Better rebels than Kneecap would’ve begun their headline set at Wide Awake festival in south London on Friday night with a show of defiance against the British state, a swipe at the occupier in its fortress capital. Perhaps they would’ve unfurled a great big yellow Hezbollah banner. As it was, Kneecap flashed the message ‘FREE PALESTINE’ on a screen, showed a montage of criticism the band had received from Sharon Osbourne, some Fox News pundits and the shadow home secretary Chris Philp, and walked on stage to ‘It’s been ages,’ one of their less popular songs. The moment demanded more.
Kneecap had done a small set at the 100 Club on Oxford Street on Thursday evening, but Wide Awake was their first real show since one of the group’s members, Mo Chara, was charged on Wednesday with terrorism offences by the Metropolitan Police. He’d allegedly waved a Hezbollah flag at a London concert in 2023. There had been two days of latency between the charge and the festival, building a dread and excitement about the band’s response. Before the Wide Awake show, I met a guy called Gary from County Armagh who had a replica of the Irish tricolour balaclava originally worn by band member DJ Provai, and since by the actor Tom Hardy and the former pornstar Mia Khalifa. ‘All this, in London,’ he said, ‘what a moment!’
But Kneecap just did a normal show. Mo Chara was keener to perform than cause trouble. He warned that there were undercover police in the crowd and said ‘Israeli lobbyists’ were targeting him, but that was as transgressive as he got. Between tracks, the band shouted ‘free, free Palestine!’ and ‘Maggie’s in a box!’ and ‘tiocfaidh ar la!’ the Irish republican slogan which means ‘our day will come’. People chant worse on football terraces and outside pubs; these are not shocking things to say anymore. Midway through the show Kneecap changed ‘free, free Palestine’ to ‘free, free Mo Chara’, and the band’s priorities tellingly elided: ending Palestinian suffering, wanting people to know their names.
It’s strange to see Kneecap now getting allocated political motivations, when their politics is so removed from their music. Belfast’s rave culture, for example, influences their sound much more than Irish nationalism.
Mo Chara and Moglai Bap (the third band member) grew up in west Belfast, and Provai in Derry. They are ‘Good Friday Agreement babies’ by their own description, born one step removed from the Troubles. On Fine Art, their debut album, they sample an unaired BBC documentary from 1995 called ‘Dancing on Narrow Ground’, which you can watch on YouTube. It is about young Catholics and Protestants in Belfast mixing at raves, taking drugs together and forgetting their issues. Kneecap have tried to revive this scene that they were too late to live. This is their sound and their project. As kids, Mo Chara and Moglai Bap met in an Irish language centre and together turned an old youth club into a place for raves. When the pair met Provai the trio became Kneecap, and they did their first gig in 2018. In their recollection it was ‘mental’. Everyone piss drunk and full of MDMA, like the old times they missed.
By Kneecap’s recollection, their first gig was ‘mental’
The politics of Kneecap’s members is boilerplate left. ‘There’s a lack of understanding about the systems that uphold class division, sectarianism and racism,’ said Moglai Bap in an interview with the Face last year. ‘Get rid of the monarchy, and the Catholic church too.’ Long before their terror charges, Kneecap said their controversy was part of the act. Mo Chara: ‘We always get people saying we’re promoting sectarianism. We’re all working-class. We’re satirical Fenian cunts.’
The fake rebel routine suited the crowd at Wide Awake just fine. They stood there, mostly British but a lot of Irish, jumping around and making mosh pits and chanting when Kneecap told them to. They wore Ikea-branded bucket hats and Greggs bum bags and old football shirts. Mannequins for cheap commercialised throwbacks. Subversives for an evening.
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