Let’s begin with some context. In the months leading up to today’s Glastonbury performance, Kneecap, the livewire hip-hop trio from west Belfast and Derry, have been the subject of a protracted and politically polarising scandal. Much of it revolves around the terrorism charge hanging over 27-year-old vocalist Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh, who is on bail after allegedly displaying a Hezbollah flag at a gig in November, and saying, “Up Hamas, Up Hezbollah.”
Ó hAnnaidh has argued that he was unaware of the meaning of the flag, which he says was thrown onto the stage by a member of the crowd, and has maintained that his on-stage comments were a joke, made in the character of his stage persona, Mo Chara. But the controversy has had quite the groundswell: ahead of the festival, 30 music executives authored a letter calling for Kneecap to be removed from the lineup; after this was leaked, more than 100 prominent musicians and bands signed a letter in support of them. Kier Starmer, meanwhile, said that it was “not appropriate” for the group, who have continued to issue vocal support for Palestine since Ó hAnnaidh’s arrest, to perform at Glastonbury.
If, somehow, you’ve been completely oblivious to the news cycle, don’t worry: Kneecap begin their set at the West Holts stage with a video montage of the scandal – a play-by-play of newsreaders, politicians and talk show hosts condemning them – just to get you up to speed. The trio aren’t so much addressing the elephant in the room as they are riding it around the West Holts stage in a kind of Hannibalesque battle manoeuvre.
From the moment the trio launch into “Better Way to Live”, a propulsive single from last year’s Fine Art, the crowd enters a hot, moshy frenzy. They’re good technical rappers – switching dextrously between English and Irish-language lyrics – but their performance excels most in its pure kinetic energy. Irreverent lyrics shoot out like violent lava over fast and infectious beats; serious subject matter (colonialism; the plight of the Irish language; social disenfranchisement; drug use) is handled with punchy and cavalier humour.
Kneecap’s better-known songs (the defiant “H.O.O.D”, or the hilariously brazen “Your Sniffer Dogs are Shite”) are greeted with ebullient chanting, while the deeper cuts prove no less effective at sending the crowd feral. DJ Próvaí (real name JJ Ó Dochartaigh) is the bearer of the beats; wearing his signature balaclava knitted in the tricolours of the Irish flag, Próvaí at one point leaps down into the crowd to join the antic moshing.
The question surrounding Kneecap’s slot ought not have been “should they be cancelled”, but rather, “should they be on the Pyramid?” West Holts may have seemed like a reasonable space for the group back when bookings were made – a reflection of the band’s growing notoriety over the past few years, aided in part by their terrific semi-biographical self-titled film. But the legal controversy has been reputationally steroidic. This was packed to the back, and many weren’t lucky enough to get in.
It is impossible to neatly detach the political furore surrounding Kneecap from the experience of watching Kneecap perform – Palestinian flags and chants abound, and the group spend most of the time between songs talking about Palestine. (Or, at several points, leading the game crowd in chants of f*** Keir Starmer”.) Whether Ó hAnnaidh ought to be embroiled in his current legal battle isn’t a matter to be litigated within a gig review, but suffice it to say the crowd makes their thoughts clear. As a performance, this embodied so much of what hip-hop has always been: forceful, urgent – and impossible to suppress.
