
Kneecap owe Keir Starmer, the BBC and Helen from Wales a thank you
Glastonbury
. She didn't sing or dance or chant a death threat. She held up her phone and live-streamed the whole
Kneecap
show on TikTok, 'even burning her finger on the overheating device', reported the Sun admiringly, 'to bring the music to the masses'. Kneecap hailed her as a 'legend'.
From which you might infer that earning legend status can be nice work. But Helen Wilson is a very modern kind of legend. She surprised herself by thrashing the crusty old
BBC
at its own game – though it's arguable if 1.7 million people actually watched or just liked her livestream as opposed to the 7,200 who definitely watched. It also left
Keir Starmer
looking like the infamous 1990s judge who inquired if
Gazza
(the world-famous footballer and also the plaintiff) might be an operetta called La Gazza Ladra.
The BBC probably workshopped 10 impossible ways to livestream the Kneecap gig, ie to bleep out any recurrences of calls to kill your local Tory MP – for which the band subsequently apologised to the families of two murdered MPs – while weighing accusations of censorship alongside the terror-related charges against a band member (for allegedly displaying a flag in support of Hizbullah and saying 'up Hamas, up Hizbullah'). It eventually settled on releasing an edited form on iPlayer, saying it was due to fears it would breach 'editorial guidelines' on impartiality.
The wonder is that the thousands of attendees fulminating about censorship didn't respond as Helen did with her TikTok stream, which is now being lionised as another near-lethal shot across the BBC/MSM's bows. Glastonbury forbids the unauthorised recording and disseminating of live performances but Helen isn't worried. Some things are too important not to be heard, she says.
READ MORE
If Kneecap's pro-Palestine stance is noisy and relentless (reflecting in principle the impotent fury of many people, young and old), it's right up there with the band's marketing nous. Among the many stunts designed to 'p**s off' just about everyone, they brought a PSNI Land Rover with them to the Sundance film festival last year (where their semi-autobiographical film with a Gerry Adams cameo won the audience award) 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,' Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh (Mo Chara) told The Guardian. The alleged Hizbullah flag-waving incident was preceded by a social media image posted by the band of a member reading the Hizbullah leader's writings.
Their official website leads with quotes from the Los Angeles Times – 'reminiscent of early Eminem' – saying the band has 'built up a notoriety for themselves which hasn't been seen in Irish music for many years'.
So it's fair to say that they've leant into the notoriety – but not without a heap of marketing gifts from British officialdom along the way. The band won a legal action against the UK government when the latter overruled the awarding of a £14,250 grant to them under a scheme that supports UK-based music acts abroad.
But there's nothing to beat the clamour around a prime minister's condemnation – until you compound it with the agonising decisions faced by a state-funded broadcaster.
When asked if he thought Kneecap should perform in Glastonbury, Starmer could have refused to comment, on the grounds that there was an ongoing case.
Instead he pronounced that the band's performance would not be 'appropriate …'. The rest was wildly predictable.
No edgy band wants to be declared 'appropriate' by anyone, never mind a grey prime minister, in a world where the US president uses f**k for emphasis. So naturally the show became the most anticipated set of the weekend. The field around the stage was closed early to prevent a crush. Far from softening its cough, the band heightened the drama by showing a video montage of its enemies, including Sharon Osborne calling them a hate group, then
kicked off a chant of 'F**k Keir Starmer' in a charged, triumphant gig
. Hardly original as chants go – two songs with that title already exist – but it did the job.
The sum total of Starmer's and the BBC's achievement was to ratchet up the protesting and ensure that any artist worth their inappropriate tag would shout 'Free Palestine' (at least) during a set, have a Palestinian flag on stage or be wearing a keffiyeh. And no one sussed that the act just before Kneecap, a self-described 'violent punk' London duo Bob Vylan, hitherto unknown to the masses – until the hapless BBC streamed them live and failed to pull the plug – would make the Irish band's act look almost puppyish.
'Sometimes we have to get our message across with violence', said frontman Bobby Vylan, who led a chant of
'death, death to the IDF'.
British police are investigating both performances, though legal experts believe it's futile since the accused's intent at the time – what he intended to happen or believed might happen as a result of his words – decides the matter. So legal vindication once again most likely – although it's worth noting that Bob Vylan are paying the professional and financial price in terms of being dropped by their management, cancelled shows and revoked US tour visas.
Long-time music critics writing about Kneecap blend admiration with caution. The Glastonbury lead-up was 'a perfect example of how quickly stories can become overheated in 2025″, writes The Guardian's
Alexis Petridis
. 'Vastly more people now have an opinion about Kneecap than have ever heard their music, which is, traditionally, a tricky and destructive position for a band to find themselves in.'
[
Kneecap would not face prosecution under new Irish anti-terrorism laws, Minister insists
Opens in new window
]
But who loaded fuel on to the stories? Keir Starmer surprised us – again – by failing to consider his own contribution while delivering a petty told-you-so to the self-flagellating BBC: 'I said that Kneecap should not be given a platform and that goes for any other performers making threats or inciting violence ...'
For Kneecap, the upshot of the weekend is a coveted
invitation to take the main stage at Electric Picnic
. 'This is going to be a special one,' said the festival about its sudden announcement. That's show business.

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4 hours ago
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Homework by Geoff Dyer: Airfix models and Action Man dolls
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RTÉ News
11 hours ago
- RTÉ News
UK police investigate Bob Vylan pre-Glastonbury concert
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Irish Examiner
12 hours ago
- Irish Examiner
'It was ‘Queen, 40p; Horslips, 50p': Irish rockers release new album of BBC recordings
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It was a heady time to be in a popular rock band. As Horslips toured the UK, they bumped into bands like The Clash, The Sex Pistols, Lindisfarne at The Blue Boar Inn, a coaching inn on the Birmingham to London motorway. 'We crossed paths with Queen quite a bit,' says Lockhart. 'There's a poster of one of our first gigs in London – Queen were on the previous week – and it was 'Queen, 40p; Horslips, 50p' at the London School of Economics.' Horslips on the cover of New Spotlight magazine 'The Blue Boar was such a dive for young punks,' adds Devlin. 'It was a place you wanted to go and see where the dinosaurs had eaten, to discover the dinosaurs ate the same egg and chips you did. We used to go to Dingwalls in Camden, north London. I remember Mick Jones being there a lot. Mick would have a bunch of mad people around him, who weren't actually that mad. They were just having a quiet drink, but they were wrapped up in black plastic sacks so that slightly took the ordinariness out of it.' Bowie towered over all the acts in the 1970s. He was consistently on the cover of influential music magazines like Melody Maker and NME. Devlin sums it up best, suggesting if you wanted to know where pop music was headed in the next five years, you just had to pick up the latest Bowie album. The access to recreational drugs on the Irish music and social scene in the 1970s wasn't comparable to its UK counterpart or to the cocaine blizzard that swept across American clubs at the time. 'There was always a little bit of dope around Ireland,' says Lockhart. 'There wasn't coke,' says Devlin. 'There used to be one guy in the drugs squad in Dublin, 'Dinny' Mullins,' says Lockhart. 'Everybody knew him. He would chat to people in pubs and stuff. He was on the ball, a smart boy. He knew what was, what, but drugs weren't at that time an endemic problem. There were five serious drug users in Dublin in the early '70s. Everybody knew them by name and pretty much where they lived. Drugs like heroin only took off in Ireland in early '80s, tragically. It was terrible. 'Heroin was seen as being the road to hell, which it is,' says Devlin. 'The idea of young fellows in an advertising agency using cocaine didn't exist. There wasn't a supply chain. Pints and shorts were what people had. Hippies smoked a bit of weed. You could easily identify them because they giggled a lot, and they were always eating packets of Cheese & Onion Taytos for the munchies.' The Horslips – At the BBC is out on July 4. See: Cracking America Horslips began their assault on North America in 1974 after releasing their album Dancehall Sweethearts. They toured the continent about five times. The Police joined them on their second tour across the Atlantic. 'We were slugabeds,' says Barry Devlin. 'We stayed up very late and behaved quite badly. You'd look out the window of your hotel and the bass player from The Police would be doing push-ups on the hotel's lawn, which would put the fear of God into you.' Jim Lockhart adds: 'And Sting would be jogging about the pool or something.' Horslips in 1974: From left to right, Jim Lockhart (behind), John Fean, Barry Devlin, frontman Charles O'Connor and Eamon Carr (behind). (Photo by Central Press/) Horslips enjoyed good backing from their record labels, Dick James Music Ltd, and later Polygram, on those tours. They registered albums on the American Hot 100 billboard, but were effectively a college band, with a loyal following that filled venues on university campuses. The biggest gig Horslips headlined there was in late '79 at The Spectrum in Philadelphia, a 13,000 seater. The United States also gave them a pinch-me moment, which descended into typical Horslips farce, as Devlin explains: 'Back then, Sunset Strip in West Hollywood was lined with billboards. When our album Aliens was released in the States, Polygram bought us this huge billboard. It had an enormous Celtic warrior brandishing an axe, with the five of us underneath it in Celtic gear. 'We were so thrilled we got the limo driver to drive up and down underneath it with our heads sticking out of the sunroof, and the girls on the street going, 'Ah, out of towners.' We're going, 'That's us! That's us up there!' Not very cool. I can't imagine David Bowie doing that for his tour.' Read More Joe Bonamassa: Five talking points from the first Rory Gallagher tribute at Marquee in Cork