chapters in ‘roughly chronological order’ (p. 5). Covering topics from nationalism in Augusta Holmes's classical music, to sonic and stylistic representations of Dublin in story and song, and from reading the grain of the Irish voice in the singing of Mike Scott (The Waterboys) to the use of stereotypes in the London-Irish band The Pogues, a multitude of subjects, music genres and literary works (including those from Bernard MacLaverty, James Joyce and Tim Robinson) are explored. The book, therefore, may be better understood as an exploration of the different ways in which this thing called ‘Irish identity’ is discursively constructed and shown to manifest in specific musical activities or moments (rather than music as discourse).

This is an important point as from the outset the reader needs to appreciate that music and Irish identity are approached here from a literary theory and cultural studies perspective. There is no musicological analysis per se, and although the author is a practising musician, the focus tends to be largely on context followed by close textual readings. This is said not as a criticism but rather to help the reader possibly reorient his or her expectations. Equally, the understanding of what might constitute ‘Irish identity’ arguably stops before the Celtic Tiger. From Dublin originally, Smyth has engaged with issues of identity in Irish literary and musical culture(s) for decades from his base in the UK. However, as such, he is possibly better positioned to provide an engaging read of Irishness that is largely post-colonial and at a theoretical remove, rather than include critical commentary about the last decade that addresses the musicking of new migrants in Ireland and the explosion of associated popular music forms.

From a methodological perspective, then, this is in part why Smyth's criticisms of the shortcomings of traditional musicology and ethnomusicology in the introduction are somewhat problematic as it is unclear whether Smyth fully appreciates the efficacy of and techniques involved in such work, not to mention the importance of further broadening out any understanding of what constitutes popular musical forms in Ireland or ‘Irish music’. Smyth does generously acknowledge the work of others in this respect, including John O'Flynn, but the largely literary focus of the book places it firmly outside of the ethnographic, other than in the opening ‘Prolegomena’, which details a day of personal travel from Liverpool to Dublin to engage in research. While compelling from a narrative perspective, this vignette may feel somewhat indulgent to some and, given many of the references made and people featured are without introduction or contextualisation, it may not make sense to new readers (and therefore doesn't function ethnographically). For the rest of the book, however, it is clear that literary theory and cultural studies approaches inform all of the chapters. However, associated methodological deployments clearly intersect with, and possibly even emanate from, an Irish Studies home, as in Chapter 5, where the author seeks a particular kind of ‘redress’. Here (pp. 76–77) Smyth endeavours to set the record straight on his take of the famous Irish-British band, The Pogues, Smyth's reading of whom (Reference Smyth2005) had been critiqued by another Irish Studies and literary theory luminary, Joe Cleary (Reference Cleary2006).

All of this is by way of asking the question: for whom is this book? Given the wide range of music and literary genres featured, it is clearly not simply a matter for popular music scholars, even those with litpop specialisations. The inclusion of a chapter on the underappreciated ‘classical’ composer Augusta Holmes sees to that (although this chapter does other important work in terms of alleviating some of the gender imbalances in the rest of the book). While the chapter on popular music in Ireland, specifically 1990s and 2000s Dublin, may be of the greatest interest to pop music scholars and fans, it is far from definitive.

The overall production levels of the book are high, but there are, unfortunately, some editorial mishaps. Most notable is the repetition of entire paragraphs virtually verbatim in two different chapters (4 and 10). Writers often borrow from their own research papers when generating new work but more careful oversight should have helped avoid this error, unless, of course, the author was comfortable using the same material in different contexts. All of this said, most importantly, like an album on repeat, this is a book that grows on you, with favourite tracks/tracts and new perspectives revealed in each encounter. It sometimes feels like you are having a pleasant and stimulating conversation with the author, perhaps in one of his Dublin or Liverpool haunts. It is this intimacy, together with the curiosity evidenced in the wide ranges of subject, and the undoubtedly deep knowledge and experience of the author, that makes this book a worthy addition to any popular music and Irish studies library. In the realm of Irish Studies, still dominated by the disciplines of history and literature, this volume may remain locked in an outer orbit, but as (popular) music scholarship grows in Irish studies, that may change. For those popular music analysts turning their attention to music coming out of Ireland and its diaspora, there is plenty of appeal in here. For literary theory and cultural studies scholars, the significance of reading music in this fashion, as text in context, should also prove engaging. In sum, this is undoubtedly a book for anyone interested in popular music and the cultural production of Irishness in Ireland and beyond. However, it is possibly of most value to cultural studies people of a literary bent and with a particular love of the musics featured here (just like the author). Smyth's nuanced and specific perspectives contribute to a deeper understanding of Irish popular musics in the broadest and hence non-disciplinary-specific of senses. In this way, Smyth caps decades of fruitful engagement within that constellation of music, literature, identity and Irishness, in a form that bears his unique imprint.