Wide Awake festival has not been having it easy. It kicks off the Brockwell Live series of one-day festivals, but last week a residents group, Protect Brockwell Park, won a legal case against Lambeth council over the planning of the events. Protect Brockwell Park had argued the live events would damage the south London park’s ecology and put the public space out of use for local people; Brockwell Live stated that they “take our stewardship of Brockwell Park seriously”.
Yet the legal travails pale into insignificance next to those faced by today’s headliners, Kneecap. The Northern Irish punk-rap trio last month faced outrage after a Coachella set in which they condemned Israeli “genocide” in Gaza and projected slogans on stage including “Fuck Israel. Free Palestine”.
After the furore Rapper MoChara was charged this week with expressing support for a proscribed terrorist organisation. Kneecap said in a statement: “We deny this ‘offence’ and will vehemently defend ourselves.”
Indeed, these setbacks don’t appear to have deflated the trio. Following English Teacher’s vexed, yearning indie and CMAT’s personality-plus, punky take on country and western, Kneecap emerge in front of a collage of recent TV coverage. “Anybody been watching the news?” inquires Chara.
Flanked by fellow rapper Móglai Bap and DJ Próvai, the latter clad in his usual Irish-flag balaclava, Chara reports that tonight’s show only just went ahead. “They tried to stop this gig,” he claims. “We’re being made an example of. The Israeli lobbyists are trying to prove to other artists: ‘If you speak out, we’re going to hit you where it hurts most.’”
The trio started out eight years ago as Goldie Lookin Chain-style comedy rappers performatively lauding Irish republicanism and their own dissolute lifestyles – a style still evident in numbers such as Fenian Cunts and the Garda-baiting Your Sniffer Dogs Are Shite. Chara now jokingly suggests that the 20,000-strong crowd might like to reconvene outside his hearing at Westminster magistrates court on 18 June, “and bring a nice big bag of ketamine”. Yet the comedy would not work were Kneecap not a great live band: Rhino Ket is a pulsating electro-throb over which they celebrate being “K-holed off my head”.
They indulge their nihilistic whimsy and quest for narcotic oblivion further in Get Your Brits Out, a flight of surrealist fantasy in which they imagine a debauched night out with Arlene Foster and other former leaders of the DUP. “Guess who’s back on the news, it’s your favourite republican hoods,” gurns Bap, which certainly has the virtue of accuracy.
Their activism is patently heartfelt rather than posturing radical chic. Protesting again that Gaza is being “bombed and starved”, Kneecap lead one final crowd chant of “free, free Palestine” before declaring on the closing H.O.O.D: “Lowlife scum, that’s what they say about me”. Próvai and his balaclava vanish into the moshpit. What a craic.
