Suzanne Harrington: Kneecap are Irishness come full circle

Amach anocht: Kneecap pictured at the IFTA 2024 Awards at the Dublin Royal Convention Centre. Pic: Brian McEvoy

There’s a venue in London’s Kentish Town just north of Camden – an area once poor and Irish, now gentrified and unaffordable – that used to be an Irish dance hall. 

In the eighties it became a gig venue. Everyone from David Bowie to Nina Simone, Siouxsie to Oasis, Rory Gallagher to Justin Timberlake performed there over the years. 

Arriving in London in my teens, with the NME gig guide under my arm, I’d made a beeline for this place. Got regularly deafened inside its booming walls.

Decades later, I’m standing in the queue outside for the first time in years, surrounded by Irish accents. 

The 2,300 capacity venue is sold out, the place heaving with everyone from oldies like me to Gen Zs in Irish football strips emblazoned with An Phalaistin. 

Inside, a giant Palestinian flag is projected above the stage, with the words Free Palestine. People chant the words.

But it’s not a political rally – it’s Kneecap, already hoarse from five consecutive nights in Dublin. They come on, all craic about being in the belly of the beast, and unleash themselves at us. 

Thousands duly bounce up and down, roaring approval. The next day I am hoarse too, and aching from all the leaping about.

It’s not just the need for catharsis after the anxiety / horror of the American election. 

It’s the fact that these guys, young enough to be my kids and from a city in which I have never set foot, have made me prouder to be Irish than a billion bloated Bonos. They speak up, they call out.

They have also done what Peig Sayers and successive generations of Irish teachers never managed: they make you want to learn Irish, so you can understand everything they’re saying rather than just the English bits, as they launch themselves around the stage, irreverent and hilarious and furiousm and so on-point it makes your brain seize up.

Kneecap are Irishness come full circle, owning it, laughing at it, at themselves, at Britain (‘your land of stolen treasures’). 

To be part of a London crowd singing Get Your Brits Out and Fenian C**ts – at least, the English chorus (I got a D in Irish) – is an intensely political experience presented as hip-hop. 

They have taken intergenerational trauma, and turned it into clever, funny, raucousness. Irishness evolved.

Living in a country whose government is arming a genocide, yet whose media pretends it isn’t, is crazy-making; Anglo-American culture is so smothered in political hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance that you have to constantly remind yourself which way is up. 

To be amid a crowd that’s shouting about this is a relief. A comfort.

Not literally. Mo Chara and Moglai Bap are shouting from stage for the crowd to slam into each other, to part like the sea and then crash towards each other like human waves. 

I glance nervously at my middle-aged English friend, a Kneecap virgin; we retreat to higher ground.

There, a safe distance from the moshing youth, we shake our osteoporosis-prone bones and scream like banshees until the house lights blind us.