Belfast rappers Kneecap on stunts, drugs and Kemi Badenoch: ‘We don’t discriminate who we piss off’
A slow afternoon in the warm wooden enclave that is Madden’s Bar, Belfast. A handful of middle-aged Guinness drinkers chat quietly, nestled like comfy dogs in the corner. The lights are low. The music is comforting.
Until, blap! Not quite a cowboy entrance, but the door opens and the energy levels leap. In bowl three young men, familiar to the barman, the drinkers and anyone who’s interested in rap or who watches joe.co.uk or Vice videos. Kneecap, the Irish-language band smashing out of Belfast and into the world, are here: rappers Mo Chara (Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh, 26), smooth-skinned and pretty in a blue jumper and mac; Móglaí Bap (Naoise Ó Cairealláin, 30), with a grin like a smiley shark, in an excellent Lacoste tracksuit, and DJ Próvaí (JJ Ó Dochartaigh, 34), usually pictured wearing an Irish flag balaclava, but today in his civvies of no face covering and black clothes. They’re straight up to the bar: Guinness for Mo Chara and Móglaí Bap, a blackcurrant and soda for Próvaí.
Everyone in Madden’s knows them already. Mo Chara, in particular, has an insouciant, up-for-it charm that cuts through in real life and as a performer. Though they rap in Irish, and are from republican Catholic backgrounds (Mo Chara and Móglaí Bap from West Belfast, Próvaí from Derry), Kneecap’s fanbase is broad, from Toddla T – who produced their debut LP, Fine Art, due out in June – to, it seems, everybody in this pub. Their fans certainly include young people from the unionist side, who’ve been happily singing along to Kneecap tracks, right from their 2017 debut single, C.E.A.R.T.A. (“cearta” is Irish for rights).
“We’ve always said [the] Irish [language] is for everyone,” says Móglaí Bap. “We talk about both sides of the community, we are working-class, and we all have the same kind of background and the same wants and needs.”
Though they’ve been bubbling under for quite a while, this year Kneecap are kicking into a higher gear. (And yes, their name is a cheeky reference to paramilitary punishment.) There’s the forthcoming album, a tour of the US and Canada, a main-stage appearance at Reading and Leeds festivals and – the thing that will catapult them to much bigger renown – their excellent, harum scarum, semi-autobiographical film, Kneecap. The band all play heightened, cartoon versions of themselves to tell a heightened, cartoon version of their story, with a Trainspotting-cum-8Mile feel. It won the audience award at this year’s Sundance film festival.
The band returned home from Sundance before the award was announced, but they’d already made quite the impression. Not only with the film – described by the festival as “a wild, ketamine-laced ride from start to finish, punctuated by songs, touches of animation, and voiceover narration by Óg Ó hAnnaidh” – but with their stunts. They brought a PSNI (Northern Ireland police force) Land Rover with them, and found a place called Provo to have their picture taken with it. “It ended up that we were on the front of all the magazines, because of that jeep,” says Mo Chara.
The hipster Americans might not quite have got the significance of an Irish-language band driving round in a PSNI car, nor indeed of Provo (a genuine Utah city, but also Irish slang for a member of the Provisional IRA), but they got the joke. Like Eminem, Kneecap’s humour is the key to their success. Their wit and eloquence shine through everything they do. There’s a great joe.co.uk interview about “stupid questions you shouldn’t ask Irish people”. After a beautifully argued section from Mo Chara, about how the British will only be able to deal with their colonial history if they tackle it as openly as the Germans did after the second world war, he says: “But the Brits just wanna hide their past, because they feel too guilty,” and makes a fists-to-the-eyes cry-baby face.
Through their very existence, Kneecap are often seen as political, not only by unionists in Ireland’s North, but by the UK government (Kemi Badenoch’s Department for Business and Trade recently intervened to stop them receiving an arts grant, of which, more later). Their songs have been banned by RTE for their copious and celebratory drug references, and for calling the PSNI the RUC (the pre-peace police force). They’ve been escorted from their own concert by security for chanting revolutionary slogans; they’ve got a song called Get Your Brits Out, about a (hypothetical) wild night out with the DUP’s Arlene Foster, Jeffrey Donaldson and Christy Stalford; another called Fenian Cunts, about Mo Chara having sex with a Protestant (“you can call me King Billy if you want”); and a skit about the IRA coming down hard on drug takers. They’re post-Good Friday agreement bad boys, taking out every old authority figure without fear: “We don’t discriminate who we piss off.”
In 2019 they advertised their Farewell to the Union tour of England and Scotland with a cartoon of Arlene Foster and Boris Johnson strapped to a rocket atop a bonfire. And in 2022, before playing at West Belfast’s Féile An Phobail arts festival, they unveiled a wall mural of a PSNI jeep, also on fire. “They get more upset about a mural of a jeep on fire than they do about a real jeep on fire,” says Mo Chara. “The last time I saw a real jeep on fire was in the [unionist area] Shankill,” says Móglaí Bap. “That’s the truth!”
Though it’s their establishment baiting that makes headlines, far more fundamental to the band’s soul and mission is the fact that all three are Irish speakers (Irish is Móglaí Bap’s first language). This might seem unprovocative to anyone outside Belfast, but official recognition of the Irish language was one of the reasons why the Northern Ireland Assembly was suspended in 2022 (the DUP opposed the Identity and Language Act, which gave Irish a legal status equal to English). The act was eventually passed in late 2022 and the campaign to have the language recognised is a storyline in the film. Kneecap started rapping in Irish to show that it’s a living language that can describe not only the traditional Irish smell of turf on a fire but what’s going on in real life now, from sex to drugs to silly jokes about drinking Buckfast.
And beside all of this, to most of their young fans Kneecap are simply a great band: funny, wild, a brilliant live act, a craic. As one YouTube commenter says: “I do not understand a word they’re saying, but I do understand that this is an absolute banger.” The best rap comes from a living culture, and Kneecap’s is working-class Belfast. They’re self-proclaimed “lowlife scum”.
We pile upstairs to another lovely wood-lined room to chat, first about their film. The band co-wrote it with director Rich Peppiatt, who badgered them for six months before they agreed to meet him. (“We get a lot of nutters emailing, sitting in their nan’s basement,” says Móglaí Bap. “We thought he was one of those.”) The idea was always to create a film version of real life, and parts of the story are “inspired by real events”, such as a scene where Mo Chara is interviewed by the police and responds only in Irish, thus requiring a translator. This did happen, but to a friend. Other parts are directly true. MóglaíBap was christened, as in the film, at a sacred Catholic rock, Colin Glen Mass Rock, in a wood south of Belfast, the first christening held there for 200 years, and British army helicopters did hover over the ceremony. And DJ Próvaí was sacked from his secondary school teaching job for being in the group, specifically for showing his buttocks on stage, those buttocks being emblazoned with BRITS OUT. “There were more nuns in the real life school, though,” he says.
All three of Kneecap are great in the film, so good that I initially thought Próvaí was played by a professional actor. They did drama lessons for six weeks – “staring into each other’s eyes, which was strange, but we loved it in the end” – and on the first day, which involved Mo Chara and Móglaí Bap digging a hole in Próvaí’s back garden, the film set was packed. They discovered later that it was because everyone was so worried that they wouldn’t be able to act.
But they really can, holding their own against such excellent actors as Simone Kirby and Michael Fassbender. Fassbender plays Arló, Móglaí Bap’s dad, an IRA man who disappears, presumed killed by the police, but is actually living in hiding. For Fassbender fans, there are a few filmic call-backs to
Steve McQueen’s devastating Hunger, where he played republican hunger striker Bobby Sands. Móglaí Bap says Fassbender loved playing Arló, “because it was like if Bobby Sands had lived”.
There’s also an appearance by exSinn Féin leader Gerry Adams, during a sequence where all the band are in a ketamine-fuelled hallucination. I’d assumed that Adams’s appearance was CGI or animation - there’s both in the film – but no, he really is there. The band asked him, assuming he’d say no, but he agreed, though “he changed ‘fucking’ to ‘flipping’,” says Mo Chara. “We thought he’d have a problem with the drugs, but it was just the profanity.”
The film is due out this summer. Before that, Fine Art will be released. Produced by Toddla T, and made in a three-week whirlwind in the summer of 2023 (they had loads of songs before they went into the studio, but scrapped them all and wrote new ones on the spot), Fine Art is based around the idea of a night in a pub like this one. There are spoken parts in between songs, where we hear people go out to have a smoke, or go to the toilet and sniff a line of coke. The music is wildly varied, from a beautiful opener, featuring Lankum’s Radie Peat and based around a 1960s jazz sample; through the bass-driven groove of Better Way to Live, the single, with Fontaines DC’s Grian Chatten on the chorus; to a sample of 808 State’s head-thumping classic Cübik on Ibh Fiacha Linne. The final track, Way Too Much, is uplifting piano house, the kind of thing you want to hear after an all-night adventure, when watching the sun rise. Ibh Fiacha Linne (loose translation: In Debt To Us) made me laugh out loud. I get the idea that it’s about gangsters wanting money, which is right, but it’s also, they say, about the band being ripped off by promoters “and saying, ‘I’m gonna pay yer ma a quick wee visit, because you owe me a tenner.’”
The band had two themes in mind. First, as ever, they wanted to prove