03-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The National
TRNSMT: Please hold your nerve and keep Kneecap
Yet before we get into the weeds, we should remember the theory that the Pistols' svengali Malcolm McLaren held, to guide his management aims: 'cash from chaos'. Sampling the Kneecap archive as their notoriety burgeons, I'm struck by their cartoonish brand as much as their terroristic qualities.
Like one of McLaren's fruitier publicity stunts, Kneecap rolled up luridly to Utah's Sundance Festival premiere of their eponymous docu-drama in January 2024.
Their name was spray painted on the side of a Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) Land Rover. The band were on board, holding up a republican tricolour of smoke flares.
The Belfast Telegraph noted that the Dublin-based creative agency The Tenth Man had teamed up with Kneecap for the stunt. Their clients include Stella McCartney, GymBox, Guinness and Carlsberg.
So already, the back story is slicker than the front story: that of out-of-control, drug-addled, young Irish-speaking Fenians cavorting down the Shankill Road.
When rock writer Dorian Lynskey interviewed them in 2024, Naoise Ó Cairealláin (known as Móglaí Bap) admitted: 'We're very calculated in our PR stuff. We know things are going to get a reaction.'
Kneecap the movie shows them to be as capable of self-deprecation and auto-irony as The Beatles or The Monkees. They're taking lightly, and playing for laughs, some very heavy matters.
The survival and rights of the Irish language, especially in the North. The lingering potential for violence and gang coercion, even in post-Troubles Belfast. The everyday buffet of hallucinogenic drugs, both dealt and consumed, in youth culture.
Yet their mode, as the film's director cites explicitly, is the fast-paced fantasy of Trainspotting and Amelie, than anything too social realist. There are often action lines around the movements of the characters, making them look like Looney Tunes animations.
The purisms of Irish republicanism are also being jerked around with. Irish language advocates wear massive jumpers and lament sonorously in the backrooms of bars.
Michael Fassbender (below) reprises his Bobby Sands role in Steve McQueen's Hunger – except here as a comically intense IRA fugitive (and father of one of the Kneecappers). He's currently teaching yoga on a Belfast beach; 'Bobby Sandals', as one of the rappers quips.
There's even a vigilante group the band contend with, known as Radical Republicans Against Drugs (RRAD). They're rendered as three stooges, stumbling and farcical. Yet there's a line the movie circulates around, capturing an ambivalence towards language-based nationalism. 'Every word of Irish spoken is a bullet fired for Irish freedom', hisses the fugitive father to his sons.
That cultural radicalism has granted their children a potent medium to use among themselves. But it's emptied of modernity, even the chaotic and fragmentary kind.
So Kneecap invent Irish words for drugs. 'Snaois' means coke, 'capaillín' means ketamine. On Móglaí Bap's chest, the letters 3CAG are tattooed (it's the name of their 2018 record). They stand for 'three chonsan agus guta', meaning 'three consonants and a vowel' in Irish.
Which means MDMA.
READ MORE: Does Kneecap row show how out of touch Westminster is?
The struggle to have the Irish language assume the same legal status in Northern Ireland as in the Republic – a status achieved in 2022 – is consistently referred to in the docu-drama.
It seems Kneecap have played their part with lines like: 'These E's are sweet/They're sweet E's/I'm eatin' em like sweeties/Mála mór cola bottles agus mála meanies.'
But here we are in the spring of 2025, and things are a lot less about artful hedonism, language activism and scampish satire for the trio.
Clips dug up from previous live performances seek to render Kneecap as advocating killing Tory politicians, or supporting proscribed Middle Eastern terrorist organisations. Both positions they have, in recent days, strenuously denied holding.
Politicians in Scotland, the US and the UK have urged promoters to take the band off their books and line-ups, with their appearances at TRNSMT and Glastonbury the most symbolic cancellations yet threatened.
For what it's worth, as a free-speech-friendly musician, I support the recent collective letter sent out by Heavenly Records, and endorsed by significant artists – especially this part of the statement:
'The question of agreeing with Kneecap's political views is irrelevant: it is in the key interests of every artist that all creative expression be protected in a society that values culture, and that this interference campaign is condemned and ridiculed.'
It has to be possible to object, as an artist, to the appalling slaughter by the Israeli Defence Force of the people of Gaza, as a wildly disproportionate response to the Hamas atrocity on October 7, 2023. Without that objection causing deplatforming or the destruction of careers.
As to Kneecap, there's a history to their position. 'Way, way before October 7, you'd have seen Palestinian and Basque flags alongside Irish ones on the Falls Road,' Móglaí Bap said to the Irish music mag Hot Press.
'There's always been solidarity in West Belfast for other occupied territories.'
In any case, it seems there's a deeper strata to their politics. 'We've more in common with working-class people in Belfast than rich people in Dublin', said the third member, Mo Chara, on Patrick Kielty's Late Late Show.
'A workers' revolution is the way forward rather than one based on a fucking God that might not even exist.'
So there's no sense of bandwagon-jumping here – Kneecap have a coherent political position that comes out in their raps. It's as natural and accessible to them as their advocacy of 'e's and whizz' (in Pulp's words).
READ MORE: Kneecap teases new music after counter-terrorism officers launch investigation
A phenomena like Kneecap makes you realise how divergent social and historical paths can be on these islands.
You could never imagine the local rewrite: 'Every word of Gaelic spoken is a bullet fired for Scottish freedom'.
The movie shows how language politics helps intensify the street-by-street tribalism in Belfast – hip-hop and EDM is a perfect vehicle for that urban claustrophobia.
Scots Gaelic would seem to take a much less aggressive position in the culture – the language feels closer to the rhythms of rural society and ecological balance. No-one looks like they need to invent Scots Gaelic terms for cocaine or ketamine.
Scots, in so far as it approaches a language, has had a better run-in with hip-hop – Loki, Stanley Odd, recently Tzusan. And it's tempting to assume that the Scots language is still socio-linguistically lively in Scottish urban and suburban areas. There are also more resources for scenes to develop (venues, studios, nearness of musicians and tech).
Having enjoyed the playfulness and comedy of Kneecap over the last few days, I have a sense that their highly political background instincts have pulled them into controversies which weren't really in their strategic plan. I think they were going more for Eminem than Roger Waters.
There is talk in the archive of a forthcoming Kneecap album, based on their engagement with other indigenous-language artists. I'd enjoy that, as a creative next move.
But the world – and particularly Gaza – is on fire. And artists who cannot help but respond to that appalling situation must be defended for their honesty and bravery.
Glasto and TRNSMT, hold your nerve on Kneecap, please.
