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-8-Mile 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. Móglaí Bap 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 ex-Sinn 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 that Irish could work over all kinds of music. And second, they were inspired by Dancing on Narrow Ground, a 1990s documentary about the rave scene in Belfast that records a time when kids from both the nationalist and unionist communities all met in a field to dance – but couldn’t hang out afterwards because there was nowhere neutral for them to go.
“That is like a really cult classic here,” says Mo Chara. “The attitudes of young people here in the 90s, changing from the rave and ecstasy scene.” They sample a line from the documentary’s voiceover: “Raves bring the Protestants and Catholics together.”
They also sample BBC radio host Stephen Nolan (“he’s the worst”), a huge figure in Ireland’s North, discussing their PSNI jeep fire mural. Oddly, while we’re talking, Nolan’s people get in touch with Kneecap’s manager, to see if the band will come on his show (their manager: “We don’t talk to the Nolan show.”). The reason is that Kneecap have just had a grant cancelled. They were given £30,000 from a BPI fund, the Music Export Growth Scheme (Megs) that supports British music exports abroad. The award was signed off by an independent selection board, but never came through to them. It turns out that it was privately overruled by the UK government. When asked why, a spokesperson for Kemi Badenoch said: “We fully support freedom of speech, but it’s hardly surprising that we don’t want to hand out UK taxpayers’ money to people that oppose the United Kingdom itself.” Nice to know that Kemi’s busy defining culture for us all. (Since our interview, Kneecap have taken legal action against the government over the decision, which they say contravenes the Windsor framework.)
“In a mixed multicultural society,” says Próvaí, “you don’t have to like everything that’s funded, that’s OK. You don’t have to be outraged either.”
“People who are outraged don’t want to see what we actually stand for,” says Móglaí Bap. “They could if they wanted, but they’d much prefer to be outraged. There’s a portion of society that want the [unionist] 12th July bonfires, and they’re funded by the council, and that’s totally fine. I’m just jel. I want a big street party like theirs! Like we have Paddy’s Day, but the 12th July goes on for two days. I wish I could go there, take loads of cocaine and hit a big drum. They get the best cocaine in Belfast!”
As you might be able to tell, drugs play quite a part in Kneecap’s world. They invented Irish words for them, because the language didn’t have them. “Snaois” is coke, “capaillín” is ketamine. Tattooed across Móglaí Bap’s chest is 3CAG, the title of their 2018 album. It stands for “3 chonsan agus guta”, the Irish for “three consonants and a vowel”, meaning MDMA. Mo Chara and Móglaí Bap started doing this while hanging out in their teens. Later, they had a squat for a while together and ran events. Everyone would go out until 2am, then pile back and bring out instruments and play Irish music, dancing till 6am. “MDMA and Guinness,” says Mo Chara. Rave, rebel songs and great tunes, all still central to what Kneecap are about.
“Kneecap was born of the need to represent that identity,” says Móglaí Bap. “[We were part of] this weird first group of young people in an urban setting in Belfast to really speak Irish together socially… sharing the words and the youth culture, and taking recreational drugs, and all that melded together.”
And using their own language to express what they want. Móglaí Bap set up an Irish-language festival – it’s how he and Mo Chara first met Próvaí, who came to speak – and he wrote a play in Irish about a young man being addicted to gambling, which he was for a while. “It’s about language and culture,” says Móglaí Bap. “There’s no point in having a united Ireland if it’s just about economics.”
“Irish isn’t a Catholic or republican language,” says Mo Chara. “The Protestants and unionists have every right to have the opportunity to learn it.”
We’re downstairs now, and the pub is filling up for the evening session. A few of the band’s friends have turned up, including Sinead, Mo Chara’s girlfriend, who runs Irish classes at the festival Móglaí Bap set up. A surfer-looking guy pops in, they all have a chat in Irish, then he pops out again. The band tell me about Irish-language schools, how they were banned until the 1990s, how parents had to collect money door to door to pay the teachers, keep them going. How “six or seven” of DJ Próvaí’s old pupils are now Irish teachers. And time passes, slowly and quickly, through Guinness and discussion, rampant piss-taking and a spot of shouting, until I have to leave..
Fine Art is out 14 June on Heavenly Recordings. The band play Reading/Leeds festival in August and the UK leg of their 2024 tour is 15–21 November. The film Kneecap will be released this summer
