“They tried to stop this gig,” Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh (aka Mo Chara) proclaimed at the start of Kneecap’s long-awaited set on Friday night. “Honestly lads, you’ve no idea how close we were to being pulled off this gig. Has anybody been watching the news?”
It’s been quite a week for rap-punk provocateurs Kneecap.
There’s been the terrorism charge (against Ó hAnnaidh), which occurred on Wednesday. There’s been the secret London gig that they held for 200 dedicated fans (which sold out in 90 seconds). And now, there’s their long-awaited headline slot at Wide Awake Festival – which, for the past few weeks, has almost looked like it wouldn’t happen at all.
Fortunately, it did. And fortunately, the band also know how to deliver good music as well as headline-making statements. Over the course of a sweaty hour and a half, they showed London who was boss – whilst also sticking a sweary, sly two fingers up to the police, the government, and pretty much everybody who tried to stop it from happening.
And they weren’t backing down. The set opened with a statement doubling down on their views on Palestine – as well as a sly dig at Piers Morgan and other news sites who covered their recent stay in the headlines.
Then it was straight into the music, via the hazy folk-tinged 3CAG (an ode to MDMA), before we had a singalong rendition of their pop-tinged single Fenian C***s. So far, so Kneecap.
Things ramped up from there. In short order, we were treated to a fast romp through some of their biggest hits, spat out and delivered with relish to a crowd they told us was the biggest they’d ever played. Yes, there was Fine Art, the hazy, woozy Better Way to Live and I bhFiacha Linne – but they also veered sideways into lesser known territory, delivering their new song The Recap (a rebuttal to the recent headlines), then encouraging the crowd to belt out the chorus to Your Sniffer Dogs are Shite.
At a festival, that’s ballsy, and those weren’t even the most eyebrow-raising lyrics. The band have always been provocateurs, but the potency of their lyrics has been supercharged by the events of the past few months. There’s something quite subversive about seeing a park full of Londoners yelling ‘Get the Brits out’ in the full glare of the afternoon sun.
And something equally fascinating about the group leading them in an Irish-language chant of “Tiocfaidh ár lá”: an Irish republican slogan that roughly translates to “our day will come” (though the less said about the anti-Margaret Thatcher ditty that followed, the better). And of course, the Free Palestine chants came thick and fast. “You are giving my lawyer nightmares,” Ó hAnnaidh joked at one point. Or was he joking?
Throughout it all, the three members took breaks to banter with the crowd. “I wanna see at least three mosh pits,” one of them declared at one point. Three minutes later, they were conducting their fans, encouraging them to let rip. They did: soon enough, the entire festival was bouncing off each other like spare parts in a pinball machine.
As the set continued, things got even wilder, both on-stage and off. After insulting everybody from Jeff Bezos to Kemi Badenoch, Kneecap closed out with some of their biggest hits: H.O.O.D, the magnificently irreverent Guilty Conscience, then the song that started it all, C.E.A.R.T.A.
As they kicked off their swansong, Ó hAnnaidh took a second to cement the band’s position on Palestine once more. Then DJ Próvaí (J. J. Ó Dochartaigh) climbed into the mosh pit and danced around with the fans. The moment was pure Kneecap: irreverent, ambitious and irrefutably themselves. These guys aren’t going anywhere.
Touring. For more information, see kneecap.ie
