The Irish rappers on trauma, sectarianism, and why they want people to talk.
An edited version of this interview appeared in BOMB (9/20/24)
Kneecap take their name from one of the methods paramilitaries used to punish people during the decades of political violence in Ireland known as The Troubles. Since first garnering attention in 2017 for their Irish-language track C.E.A.R.T.A. (‘rights,’ in Irish), Mo Chara, Moglaí Bap, and DJ Provaí have been gaining more and more attention with their politically-conscious, sharply satirical raps.
They’re now getting ready to tour their second album, Fine Art, a concept album which takes place in a fictional pub called The Rutz. The album coincides with the release of Kneecap (Dir. Rich Peppiatt, 2024), an uproarious, only-mildly-exaggerated biopic about the West Belfast trio’s rise to fame. The movie, like their music which swings back and forth between the English and Irish languages, has only added to the band’s acclaim.
When we spoke, they were getting ready for their upcoming U.S. tour. We chatted about working with Toddla T, why they’re suing the British government, and about the role art, humour, and drugs can play in creating dialogue and reframing how communities relate to one another in the “post-conflict” Belfast in which they’ve grown up.
Tadhg Hoey: What was the idea behind The Rutz?
Moglaí Bap: We were in the studio with (Toddla) T, going through different ideas, and the idea of a concept album really resonated with us. Storytelling was always a central aspect of our music, going back to previous songs like Gael Giggolos where we were in debt to dissident Republicans and we have to go shagging old people, for example.
[Laughter]
We just really wanted to tie the whole album together. The pub was just a perfect place for us to tie the album together. In Ireland, you know yourself, the pub is the epicenter. It’s where we go to worship each other and pints. It’s the modern day mass. All us and our friends, we’d be more likely to go to the pub than we would a nightclub. Our local pub would have basically every walk of life. You’d have the young ones in the corner and up at the bar you’d have all the alcoholics sitting there. Then, on the other side, you’d have all the aunties screaming at each other, drinking West Coast Cooler. And we all get along quite well. So we wanted to reflect that in the album, and the ups and downs of a pub and the different kinds of people you get in an Irish pub.
TH: The structure of the album, like a night out, has ups and downs. It has an arc.
Mo Chara: That was all done on purpose obviously. We went to T and he was like: listen, if you want to do 12 songs that aren’t cohesive, I’m more than happy to do that with you but, ideally, I’d much prefer to do some concept album that has a bit of theatrics to it. That obviously suited us. We’ve released music and we’ve done gigs before but this was our first proper debut album, so we wanted to reflect our surroundings, introspectively, as if we were starting again. He was really good at capturing that.
TH: How was the pop-up in London for the album, when you physically recreated the Rutz?
MB: Insane. Holy fuck. The pub was way too small. What do you call the place?
DJ Provaí: Molly Blooms.
MB: Your man let us do what we wanted, which was class. One of our managers was organizing it and asking, like, do you mind if we like spray paint outside and board up the windows and whatever?
DJP: He had all these old boys walking into the toilet and there were neon lights up everywhere with neon graffiti that you could only see [with the neon lights]. We had all these glow-in-the-dark keys made into the shape of the balaclava. People were going around using them in the toilets.
MB: Very impractical though, because the pub was absolutely tiny and there were like 150 people standing for most of the night.
[Laughter]
TH: All that contributes to the hype.
MB: Yeah.
DJP: We planned to do one or two plays of the album and they ended up doing three or four plays so that people could rotate but whenever we were asking people can you move out and let the next crowd move in, they were just squeezing against the wall.
MC: We were relying on the goodwill of the public to come in, have one drink and then leave.
[Laughter]
People were waiting an hour and a half to get in, so they weren’t rushing out after one pint. I don’t blame them.
DJP: There was a crossover with Micil Poitín as well, so we were doing poitín cocktails, which didn’t help because people ended up getting lairied very quickly.
MB: We were there all day. We were that drunk by the end that we forgot how many times we played the album. Then our manager was like, we’ll do it again. We played it five times.
TH: Just doing the DJ spin back.
DJP: [Makes turntable spin back noise]
[Laughter]
TH: How was it working with Toddla T? Provaí, you’d been making most of the beats before this, though I know other people hop on and do make beats for you. How was it working with a producer who had a very distinct vision for how the album should be or should sound?
DJP: Whenever we started off, we were obviously amateur beatmakers. Didn’t know what we were doing.
TH: You’re selling yourself short!
DJP: I mean, when I started with C.E.A.R.T.A., it was just: let’s try something and see if it works. And it stuck. It worked, and it got us to where we needed to be. Then when T came on board, it just gave us a massive elevation. It gave us a bit of clout. He was able to take the ideas we had on board and turn them into something tangible. We would give him the idea of the type of energy or the type of beats—because obviously our shows are very energetic, so whenever you’re making music you want to have it reflect in the music as well. He was able to work with us on those beats and get them to the level that they needed to be for the live shows.
It’s hard doing a concept album and trying to have all the pieces be able to stand on their own as well. So that was brilliant on his part. Ties it to the bar as well. All the wee skits just bring it all together. It was great to get him on board. He works at such a quick pace, which works brilliantly for us as well.
TH: I want to talk about humour, which you use well. There’s a great moment in the movie when DJ Provai jokes about the famine to his partner, a committed advocate for the Irish language. She scolds him and he responds, ‘too soon?’ That sums up a lot of what the movie (and your music) does, which is to take the piss out of heavy subjects: the death of a language, colonialism, nationwide-PTSD, mental health issues. Thingsa lot of people wouldn’t go near. You humanize it, make it something people can talk about by making it funny. Is this a conscious thing or just how you talk about these things?
MC: Because we grew up after the ceasefire, we had a privilege that a lot of people didn’t have. The place was so serious for so long. A lot of these things you couldn’t speak about. But now, our generation is able to look back at these things and of course not forget them, and understand that there’s people still traumatized by these things. But we’re in a time where everybody realizes that humor heals. It could be this thing that was just so taboo that we just never talk about it, or something that we could take back control of through humor. That’s something we do through our music and it was something that we thought was important with the film.
Also, people are saying, oh, can you joke about that? Whatever the troubles, but what if you offend somebody from a different community in Ireland or in Belfast? What we say is that we’re not giving each other enough credit—like we can all take a joke. Do you know what I mean? It’s important that we do joke about these things.
Moglaí was at the 12th marches a couple of years ago. A friend of ours was getting some footage of it and some young Unionists came up to them, singing C.E.A.R.T.A., slagging, saying what are you doing behind enemy lines. All these kinds of jokes.
TH: Jokes which wouldn’t have been possible a while ago.
MC: It wouldn’t have been possible. Now because of the privilege that we have of not having soldiers on the streets, we can talk about these things and actually bond over it. That’s something important for the younger generation.
DJP: We still have a legacy, though, that if someone offers a pint for the famine we can’t turn it down just in case we never get another drop again.
[Laughter]
So that legacy’s still there.
MB: I think the movie’s really good in that it explains the Kneecap concept, and the music, in long form. We’re getting a lot of the people who didn’t understand Kneepcap’s music, or didn’t wanna understand it. Or just don’t listen to hip-hop either, which is fair enough.
There was an artist, a Protestant from the Shankill Road, [whose] music would be centered around Protestant culture. He went to the movie and he was talking about how much the movie resonated with him. How much he’s seen of his own life and his own upbringing in my family story. He sent me a big long message. He said he downloaded Duolingo straight away and sent off the messages with a wee bit in Irish, which would’ve been unfathomable 20, 30 years ago.
I think that’s the reality of young people in the North. They’re actually not that serious about sectarianism. We had Naomi Long talk about us like we’re trying to create a sectarian divide. But the reality for us—when I was in Sandy Row, or that fella messaging us who we’re now friends with—they, young working class Protestants, don’t feel like that. Not [like] a middle-class politician from somewhere fancy. That’s the reality. That’s why the movie’s very good in that way. As Mo Chara always said, our story is the exact same as the story in the Shankill. We have a lot more in common.
TH: That’s really interesting. The mirror image of what you experienced.
MB: For sure. And he talks about the absent father, which was just the most common thing during The Troubles. Another thing we’ve seen is the DUP (Democratic Unionist Party) have denied a lot of people from Protestant or Loyalist backgrounds the right, for a long time, to have an Irish identity, or to understand the language of the culture. They’ve projected onto the [Irish] language that it’s something you should fear, or will corrode your own identity. Whereas the reality is they can be British if they want and speak Irish. People are starting to realize that you can have these two things. They don’t take away from each other. It doesn’t work like that. If I and my family were living in Portugal for 500 years, I’d expect to be welcomed and have an opportunity to learn Portuguese and Portuguese culture.
TH: I grew up in Monaghan, ten minutes away from the border, and The North was spoken about with such seriousness when I was growing up. It’s refreshing now to hear you talk about it.
DJP: We had the benefit of time passing. We’re not as close to the actual things that happened. Our parents or our grandparents were a lot closer. The pain just passes on. They say that time heals everything, so we’re lucky that we can get to the point now we can laugh about it and actually open a dialogue about it, chat with people from all sides and people who suffered at the hands of everybody, not just one side, you know?
MC: In our songs, it’s like extreme versions of some things, you know what I mean? Like we’re extreme versions of ourselves in the music. We talk about topics in an exaggerated version—like South Park. What happens then is that people come out and are like, how can you talk about that? And then other people come out and start a dialogue with them. A lot of our topics like drugs or whatever—it creates a dialogue amongst people. That’s something that we’re losing in this generation is that people are afraid—
DJP: Drugs are bad, okay.
MC: People are afraid to have a dialogue. If I disagree with you then there’s nothing that we can talk about. But, I feel like we can disagree with people and still like them or still have a decent conversation with them about certain topics. That’s what we try to do through our music, in an extreme version.
MB: As we were saying, time heals, and also we grew up in a post-Good Friday Agreement period. That’s when we had Give My Head Peace, an old TV show and it’s based on that piss-take of Catholics and Loyalists and Protestants all getting together, taking the piss out of each other. That’s the kind of stuff we grew up on. Humour is the best way to deal with a bit of trauma. Irish people know that more than anyone.
TH: You’ve taken the arms out of the armed struggle. What’s it now, the absurd struggle?
[Laughter]
By taking the piss out of it all, I feel like you’ve—
DJP: Taken the hands out of it.
[Laughter]
MC: The Red Hand of Ulster. The Taking The Piss Process.
TH: You’ve opened so many minds to so much of this these past few years. I remember a viral clip of you years ago, talking about the U.K., explaining how ignorance is baked into the English education system. It reminded me of this theorist I read in college who said that English people don’t know their history or the extent of the damage they’ve caused because so much of their history took place abroad, not at home. You make these ideas accessible for a lot of people; make it easy to see why Irish people, for example, so readily support the Palestinian cause.
MC: Exactly. A lot of the education system in England, when they talk about English history, it’s all about the glory days of empire. It’s like a national pride that they conquered half the world. Rather than looking at the—[Laughter]—obvious downsides to it, it’s all about a sense of pride. Like, we ruled the world at one point. This is something they’re taught as kids, rather than both sides of the argument. We got a wee bit of it because we went to an Irish-language school [so] we got a little bit of Irish history as well. We got the other side of it which I suppose a lot of people in England don’t get.
TH: Are you surprised at all how well an Irish-language movie’s been received?
MC: I don’t think it matters what language things are in now. Especially as the biggest fucking TV show in the last couple of years was in Korean. Squid Game. You know what I mean? I mean, subtitles are a great thing. [Laughter]. Same with music. I listen to music in Arabic. I don’t understand the words but you can still enjoy it. It’s obviously surprising that it went down so well in England. I feel like the reason it’s going down so well in England is because of the fact tha it’s very—for lack of a better word—anti-authority. People in England understand that because the British government hasn’t really served the English people very well. Right? So, I feel like a lot of people in England actually really related to it in some ways.
MB: I think it’s only countries like Ireland who question art being made in their native language. I think that is the hang up you have with colonialism. For a long time, we see that it’s not worthy. For a long time, a lot of bands would never get famous unless they got validated by England and then they’d come home to Ireland and be famous. Or, when they were making Father Ted —these programs, they’re all made in England. For a long time, we looked over there for that validation. I think people are changing their opinions.
If you look at Top Boy, for example, in London. They basically speak a different version of English. People never said to them, oh, don’t be using London colloquial terms no one understands from South London or whatever. That’s what made it good. That was, like, a main point for us making the film. We weren’t going to dilute the language or the politics. We’re gonna keep it. People got it—they didn’t get it. It’s grand. We came to see that in Utah. They didn’t understand it, but they loved it.
TH: I did wonder, when I went to see it, how some of the Americans understood the accents.
MC: We went to one of the screenings in Glasgow and it obviously went down a storm there. They get the religious jokes and the Unionists and Republican stuff, like the scene with the Loyalist band. Someone said [imitation of American accent]: You’re getting chased by the guys in the orange jumpsuits.
[Laughter]
So, some jokes landed in certain places and they didn’t in others. Which is fine. There was a show in Texas and you can imagine how the ‘cowboys were proper cunts’ joke went down. No one laughing in the cinema.
MB: It has good repeat value because I think a lot of movies or music is created to be consumed once or on the spot, like everything has to be understood right away because of the TikTok generation and everyone’s wee mashed potato brains. And so I find the movie’s good that way. You have to maybe watch it the second time to really understand what’s going on, or you have to go on Wikipedia after and find out who these fellas in the orange jumpsuits are.
TH: I want to ask you about drugs. The North has had one of the world’s highest rates of antidepressant prescriptions since at least the 70s. Some of it, I imagine, is down to poverty, but a lot of it is the legacy of The Troubles. I didn’t know this until I read “Suicide of the Ceasefire Babies,” an essay by Lyra McKee on epigenetic trauma (McKee, a journalist, was shot in the head and killed whilst covering political unrest in Derry in 2019). There’s even a bit in Kneecap where MC and MB talk about intergenerational trauma just to get scripts for drugs from psychiatrists. It’s funny in the movie, but it hides a dark truth. Also, at the beginning of Sick In The Head, Moglai Bap points out that “two bags of street is the same as an hour with a therapist—no wonder we’re all fucked up.”
MC: It’s the same thing that we talk about with The Troubles. It’s obviously a topic that is extremely serious and has affected a lot of families. Obviously, to some people it could seem like we are making light of it. When, in actual fact, the fact that we’ve even done that—like, look at this interview. You have brought up a fucking question—a serious question. The topics we talk about lead to a discussion. We’re not glorifying anything; we’re doing an exaggerated version of some topics for certain situations. Obviously prescription drugs, as you said—nail on the head—are way more likely to be prescribed here than anywhere else. That’s a serious fucking topic. I don’t have all the answers for it, but at the end of the day, people know these things and there’s people who go to fucking university for years that are educated and able to speak about these things. That’s what we’re trying to create here: dialogue.
Drugs are so taboo here. Obviously in America, weed’s legal. The topic of drugs is very open and you’re able to converse about it. Like you go to Europe, you go to festivals, they have drug testing kits at tents. That’s just so far removed from here, right? There’s a lot of avoidable deaths from drugs in Ireland because it’s so taboo. Like in Europe, they know if you’re prone to seizures you shouldn’t take ecstasy or MDMA. Because it’s so taboo to talk about drugs here, people don’t know that. There’s a lot of avoidable deaths because of it. So we’re trying to normalize the conversation of drugs. Again, drugs is used as a blanket term. Ecstasy isn’t the same as heroin. Party drugs are all labeled under the same thing, as heroin and crack, and all these things. When, in actual fact, there are sub-genres to this. Weed isn’t the same as fucking cocaine, right? So, it’s something that needs to be spoken about and needs to be broken down. It’s not just a blanket term anymore. We’re just trying to open the conversation so that people can talk about it.
MB: The two characters in the movie are using, to their advantage, the fact that they understand that symptoms of trauma and PTSD are treated with prescription drugs. That’s why they bring up this intergenerational trauma, or that anxiety and depression can be symptoms of trauma. So it’s just highlighting the fact that after 30 years they think everything changes and goes back to normal. The reality is that it’s easier to medicate a population than to give them actual services, to give them mental health services or counseling. That’s the reality, and you see that in the North of Ireland. That’s why we have one of the most medicated populations in the United Kingdom. Because they’re just like: what, you want us to pay for six months of counseling; it’s gonna cost a fortune! It’s like bang it out—give out the diazepam or whatever.
MC: The British government, as you say, would rather medicate people here than talk about actual solutions, because that would mean that the British government would have to question a lot of their decisions in Ireland and have to create a dialogue that I don’t think the British government is willing to have. So, it’s just easier to just give everybody prescription tablets and not have to talk about the past
TH: Or take responsibility for it.
MC: Exactly.
TH: How influential has rave music and culture been for Kneecap? Get Your Brits Out has, if I’m not mistaken, an 808 State sample (and a sample from the intro to the BBC News) and I’ve noticed a few other rave samples. I bhFiacha Linne has an Altern8 sample and Parful has several samples from Dancing On Narrow Ground, a documentary from 1995 on the impact rave had in the North.
MC: That documentary is iconic here. It’s one of them ones you’d stick on when you’re hungover for something to watch because it’s so fucking iconic. The difference it made amongst young people, like the way that they define it in the documentary about how during the week there’s bombs, there’s murders going on; then, at the weekends it doesn’t matter your background. All that’s out the window because they’re all taking ecstasy. The amount of an effect that had on young people’s outlook on people from different communities was influential, and on how young people view each other now from whatever community you’re from. So, ecstasy, rave music, and the rave scene, played a big part in changing young people’s brains and how they look at each other. It was very, very influential.
MB: Definitely. The fact that rave culture and obviously ecstasy goes hand in hand. When I did ecstasy for the first time, it just changed my whole perspective and how I viewed things. The relationships I had with, say, my brothers—like once we did ecstasy and went to a rave, it just changed things. I don’t know what happens chemically in your brain. Something fun anyway. Same with that documentary; that’s why all drugs shouldn’t be painted with the same brush, as Mo Chara was saying, because of the benefits that we can be afforded. Drugs like MDMA originated in psychotherapy in the seventies. That’s where it came from, then it got brought into disco, into disco music in the eighties. So there’s many benefits. I think the fact that we have a conversation about drugs to bring it down and try and see there’s a difference there, and that there’s benefits there. That’s what you see in America. Weed Wade is legal, mushrooms. You go to Vancouver, they’re sniffing fucking peyote. Everything’s legal in Vancouver.
DJP: Coyotes.
[Laughter]
MB: I mean, that’s why we sampled it, because it’s such a moment in the North of Ireland. The fact that this counterculture and ecstasy was a bonding moment for people who thought they couldn’t get along. But the reality is, when you take ecstasy, all them barriers kinda melted down.
TH: Last question, but how’s the court case going against the Tories? Is suing the government a better way of getting money off them than relying on their goodwill?
[Laughter]
MB: The only way we get mental health services!
[Laughter]
MC: Reparations, for fuck’s sake! We can’t get into it too much.We were awarded 15,000GBP to tour America, which isn’t a lot of money for a band touring America. Kemi Badenoch, a Tory MP, vetoed it, which wasn’t really her place to veto because it was an independent body that awarded it. Her point was that why would we give UK taxpayer money to a band that opposes the U.K. Obviously, we pay taxes because we live in the jurisdiction of the United Kingdom. By that logic, we were saying that we shouldn’t have to pay taxes then, if we’re not we’re not able to reap the benefits of these taxes. I feel like it’s a slippery slope.
DJP: We took them to the court as well and they’ve conceded the first [bit] of the case. It’s going to the high court now in November. We can’t see any more than that.
All images courtesy of Peadar O Goill