In another world they never got here. It began with the arrest in May of one of the Belfast hip hop trio, Mo Chara, for allegedly unveiling a Hezbollah flag at a gig last November, and then in July an advert for this Wembley concert was banned by TfL on the London Underground. Then they got blasted along with Bob Vylan for potential ‘Death to the IDF’ chants at Glastonbury – though the police investigated and dropped the case.
Judging from the crowds who turn up to rally support, Kneecap didn’t need the ad (and the news of its ban may of course have done them favours). Irish football shirts, tricolour balaclavas (of the kind that provoked the Tube ad ban in the first place) and Palestinian flags pattern a dedicated-to-the-cause crowd.
Rammed from the start for the two support acts, London rapper Jelani Blackman and Irish punk group Gunners, the crowd is wired before the Belfasters prance on, a mythic horse galloping on screen thanks to their trademark trippy cartoonish visuals as acid-tinged folk opener 3CAG pounds us into life, followed by the anthemic Fenian Cunts.
DJ Próvaí is a grounding force in his trademark Irish-flag bandana on the decks whilst rappers Mo Chara and Móglaí Bap strut around the stage. If the crowd starts off a little static, the frontmen – as charismatic and chaotic as the Gallagher brothers, but with an added frenzied political charge that requires reading the news – intervene. These guys know how to get a moshpit going – and warn that it can’t end up being a cockfest (if anything, there were more women than men).
Kneecap’s signature blend of Gaelic and English lets the crowd shout along to parts of every song (along with the occasional help from the visuals) going through belters like Sick in the Head (mental health and drugs), H.O.O.D. (just being low-life scum) and Get Your Brits Out (a fever dream freakset featuring the BBC’s news tone and Arlene Foster on a night out).
As the set becomes more techno-filled, the crowd gets wilder. New tune Sayanara and Better Way to Live, with a cameo from none other than Grian Chatten of Fontaines DC, get people so moist that it’s a relief when Mo Chara shares a prayer for all the “sweaty genitals”.
It becomes clear that being in Wembley Arena, their biggest London show yet (“the belly of the beast”), does matter to the band. Mo Chara said, sincerely, “it might not be a big deal for you, but it’s one of the most important nights of our lives”. But it felt like it was a big deal to the audience. There were more Keffiyehs than at a Palestine march. Flags draped the sides of the balconies, brought by fans. Irish accents prevailed and chants of Free Palestine continued long after the music ended. An alien could have stumbled in and thought it a political rally.
“All we’re doing is filling a void that politicians aren’t filling,” the trio said. “There’s a reason it falls to artists to be the people spearheading these campaigns and movements – it’s because politicians won’t.” They urged other bands to speak out before it was too late.
In the two years since I last saw them in Camden, when the MO was definitely partying and the trio swigged Buckfast throughout the set, that has now been replaced by politics.
They’re a more serious group than they were back then – partly, they say, because the situation in Gaza is so much worse.
Their politics is patently not some sort of twisted press opportunity, as their many detractors might claim. Even before their set began, Massive Attack played a special audio-visual presentation and the director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign Ben Jamal gave a speech.
The screen flashed further statements on Israel’s war on Gaza ending with the words Free Palestine, to which the audience responded with a chant.
To watch Kneecap is to understand that rap is a political force and it hasn’t been exhausted yet. Birthed in the 1960s Bronx, who would have guessed the same form of music would show up decades later in the form of three self-described ‘low life scum’ from Belfast? Or maybe you could have: Ireland’s oral storytelling tradition combined with an anti-colonial struggle, and the political trauma of the not-long-passed Troubles which show up physically in the broken wall that still divides Belfast in half and in less visible measures, such as the elevated suicide rate.
There’s another world in which they never got here either. “A band that raps in Irish shouldn’t be playing Wembley,” Mo Chara tells Wembley. Only 2.4 percent of the population of Northern Ireland (sorry, the North of Ireland) even speak Gaelic. Much of the audience is visibly and audibly Irish but many, of course, are not. That they are in Wembley OVO Arena having started off using GarageBand eight years ago, with no connections to haul them out of council estate Belfast origins is a trajectory many politicians can only dream of.
This is the year that Kneecap have cut through, and the crowd feels it.
Pushed up the grimy ladder of the music industry by a Michael Fassbender-featuring origin story film released last year, and then shoved up a good few more rungs by the political turmoil of this summer, a few lads from Belfast have come to represent The Resistance in many of the left’s eyes today. “We never thought we’d get any interest from anyone other than our friends,” they told the audience.
The secret of their success lies in the fact they know how to make an audience get loose. Jarringly static for the first few hits, the trio expertly curates one of the most women-heavy and, for what it’s worth, friendliest mosh pits I’ve ever encountered. Nothing unites people like a common cause (or an enemy – the gig being on the very same day of Keir Starmer and Donald Trump’s love-in, during which they scrupulously avoided the subject of the Middle East, which was not lost on Mo Chara who leads chants of Fuck Keir Starmer). It was also the day that Your Party imploded leaving very little for the left to unite around.
On the Tube home, I listen in on an Irish man and a Scottish woman chat about the Gaelic language lessons and lack thereof in their countries. It’s clear they’ve just met. But Kneecap has given them something to talk about. And they’re both wearing Palestine shirts.
