Kneecap fans turned out in force on Friday to support the Irish-language hip-hop trio at their biggest ever festival headline gig, which came just days after a band member was charged with a terror offence.
Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh was charged by the Metropolitan Police for having allegedly displayed a flag in support of proscribed Lebanese organisation Hezbollah at a gig last year.
The band denied the offence, calling it “political policing” and “a carnival of distraction” away from Gaza.
Speaking on stage at the Wide Awake festival, the rapper – due to appear in court next month – said the authorites were “trying to silence us before Glastonbury” and urged fans to be “on the right side of history.”
“I know we’re out, we’re enjoying ourselves and we’re trying to listen to some tunes at a festival… believe me lads, I wish I didn’t have to do this,” he said at the south London event.
“But the world’s not listening. The world needs to see solidarity of 20,000 people in a park in London chanting, ‘free free Palestine!'”
The chant echoed out around Brixton’s Brockwell park.
The UN said on Friday that Gaza was in the “cruellest phase” of war, with 9,000 trucks’ worth of aid ready at the border for the Palestinian territory.
“Let’s remember how lucky we are to be in a field with our friends and not being bombed from the sky,” Kneecap’s frontman, who goes by the stage name Mo Chara, told the audience on Friday night.
Israel launched a military campaign in Gaza in response to the Palestinian group Hamas’s cross-border attack on 7 October 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others were taken hostage.
At least 53,762 people, including 16,500 children, have been killed in Gaza since then, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.
Friday’s concert – Kneecap’s first big gig since the investigation was launched – followed a smaller “secret” set at London’s 100 club the night before.
It saw the band – comprised of Chara, Móglaí Bap (Naoise Ó Cairealláin) and balaclava-wearing beatmaker DJ Próvaí (JJ Ó Dochartaigh) – rip through tracks from their acclaimed album Fine Art, which has seen a surge in streaming in recent weeks since the controversy began.
This included a brand new track called The Recap which dropped online only hours earlier, and begins with a clip of a news report about the counter-terrorism investigation.
Fans, many of whom were wearing Irish and Palestinian flags and shirts, bounced and sang along to their tracks which find them rapping in English and Irish about everything from drug-fuelled parties to Northern Ireland and Gaza.
One fan, Myrtle from Brighton, told BBC News she agreed with the band’s views on Gaza.
“I think it’s amazing. I think they’re completely right,” she said.
“Imagine in a few years if we get to a state where it’s [even worse] and you can’t say that you’ve been on the right side of history and you’ve not made an effort to make that change, how do you not feel guilty?”
She added: “Obviously it’s led to one of them being charged with a terror offence which is awful, but it’s brought more attention to the politics behind it.”
The gig culminated in rousing renditions of Kneecap songs Get Your Brits out and H.O.O.D, with the band encouraging fans to bellow out the Irish Republican slogan “Tiocfaidh ár lá“, which translates as “our day will come”.
Brixton resident John told us outside the gig: “At best they’re naive, at worst they’re apologists for violence.”
“Do they really know what Ireland was like before the Good Friday Agreement?” he asked.
A fan who lives in Orkney, Gwen, told us she had first come across Kneecap “by accident” when her sister told her about the band’s now Bafta-winning film.
She lived in a kibbutz in Israel when she was younger. “I’ve spent a lot of time in Israel, and I’ve had a lovely experience with Israeli people, and I’ve met Palestinian people in Israel,” she explained.
“And the main thing that resonated with me when I was in Israel was that most people on the ground just kind of want peace. They don’t like living with the constant fear of terror.”
She said she “loved Kneecap even more” when they “started putting their light on Gaza”.
Speaking at the Ivor Novello awards a day earlier, the composer of Kneecap’s semi-autobiographical biopic, Michael “Mikey J” Asante, told the BBC’s Mark Savage: “I haven’t really spoken to them, it’s all pretty new – but more than anything else there’s the notion of freedom of expression.
“It will all work out how it needs to. So you leave the people who have the information to make the right decisions.”
Ó hAnnaidh seemed unconcerned about the law on the night, joking with fans that they would have to write to him in jail while asking them to get their “grannies to light a wee candle for me”.
To their many fans, Kneecap are relatable, hedonistic provocateurs, mixing rapid-fire anti-establishment lyrics that aim to give a voice to the oppressed with danceable bass-heavy beats.
To their critics they are dangerous upstarts who have now gone too far.
During an incendiary performance at the Coachella music festival in California last month, they described Israel’s military action in Gaza as a US-funded genocide. As a result, they have been called antisemitic and “terrorist sympathisers”.
Then in the UK, historic footage from two of their gigs was assessed by counter-terrorism police. One appeared to show a band member shouting “up Hamas, up Hezbollah” – both groups are banned in the UK and it is a crime to express support for them – while another video allegedly showed them calling for Conservative MPs to be killed.
Kneecap apologised to the families of murdered MPs Sir David Amess and Jo Cox but claimed footage of the incident had been taken out of context and “exploited and weaponised”, adding they had have “never supported” Hamas or Hezbollah.
They repeated the claim they were “being made an example of” on stage on Friday.
Organisers of Friday’s Brixton event confirmed in a statement earlier this month that Friday’s gig would go ahead after they held “positive discussions with key stakeholders”.
“Wide Awake Festival has a proud history of supporting the alternative music scene and we look forward to staging another unforgettable event showcasing the very best emerging and established talent,” they said.
But other Kneecap gigs have been cancelled in the wake of the controversy, including their sets at the Eden Project in Cornwall and Plymouth Pavilions.
Police Scotland have said that allowing them to perform at the TRNSMT music festival in Glasgow next month will require “a significant policing operation”.
Some politicians including Tory leader Kemi Badenoch have called for Kneecap to be banned and Commons Leader Lucy Powell has said the group should not be allowed to perform at Glastonbury next month, where they are listed for the Saturday.
Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh is due to appear in court a week before the festival begins.
Artists including CMAT, Massive Attack and Primal Scream as well as Paul Weller and DJ Annie Mac have all publicly defended Kneecap, saying the powers-that-be are “strategically concocting moral outrage over the stage utterings of a young punk band” while ignoring the situation in Gaza.
