Kneecap
West Holts, Saturday June 28, 2025
In 2017, Glastonbury’s Pyramid field resounded to the chant, “Oooh, Jeremy Corbyn,” hymning the Labour party’s then-leader to the tune of the White Stripes’ 7 Nation Army. In 2025, much has changed, and the crowd at the West Holts stage address the current leader and Prime Minister with “Fuck you Starmer”, conducted by Mo Chara and Móglai Bap, the two young rappers of Kneecap, the group from West Belfast who deliver their pungent rhymes in English and Irish.
The question before their show was, would they lean into recent attempts to have them withdrawn from the Glastonbury bill – a response to an overexcited suggestion made in the heat of a show that listeners might consider murdering their MP and charges against Mo Chara for allegedly displaying the flag of Hezbollah. Or would they cool the febrile atmosphere around the band by letting it slide?
The answer, it proves, is the former, in spades. A video montage that precedes their entrance includes high profile critics of the band, including Sharon Osbourne calling them a hate group. Later, they’re more explicit, sending out “a big thankyou to the Eavis family”, acknowledging “the pressure the family was under” to blackball them.
It’s fair to say they make the most of their reprieve, delivering colourful street scenarios with amphetamine-speed raps, their music maestro – DJ Próvai, hooded as ever in a tricolour balaclava, pumping out appealingly crude beats that call back to the ’90s heyday of hardcore-into-jungle and reach out to the contemporary street music across the Irish Sea: grime.
Kneecap songs feed back their Catholic-Nationalist community’s feelings of political marginalisation, plus winningly low-rent gangsta rap tropes, notably in today’s ecstatically-received Your Sniffer Dogs Are Shite and the hilariously OTT Bloodbath. They make no bones, among constant reminders of their support for a free Palestine, of their feelings of kinship, as self-styled “Fenian cunts”. “We’re from West Belfast,” they declare, “so we understand colonialism”. Keir Starmer is fingered for his failure to act effectively against Israel’s actions in Gaza. Hence the chant.
The crowd respond to the group’s high energy exhortations with verve, a big Irish contingent evident in tricolours and Celtic FC shirts. But plenty of non-Celts are buying in, enough to have the field closed, deemed full – a rare occurrence in this rangy section of the site.
Kneecap walk a thin line. Today they allude to Mo Chara’s upcoming August 20 hearing in Westminster, advocating “no riots, just love and support”, but the conflicting elements of pantomime and agit-prop in their act that create such a frisson, also offer fertile ground for misunderstanding. There are elements of their recent experience that recall previous moral panics over provocative rap groups – The Beastie Boys and Public Enemy. Those groups surfed the publicity over their alleged outrages, but there would be blowback. For the moment, what does not kill Kneecap makes them stronger.
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Photo: Kneecap at Reading Festival, August 2024 (credit: Simone Joyner/Getty)