Tom Dunne: Kneecap put Belfast back on the map as a great place for gigs
Music fans at the Kneecap gig at Belfast Vital. Picture: Liam McBurney/PA Wire
Kneecap’s triumphs at the weekend both at the Electric Picnic and Boucher Road Belfast were the stuff of dreams. Or nightmares, depending on which side of the historic divide you play the drums for. Surreal at the very least, if not unreal and just a tad “batshit crazy”.
As the lads themselves said of their EP performance “Our biggest ever gig…50,000 sound Fenians in a field.” In total they played to 90,000 “sound Fenians” in two days. Although I’m not sure they were all Fenians. My daughter was there and wouldn’t know a Fenian from a Free Presbyterian.
She’d travelled to Belfast on the Friday, a date, August 29th, that has been giving me sleepless nights since May. Particularly since July 12th when I drove through the North on the Unionists’ big day. For those of us of a certain age, that is never not scary.
The mile-high bonfires were one thing – seeing them in real life is so much worse than on TV - but the flags were something else. There were the Union Jacks, obviously, but scattered amongst them too were Israeli flags. “Whatever side you’re on,” they seemed to say, “be clear, it isn’t ours.”
My daughter’s visit north passed without incident. She loved it. Belfast has now been added to a list of cities that she thinks are “great craic” and “fun places to see a gig.” It wasn’t always like this.
The plight of dads like me was expressed beautifully in a Tweet that caught my eye a few days later from a dad from the other bus. Amazed at how much Kneecap were the “talk of Twitter” he resolved to give “a perspective from the Unionist community” as he put it.
He explained, eloquently, that his daughter was a Kneecap fan and her friend a Fontaines DC fan and he had gone with them to make sure they got home safe. We would be birds of a feather there. Not a great fan himself, he said, but he had loved the Kneecap film.
He’d known it was always going to be a Nationalist celebration, but he was fine with that. He saw himself as an outsider and a guest and said he had never felt intimidated. In fact, he had nice chats with the other dads at the back. BBC 6 dads of all persuasions.
His daughter, obviously, shares his Unionist background but spent the night draped in a tricolour. He saw it more as a gig outfit than anything else and even bought her an Ireland top from O’Neill’s to make the ensemble complete. A Fenian for a day, as it were.
He enjoyed Kneecap, Fontaines DC not so much. He did not feel “Brits Out” was ever directed at him. He concluded by saying “You may now call me a Lundy.” I’ll let you Google that historic reference yourself, it’s worth it.
I couldn’t help but marvel. When the Troubles were at their peak Northern Ireland was a wasteland for gigs. Big acts wouldn’t travel, and the cool UK pub-rock scene never made it there either. Your options, even as late as 1975, were either a showband or a covers band playing the local hall.
These were sectarian events. It would generally be a local church hall, and they would be either Protestant or Catholic as would the bands playing in them. Derry and Belfast were described at the time as “two cities trapped in cultural hibernation.”
It’s ironic that a band releasing tracks called and could change all that. When the Sex Pistols started touring in the UK in February 1976, bands seeing them immediately spilt up and reformed as punk bands. By December, with the infamous Bill Grundy interview on TV, the die was cast.
In Belfast, a Deep Purple covers band called Highway Star instantly rebranded as Stiff Little Fingers. The Harp Bar opened its doors to punk bands of all persuasions. It soon became one of the definitive punk rock venues, up there with CBGBs and the 100 Club.
Terry O’Neill opened the Good Vibrations shop and set up the Good Vibrations record label. Bands like SLF, The Undertones, Rudi, The Outcasts and Protex were suddenly united. Because teenage dreams were hard to beat.
The murals of terrorists have given way to murals of Terry Hooley. We are all Kneecap-loving Lundys now.
