Going to Glasto this year with your little tent? I only ask because the average age of people who attend this extortionate smugfest is now not terribly distant from that of people who read this magazine. So it is possible that some of you are off to watch good old Neil Young, Nick Lowe and Gary Numan (the average age of headliners has almost tripled since the festival began in 1970) – and, of course, Kneecap, the British band who affiliate themselves with the Provisional IRA, Hamas and Hezbollah. But more about those lovable bhoys in a moment.
The festival was truly counter-cultural for a handful of years. At that first event you could sit in the damp grass and watch the yet-to-be-abbreviated Tyrannosaurus Rex and the prog-rock raga jazz awfulness of Quintessence while coping with the symptoms of botulism occasioned by your beanburger. The average age of festival-goers was about 25; it is now nearly double that. The counter-culture has become the predominant culture – and attendance, performative in itself, verifies the individual as being on the progressive wing of society. You vote Green or Labour or Lib Dem; you support ‘Palestine’, even if you are not wholly sure what is meant by ‘from the river to the sea’; you are proud to recycle.
OK, you’re a little alarmed at the rise in Jimi and Olivia’s school fees this year as a consequence of those new taxes, and you are holding off from installing a heat pump for now. By and large, though, you’re on message, you’re down with da kidz. Except the kidz aren’t there because they find it just a tad embarrassing. But it’s the ethos that matters, isn’t it, you will be thinking to yourself as you try to escape the corporate rock drone of Wolf Alice and wish Dire Straits were on the bill. We are on the right side of history, you tell yourself – the left side.
So it will be interesting to see what Glasto does about one of its acts this year, given that the festival prides itself on providing its creaking audience with radical politics along with a lot of very questionable music. Some years back they gave us Jeremy Corbyn– now they give us… Kneecap.
You will have read about them. A rap trio from West Belfast who, as you might gather from their names, immerse themselves in Oirish culture and spout every fashionable shibboleth of the rad left. Liam Og O hAnnaidh, Naoise O Caireallain and J.J. O Dochartaigh, then. They are on the verge of being prosecuted for saying incendiary stuff, such as chanting in favour of Hezbollah and Hamas and announcing at a gig two years ago: ‘The only good Tory is a dead Tory. Kill your local MP.’
Politicians from both Labour and the Conservatives have demanded that the police get involved, that the Irish government denounce the band and that Glastonbury kick them off the bill. It does occur that perhaps the police might take an interest, seeing as the going rate these days for suggesting that asylum hotels for refugees be burned down is two years and seven months in choky. We have never been happier as a nation to imprison people for the things they say – especially if they’re deemed to come from the political right.
They have been revealed as
charlatans, traitors to the cause and, perhaps even worse, frit
How have Kneecap responded to this sudden outpouring of concern? By screaming: ‘We stand by every word and you won’t take me alive, Bruddish copper!’? Nope. Not at all. By caving in. And in the most pitiable manner imaginable. In a 500-word statement they announced that they’d never supported Hamas and Hezbollah, despite having been caught on camera waving the Hezbollah flag and shouting ‘Up Hamas! Up Hezbollah!’ at one of their gigs. More than that, they had never intended the phrase ‘Kill your local MP’ to be taken as a call to action, despite the fact it is a call to action. ‘To the Amess and Cox families, we send our heartfelt apologies, we never intended to cause you hurt,’ they said in the statement, adding that: ‘Establishment figures, desperate to silence us, have combed through hundreds of hours of footage and interviews, extracting a handful of words from months or years ago to manufacture moral hysteria.’
Oh, you pathetic saps. Have a shred of courage, a spot of steel, a soupçon of conviction. Your supporter base has depended utterly on all that inflammatory anti-British and anti-Israel ur-rhetoric you spout every time you set foot on a stage. Now it seems that the whole thing was a bit of a joke, was itself solely performative. For as soon as those supposed convictions came into conflict with your cash flow, you threw your hands up and sobbed: ‘But we didn’t mean it! Please! We don’t want anybody dead, we want everybody to be happy and love each other!’
Then why would you wave a Hezbollah flag? Why would you affiliate yourself with the Provisional IRA? Why would you instruct people to kill their local MP? Again, the answer, one assumes, is that it was just an act – a highly lucrative act at that – until they got found out a little late in the day.
I have been watching the progress of these grim-faced gobby chancers for two years, and in truth there have been plenty of reasons during that time to get them kicked off their label and banned from performing, if that is what people want. I still cleave to the notion of freedom of speech, however, and so for me the current denouement is serendipitous. Kneecap have been revealed as charlatans, traitors to the cause and – perhaps even worse than that – frit, worried about their careers. They are basically Goldie Lookin Chain – another white, Celtic hip hop band who took the piss, enjoyed a brief moment in the sun, and then were gone.
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