In many ways, Kneecap have emerged as unlikely champions of a modern Irish identity. Despite their bull-in-a-china-shop approach, which has already seen their music pulled from national radio and denouncements from the Democratic Union Party, they have sold-out shows across the UK and Ireland. However, when the Northern Irish group were awarded Arts Council funding earlier this year to keep up with touring expenses, it was rescinded at the last minute. The then-secretary of state and business, Kemi Badenoch, controversially proclaimed that it was “hardly surprising that we don’t want to hand out UK taxpayers’ money to people that oppose the United Kingdom itself.”
Kneecap have been embroiled in a legal battle to reinstate the funding ever since Badenoch’s comments, but that hasn’t stopped them from speaking up. Only last weekend (August 23), the group called out the UK government for its complicity in the genocide in Gaza during their Reading Festival performance having, days prior, raised over £6000 for a Palestinian family fleeing conflict through the sale of their Mo Chara lager. For Kneecap, at least, beer and political activism are not mutually exclusive.
Below, Dazed spoke to the trailblazing rap group about the release of their debut film, language revivalism, and what they see as the deeper significance behind their drug use.
What do you think the reception to this film will be?
Mo Chara: It depends. I think it’ll do very well, but I think it’s going to be one of them ones where there’s a lot of jokes that are missed for some audiences. Like, you go to Scotland and the jokes are all going to land perfectly – stuff with the Orange Order, a lot of people in England might not get that. People have this preconceived idea that we’re gonna be Brit-bashing or whatever. Regardless of what we do, they’re going to think that anyway.
DJ Provaí: The only way you’ll know if you like it or not is if you go and see it.
Móglaí Bap: You don’t have to love everything about the movie to go watch a movie. You don’t have to love cocaine to enjoy Scarface, it’s not a lifetime commitment to the subject matter.
What I love about the film is how it almost acts like a companion guide to the music. It translates the lyrics for people like me who wouldn’t have understood them, and also contextualises some of the themes in your songs. How did the film actually come about?
Mo Chara: Well, Rich [the film’s director] reached out to us. I wrote the script…
Mo Chara: Funnily enough, before Rich contacted us, there was this woman from Ballymena in Ireland who had a spare ticket to one of our gigs which was sold out. Rich was trying to get a ticket for it and she came up. It was a bit of a drive away and he was trying to give her money but she was like, ‘No, I don’t want money. I’m just such a big fan of Kneecap, I don’t want the ticket going to waste.’ So, she drove from Ballymena to Belfast and gave Rich the ticket for free. Then he went and saw the gig and thought: ‘I want to do a film about these fellas.’ So whoever this woman is in Ballymena, it’s because of her that this film happened.
“Drugs, even though they’re demonised, actually play a massive role in bringing an openness between people, especially men” – Móglaí Bap
The film opens with a line about drugs bringing people together, which, cultural and political commentary aside, becomes an underlying theme of the film. Is there a deeper significance of drugs to contemporary issues?
Móglaí Bap: Yeah, the film has a lot of violence in it but there’s also a lot of tenderness and understanding within our characters. I think drugs, even though they’re demonised and put in a box, actually play a massive role in bringing an openness between people, especially men. That’s where the origins of MDMA come from: psychotherapy and PTSD. We all took pills in the 90s, Catholics and Protestants. It was breaking down barriers. They were able to communicate with each other and express their feelings and emotions and have a lot of fun. That’s how drugs can be very positive. They are also very serious things to be dealing with, but that’s why we have to start talking about drugs in the right way – not just avoid them and just pretend it’s not happening. People have to accept that young people take drugs and help them take drugs responsibly. Avoidable deaths are because of young people not being able to take drugs properly.
DJ Provaí: Times change as well. They get testing kits for drugs at festivals now.
Móglaí Bap: Yeah, us!
DJ Provaí: [Mimes sampling drugs] ‘Yup, that’s ketamine, next!’
Móglaí Bap: That’s a shout…
Speaking of drugs, you guys were the first to coin names for many substances in Irish. Was that intentional or did it just come about naturally?
Móglaí Bap: It was just for fun. I grew up speaking Irish and my dad had a habit of making up words for stuff, just for the craic. Like, nobody actually says 7UP in Irish, but when my dad was translating it to us kids, he would say, ‘seacht suas,’ which means ‘seven’ and ‘up’ in Irish. It’s not because we think that everything has to be Irish, it’s just because it was fun. That was the background of it, and then we started hanging out and taking drugs, and realised that words for them didn’t exist in modern Irish language terminology. So, we got cocaine turned into snaoisín, which is snuff.
Mo Chara: Like, snortable tobacco. It’s great!
Móglaí Bap: I guess that’s part of language revival. Its evolution has to include these terminologies and youth culture. A lot of people don’t agree with it, but that’s just the way it is. Language isn’t one philosophy or one ideology, langage is a wide spectrum of people speaking it and that’s the way it should be. Nobody can gatekeep language. Nobody can say what way you should speak it, or who should speak it. Anybody can speak it.
DJ Provaí: And that’s something that happened here [in Ireland]. It was attached to sectarianism, attached to Catholicism, things that haven’t got anything to do with the language. It’s a living thing that’s not attached to any ideology. It’s a way of communicating and it’s the way we communicate. It’s how we all met and, whenever there’s somebody who doesn’t speak English with us, we just all speak Irish to each other. That’s the way our friendship group is.
My neighbour is a lovely Irish lady who loves what you’re all doing with the language. She explained to me that her mum didn’t teach her Irish because she was worried who would hear her speaking it.
DJ Provaí: That’s common. Back in the 19th century, there was a thing called a ‘bata scoir’, which means ‘tally stick.’ Every time you spoke Irish in school they would put a notch in it and, at the end of the day, how many notches it had was how many times you got beaten – and not in a kinky way. People became ashamed of speaking the language and that might be what you see with your neighbours’ parents. To get ahead in life, they didn’t want to be speaking this peasant language, they wanted to speak the language of getting jobs, to speak the language of globalisation. People sort of turned their back on Irish because of shame and trying to feed their families. It’s come full circle now, where people are proud of it again.
I hope you guys know how much you’re doing for that, too.
Mo Chara: We’ve started normalising it among young people, especially in the cities. I think the big issue with the language for a long time was that people were learning it in school, but it wasn’t something that was a means of communication outside of that. But now I feel like we’re creating modern, contemporary music that shines a new light on it for people. I remember when I was young, I was embarrassed speaking the language, no one would speak it.
Móglaí Bap: Recently, I went to buy weed off a dealer and he spoke Irish. That’s a true sign of the development of the language.
The balaclava is also quite an uncomfortable image for her, one that reminds her of the violence she grew up around. How would you respond?
DJ Provaí: Imagine how uncomfortable I feel!
Mo Chara: He’s fucking sweating underneath it!
DJ Provaí: I would say it’s OK to be uncomfortable.
Mo Chara: Remember, we’ve grown up in very similar circumstances. You don’t have to throw a stone very far in our families to find jail time.
DJ Provaí: The fact that we joke about this stuff is to make light of it, to help people get past the struggle of it. We come from a place that’s been so serious for so long, it’s time to relax.
Mo Chara: Life in Belfast is still uncomfortable. We’re creating a dialogue about it. We’re talking about a connected future, a united future between all working class people from any background. So it’s good to be uncomfortable. Let’s all be uncomfortable together. Let’s talk about it, and talk about an alternative.
“Life in Belfast is still uncomfortable… Let’s all be uncomfortable together. Let’s talk about it, and talk about an alternative” – Mo Chara
Why do you think this is all happening now?
Mo Chara: People are from a generation called ceasefire babies, who grew up around the time of the [1994] ceasefire. We’re far enough away now where we don’t remember it as directly and we’re able to joke about it and use humour as a means of processing it. People see the balaclava and think ‘sectarianism’, but in every interview we talk about working class Catholics and working class Protestants. We have a lot more similarities than we do differences, and definitely know more about each other than the governors in London who don’t know anything about Belfast.
DJ Provaí: And that’s what the tricolour represents. We forget that the whole purpose of the tricolour is the green, Catholics, and the orange, Protestants, coming together, with the white representing peace.
Welsh-language rap also emerged around the same time as you guys, but, where that movement had ample funding, you had to – and are continuing to have to – fight to get yours. Would you mind speaking on that?
DJ Provaí: We were given £15,000 of funding, and the Tory government overreached and withdrew it. There’s a court case. We’re taking the British government to the High Court in November.
Móglaí Bap: They’re still stealing our money, bastards. You’ve seen the quote that she said, something along the lines of, ‘Why would we give UK taxpayer money to a band that opposes the United Kingdom?’ Of course, we oppose the United Kingdom, but, at the same time, we’re under its jurisdiction, we live there. I, by law, have to pay taxes. I don’t want to pay taxes to the guns that are being sent to the Middle East, but I have to. So, by their logic, I shouldn’t be entitled to reap the benefits of the taxes I pay, then I shouldn’t have to pay taxes. Nobody in Scotland who supports a united Scotland should have to pay taxes, either. It’s some kind of weird USSR-like politics where you can create art and the government will fund it, but only if it’s in line with our politics – which is the polar opposite of what art should be for. Art should be for opposing the mainstream or for questioning the status quo. That’s what it’s for, and that’s why it should be funded.
I’m also fascinated by the intricacies of creating rap in a different language. While English-language rap has certain played-out rhymes, like ‘lyrical miracle’, you had the field open to use the language as you see fit. What was that process like?
Mo Chara: Irish uses more sounds than a lot of European languages. It’s not hard to make more sounds than English speakers, and we’ve got loads of different noises that aren’t made in the English language. That really gives a benefit for rhyming structures. One of my favourite rhymes I’ve found is Connemara and marijuana. Connemara is a big Gaelic region, all the families there have been speaking Irish there for over 2000 years. It’s also at the very edge of the west of Ireland, so it’s a big port for bringing drugs into the area. Connemara rhyming with marijuana was just handed to us on a plate.
Could you teach our readers a word in Irish?
Mo Chara: Well, it’s hard in Irish because it’s always more than one word.
Móglaí Bap: What about ar an drabhlás? Err-an-drow-ha-las. It means on the piss!
The Kneecap film is in cinemas now.
