It is perhaps worth recalling Kneecap’s appearance at last year’s Glastonbury, a lunchtime set in the Woodsies tent that saw the band widely acclaimed as bringers of boozy, edgy hilarity, complete with songs called Get Your Brits Out and Rhino Ket. Twelve months and some provocative onstage comments about Palestine and Conservative MPs later, they’re both folk devil and cause celebre, whose appearance at the festival is the most hotly debated of 2025 – both the prime minister and the leader of the opposition have had strong opinions about it.
It’s a perfect example of how quickly stories can become overheated in the 21st century: vastly more people now have a opinion about Kneecap than have ever heard their music, which is, traditionally, a tricky and destructive position for a band to find themselves in. Invoking a name one probably shouldn’t invoke under the circumstances, you might want to ask the surviving members of the Sex Pistols how that worked out for them.
