‘The Brits made us feel like it was a peasant language’: Kneecap’s rebellious rise to power

When you’ve spent hours listening to Kneecap, the riotous Belfast rap trio whose lyrics span a broad spectrum of subjects, from sex and drugs to Irish independence and British colonialism, the last thing you expect to discuss in such detail is breakfast. More specifically, eggs.

“Sorry, man, Moglai has just gone to check on his eggs; you’re stuck with me for now,” says Mo Chara over Zoom.

Chara is one-third of Kneecap, the Irish-language hip-hop group that exploded out of Belfast in 2017 and has been seducing the rest of the world ever since. Moglai Bap, the one waiting on his eggs, is Chara’s fellow frontman, while the group’s resident DJ, DJ Provai, doesn’t really do interviews. Probably due to usually wearing an Irish-flag balaclava that covers his face. Ah yes, welcome to the weird and wild world of Kneecap.

“That’s probably not clear – he’s waiting on his breakfast, he’s not, like, checking on embryos,” clarifies Chara. “Maybe I want some breakfast, too. I could do with some eggs.”

At this point, Chara could pretty much have whatever he likes, such is the buzz around Kneecap – eggs for breakfast, world domination for dinner.

The group, which will tour Australia in March, formed in 2017, picking the name Kneecap as a tongue-in-cheek hat tip to the traditional wounding inflicted on drug dealers by paramilitary Irish Republicans. They quickly began making waves for their brash music, intensely political lyrics and, most importantly, their determination to rap in their native tongue.

Their debut track C.E.A.R.T.A was recorded after police detained Bap for spray-painting the Irish word for “rights” (cearta). He refused to speak English to police and was held as they waited for a translator.

Since then, the mythology around Kneecap has steadily grown, boosted by the release of their second album Fine Art and a headline-grabbing slot at this year’s Glastonbury. “You know who was backstage waiting for us, f---ing Noel Gallagher,” says Bap, having joined us after finally getting his eggs.

“We came offstage and he was sitting there, telling us how much he loved the gig. He said he was 20 minutes early to it. Couldn’t believe my eyes.”

“It was surreal,” agrees Chara. “I remember saying to him, ‘You belong online; I am not supposed to see you in real life.’”

Pinch-me moments are increasingly common for Kneecap, but nothing compares to the recent release of their semi-autobiographical film, also called Kneecap. Set in 2019, around the time the Irish-speaking community of Northern Ireland was campaigning for legislation that would recognise the status of the Irish language, the events mirror Kneecap’s real-life origin story.

Against a backdrop of growing up in post-Troubles society, the rebellious trio began rapping in Irish when the language was disappearing, especially among young people. “There was always this embarrassment that the Brits made us feel like it was a peasant language,” explains Chara.

Through the use of the Irish language, Kneecap reignited a sense of nationalist identity among their peers, using rap as a vehicle to make it relevant.

“It might sound funny but there was no Irish word for cocaine, so we’d choose old words from a hundred years ago and regenerate them, which helped turbocharge the subculture,” says Bap.

In case you’re curious, in Irish, snaois is coke and capaillin is ketamine. Tattooed across Bap’s chest is 3CAG, the title of Kneecap’s 2018 album. It stands for 3 chonsan agus guta, Irish for “three consonants and a vowel”, meaning MDMA.

All three drugs feature heavily in the Kneecap story, as the band rocket from a Belfast squat to the centre of the Irish zeitgeist, fascinating the youth and terrifying the powers that be.

They say the craziest ideas are often the best ones, which perhaps explains the hype around the film. On the surface it’s hardly your classic breakout hit – a foreign-language biopic about a rap trio that only formed a few years ago.

“Yeah, I’m the first to say it was a dice roll; it’s not like it had the obvious ingredients for success,” says Rich Peppiatt, the film’s writer and director, with a laugh. “And yet it seems to be working out, against all odds.”

He’s not wrong. In March Kneecap premiered at Sundance, the first Irish-language film to do so, and this week it was selected by the Irish Film & Television Academy to represent Ireland in the international feature film category at the 97th annual Academy Awards.

The group portray themselves in the film, having undertaken acting lessons twice a week for six months in the lead-up to filming. “For us personally, we draw a lot of confidence in being the underdog; that first day on set, we knew the crew probably didn’t expect much of us, so we wanted to blow them away,” says Chara.

“Classic show-pony behaviour,” adds Bap.

‘It’s a bad day for hip-hop when censorship stops.’

Mo Chara, Kneecap

Luckily for Peppiatt, the on-stage bravado translated seamlessly on camera, even if he did have to deal with a last-minute curveball. “They spent three months not drinking and trying to get fit, and the night before day one of filming they let it all go and got absolutely blitzed in the hotel,” he says.

“So I was very grumpy with them, but they assured me they were method actors. So that was that and, annoyingly, they were effortlessly good.”

Thankfully, there was one person on set who Peppiatt didn’t need to worry about: two-time Oscar nominee Michael Fassbender. After reading the script the Irish actor jumped at the chance to play Bap’s on-screen father Arlo, a former leader of the Irish Republican Army who fakes his death.

“He didn’t have to do this film but he loved the concept, and I think he saw it as a continuation of his character Bobby Sands [the IRA member who rose to prominence in 1981 when he embarked on a fatal hunger strike] who he played in Hunger,” says Bap.

“Everybody just upped their game when he was around. Like, we were better, the crew were better, even the f---ing catering was better.”

Arlo appears regularly in the film to remind his son that “every word of Irish spoken is a bullet fired for Irish freedom”. This message is not lost on the boys from Kneecap, who have faced plenty of censorship in their short history.

In late 2017 C.E.A.R.T.A was banned from the Irish radio station RTE for “drug references and cursing”. Two years later the group were removed from the stage of their own concert at University College Dublin after chanting tiocfaidh ar la, a Republican slogan that translates as “our day will come”.

“It’s a bad day for hip-hop when censorship stops, so we’re not that fussed; we know that the topics we’re rapping about will create issues with mainstream politics,” says Chara.

“Whenever we weren’t playing on the radio we took it as a win,” adds Bap. “Because these bands that are played on radio on repeat are bland and won’t ever shake the status quo.”

Kneecap is in cinemas now. The group will perform at Brisbane’s The Brightside on March 12; at Melbourne’s 170 Russell on March 13-14; at Sydney’s UNSW Roundhouse on March 15; and at Fremantle’s Freo.Social on March 17.

Find more of the author’s work here. Email him at thomas.mitchell@smh.com.au or follow him on Instagram at @thomasalexandermitchell and on Twitter @_thmitchell.

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