A day in the life of the Belfast rappers Kneecap tends to be eventful. So far this year they’ve taken a case against the UK government for blocking funding for them from a British music-industry assocation; led a boycott of South by Southwest that resulted in the Texas music festival announcing that the US army and arms manufacturers would no longer sponsor it; and released their debut album, Fine Art, to almost universally strong reviews.
Now their debut feature film, also called Kneecap, is about to be released in cinemas around the world. After it debuted at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, where the trio arrived in one of their trademark PSNI-style Land Rovers, the fictionalised biopic promptly scooped three main prizes – best Irish film, best Irish-language film and the audience award – at Galway Film Fleadh last month.
These would be milestones in the trajectory of any artist’s career – and Kneecap are doing all of it back to back. The swirl of controversy that characterised their rise has given way to acclaim and accolades. The film is hilarious, whip-smart, moving, brilliantly entertaining. When it lands, early next month, it will be a landmark moment for the Irish language, Irish cinema and Irish music.
For these three men, who emerged from a small west Belfast subculture of raving, trad and Gaeilge, none of this makes sense and all of it makes sense. Kneecap – Mo Chara, Móglaí Bap and DJ Próvai – don’t suffer fools. Their default stance is grounded divilment. They are making music for themselves. They made the film for Irish speakers in Belfast. They couldn’t care less what anyone thinks about the way they express themselves. They don’t spend much time online. They are in the midst of a glorious, frenetic storm of their own conjuring. “I wish you could buy shares in bands,” the director of their film, Rich Peppiatt, jokes. “Can we float Kneecap on the Irish Stock Exchange or something?”
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[ Galway Film Fleadh 2024: Kneecap scoops three main prizesOpens in new window ]
“When we started we were always sure of what we were doing with Kneecap, how we felt about it, our own position in terms of the language,” says Móglaí Bap, aka Naoise Ó Cairealláin. When we speak, the band are having lunch in Madrid before a show at the Mad Cool Festival. “We had different reasons for Kneecap: representing this identity and the language, young people, subculture amongst the youth in Irish. So all that stuff of trying to stereotype working-class people, it never affected us because we have strong core beliefs and values that carry us through. We know what we’re doing. We’re very certain of ourselves. We’re confident in ourselves. Anyone who spends too much time on the internet, they’re the people who are definitely not too sure of themselves, because they’re spending all day on the internet writing comments. For us, we live in the real world. We’re making music and making art.”
The music producer Toddla T didn’t know anything about Kneecap until he was on holiday in west Co Cork a few years ago with his wife, the novelist, broadcaster and DJ Annie Macmanus, aka Annie Mac, and spotted a flyer for the band on a pub table. “Annie and the guy who runs the boozer said, ‘You should work with them,’” he says from London. When Kneecap arrived at his studio, “the vibration I got from them was an authenticity I had not seen come out of a space like that before”. They began throwing ideas around, and at one point Mo Chara said he wanted flutes on a track. Toddla T obliged. “When I could see they were enjoying the process, I could lean into that. They started scribing, and it was done in a couple of hours.” That first tune ended up being the album’s title track.
“Out of respect”, Toddla T embarked on a deep dive into Irish traditional music and Belfast’s history culture. After Móglaí Bap sent him Dancing on Narrow Ground, a documentary about rave culture in the North during the Troubles, it ended up being sampled on the album. “The first thing they said to me was, ‘We do festivals, and our tunes don’t bang enough on the rig,’” Toddla T says. “That’s one thing I could confidently say I could achieve. Every time I was building tunes I had the ethos of the pub trad session, the Irish culture that I’ve been around due to my family and extended family – but also, you know when you go to a concert and you’ve got the big f***ing speakers that curl? I was thinking about filling them all the time.”
Kneecap: the Northern Irish rappers leading a Celtic revival
It worked. In a year when Irish acts appeared to take over Glastonbury – “About time: reparations,” Mo Chara says – Kneecap were heralded as one of the acts of the festival. About 8,000 people turned up to hear them – a virtually unheard-of turnout for the 11.30am slot in the enormous Woodsies tent. They performed a second show in the late-night Shangri-La area. Noel Gallagher was in the audience. “I get there and the f***ing tent is absolutely f***ing smash-packed. You couldn’t get in. And these three lads walk out,” he said after the festival. “I couldn’t believe how enjoyable it was … They were really, really good.”
“I sang a couple of lines of [the republican song] The Broad Black Brimmer with Lewis Capaldi,” says Mo Chara (aka Liam Óg Ó Hannaidh) says, recounting another surreal moment from the festival. “Paul Mescal was flirting with us in the back of the [cinema] tent,” says DJ Próvaí. He pauses before making a scandalous revelation. “He was wearing Adidas shorts, not GAA shorts. It’s all a farce.”
“Glastonbury definitely was a true measure of the album and what we’re doing,” Móglaí Bap says.
“I knew it was good as soon as it was finished,” Mo Chara says of the album. “I don’t need Noel Gallagher to tell me. I’ll have a pint with him, though, if he wants. He’s f**kin’ buying. Sing us Wonderwall there.” He gets serious. “I said to him, ‘Did you see the gig?’ He said, ‘I was there 20 minutes early.’ That’s a mad one. I grew up on his music.”
How are they handling their relentless schedule? “Cocaine,” they say, to peals of laughter.
“Ah, we go to a spa on a day off and all get massages and stuff,” Móglaí Bap says. “You have to make the most of it. Gigging for us is natural. Travelling is the hard bit. But gigging is blowing off steam for us.”
“We’ve no other options, really,” Mo Chara says. “We knew it was going to be busy with the film and album coming out around the same time. We knew there was going to be PR on both sides all around that time.”
[ Kneecap in Dublin: It’s not rage that the punk-rap three-piece conjure. It’s joyOpens in new window ]
Móglaí Bap slips into good-natured sarcasm. “Oh, it’s f***ing awful. See Madrid? See the weather here, and the pool, and all the sexy people, and the food? F***ing awful. We’re going to try and start a union. Dan [Lambert, their manager] won’t let us. We’re trying to get some workers’ rights, but there’s none around here.”
As for their legal case against the UK government, “I think that’s why they lost the election,” Móglaí Bap says of the Tories. “Yes,” Mo Chara says, “because they denied us £15,000. Everybody in England had enough. The House of Lords even.” They’re in full flow now. “Even the queen,” says DJ Próvaí, aka JJ Ó Dochartaigh. “Ay, the queen herself rose from the dead and said, ‘Give the boys the money,’” Móglaí Bap says.
Time is a luxury in the midst of all this, but they have been back in the studio with Toddla T to work on their follow-up album. “We’ll have Ian Paisley jnr on it,” Mo Chara says. “I hear he has plenty of free time at the moment.”
Stories abound about Kneecap’s impact on their fans, prompting everything from pro-Palestine activism to the learning of indigenous languages. They can also inspire the people they work with. Toddla T says the group’s integrity helped him to renew his own creative practice. “It’s easy to think, ‘Oh I’m the older guy, and I’m more experienced,’ but being around them has made me believe in myself a bit more. I’m really grateful for their existence.”
Peppiatt has his own stories. “When I first met the band,” he says, “the first thing I did was sign up to Irish night classes. When the teacher asked people in the class why they were learning Irish, half the people were there because they were fans of Kneecap. That was in 2019. They were having that cultural impact in Belfast then.”
He recalls the “big pub talk” they had about the fact that one day Kneecap were going to make a massive album and that he was going to make a film about them. “We all believed we were going to do it. Here’s the other thing: I don’t think an Irishman or Irishwoman could have made this film. Because the fact that I have a British passport – I consider myself Irish as well – means it makes it Teflon from people who turn around and say, ‘This film is anti-British.’ Well, your perception of Britishness doesn’t have to be the same as mine. The Daily Mail doesn’t get to define what Britishness is. Britishness, to me, is acknowledging our colonialist roots, acknowledging how our imperial power plays out in a country that isn’t ours.”
Making a film is much more complex than making an album, of course, especially when there’s the small matter of doing so with three people untested on screen. The trio’s acting teacher, Kieran Lagan, coached them for months. One scene, a serious, tender two-hander between Michael Fassbender, who plays Arló, a former IRA man on the run, and Móglaí Bap, whose eponymous character, Naoise, is Arló’s son, was being filmed on a beach. Peppiatt was nervous. “I was wondering, opposite one of the best character actors of his generation, is Naoise going to look like he won a raffle to be there?” Peppiatt says. “And I remember Naoise getting out of the car when the scene was finished, and he came up to me and asked, ‘Is that all right?’ I swear, I nearly cried. He had done so well.”
Along with the work Kneecap themselves put in, Peppiatt credits the actors who surrounded them – as well as Fassbender, the film features Simone Kirby, Josie Walker, Fionnuala Flaherty and Jessica Reynolds, among others – for helping to foster such a richly creative environment that Kneecap could bounce and feed off.
It has been a long road since Sundance, Peppiatt says. At last, after “revving the engine for six months, it’s time to release the handbrake”. Peppiatt and the producer Trevor Birney have since founded a new production company, Coup d’état Films, based in Belfast. “The last six months on a personal level has been transformative,” Peppiatt says. “Ever since Sundance, agents and managers have descended upon me. You’re getting Hollywood things offered. As part of all that I realised, ‘Hang on, I don’t want to go to Hollywood.’
“Belfast is my home. It’s a city that has given me a huge amount. I married into a west Belfast family who have gone through real shit at the hands of the British. To be welcomed in as an Englishman is something so close to my heart. I’m very proud on a personal level to make a film that represents the people of west Belfast – the humour, the personalities, something that’s a genuine representation. It made me think, ‘You know what, I want to keep working in Ireland. There are more Irish stories to tell.’
“The Irish film industry is in ascendance, probably more so than anywhere else right now. Why jump ship to somewhere else when you’re in this amazing place? If American money wants to come and work with me, then fine, but it can come to my backyard and spend it there. And that’s Belfast.”
Kneecap opens in cinemas on Thursday, August 8th
