KNEECAP: "We respect anyone who’s unapologetically themselves and open about it. It’s the sneaky ones you’ve got to worry about..."

It being a gorgeous Thursday night I could be walking the dog on the beach, throwing a steak on the BBQ or camping out in a beer garden. Instead I’m having an even bigger blast bellowing out “You Fenian cunts, you Fenian cunts, ooh!” with the 2,499 other people packed into the Galway Arts Festival Big Top.

Leading this most ungodly of choirs are Messrs. - and, indeed, messers – Mo Chara, Móglaí Bap and DJ Próvaí, who are known to the taxman as Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh, Naoise Ó Cairealláin and JJ Ó Dochartaigh.

It’s evident from the ecstatic reaction to tonight’s gig and the rave reviews for their upcoming self-titled movie that Kneecap’s time is very much now, with their merch stand doing a roaring trade in tricolour balaclavas, one of which is now residing chez Clark, ready for when I next need to have a serious word with the neighbours.

The trio were no less animated earlier in the day when we sat down for a powwow in their backstage portacabin.

I should say from the outset that interviewing the self-styled lowlife scum is the journalistic equivalent of herding cats.

Ask them about cucumbers and they’ll talk to you at great length – and no little insight – about radishes. They’ll be making a serious point and one of them will crack a joke. They’ll be cracking a joke and one of them will make a serious point.

No tangent is too inconsequential to go off on, or subject verboten which is one in the eye for all those stuffy media trainers out there.

Having met them before, I’m also aware of the fierce intelligence, righteous anger and work ethic that underpins their West Belfast brand of agitpop or, more precisely, agithiphop.

ELTON JOHN A FAN

Before we talk about that future IFTA, BAFTA, Golden Globe and Oscar winner of theirs, let’s get a flavour of how bonkers life has recently been for Kneecap, starting with their latest rock royalty fan, Elton John.

“The fact that he knows who Kneecap are is fucking bizarre,” Mo Chara enthuses. “He played the song we did with Grian Chatten, ‘Better Way To Live’, on his Apple Music Rocket Hour show. ‘Get Your Brits Out’ is on his weekly playlist as well – it’s insane!”

Elton doubtless wishing that him and Bernie Taupin had come up with lyrics like: “These E’s are sweet/ They’re sweet E’s/ I’m eatin’ ‘em like sweeties/ Mála mór cola bottles agus mála meanies.”

Grian Chatten also performed ‘Better Way To Live’ with them at Glastonbury where a Mr. N. Gallagher from Longsight, Manchester was among the crowd. Can they talk us through their Worthy Farm experience?

“We got in late enough on the Friday night,” Mo Chara recalls. “Most people had arrived on the Thursday, so we had to park our camper at the very back of the site, which was around a two-hour walk from where we were gigging on Saturday. Anyway, we ditched the van and went straight to Fontaines D.C. on The Park Stage, which was savage. They’ve stepped it up another gear.

“We tried to get an early night, failed and made it back to the camper at around half-fucking-three, which was shit ‘cause we had to be up at eight for our first gig at eleven-thirty. We were like, ‘It’s breakfast time, no fucker’s going to be there’ but they were queuing to get in and we ended up with a full tent of around 6,000 people.”

Was this when Grian jumped up on stage with them?

“Jesus, no, we’re not that good at persuasion!” Móglaí Bap laughs. “Grian loves his leaba, so he joined us for the second gig which was at half-one the following morning. That was fourteen hours of trying to keep the adrenaline up. We’ve scientifically worked out that if you have a few drinks and then take an hour or two’s break you’ll be buzzing but not shit-faced when you eventually get on stage.”

Sage-like advice for any young musicians who might be reading this.

“We got our pacing right and fucking killed it,” Mo Chara resumes. “We were walking through the artists’ tents afterwards and this guy came up and shook my hand. I was like, ‘What the fuck, it’s Noel Gallagher!’ The big fella he was with, Northy, had told him about us and he’d arrived twenty minutes early for the gig, which he said he loved.”

I’ve been interviewing Noel for almost thirty years and he’s not one to plámás.

“Yeah, he’s not up your arse for no reason,” nods DJ Próvaí, who got dog’s abuse on social media after joking to the NME about “meeting that guy from Blur.”

“I don’t think their readers get irony,” the balaclava-wearing member of Kneecap grins. He hasn’t got it on now, hence I can see that’s he’s grinning.

“I get the sense that Noel would happily tell you, ‘You’re shit,” Móglaí Bap takes over. “We asked him how he thought England were going to get on at the Euros and he said, ‘I don’t give a fuck, I’m Irish.’”

Did he tell them about the time he played at Croke Park?

“What, with Oasis?” Mo Chara enquires.

No, with Oisín GAA, the Manchester club he played football with during the early 1980s and who were invited to Croker after winning successive under age championships.

“Really? Fuck, we’d have asked him about it if we’d known,” says Mo Chara who, pointing at Móglaí Bap, continues: “His brother, Cairbre, is the Limerick hurling strength and conditioning coach. Before that he was with Arsenal and Tipperary so he’s at the top of his profession. We all played hurling and football growing up.”

As well as having nice words said about them by Noel Gallagher – “There’s a lot of humour to it… I couldn’t believe how enjoyable it was,” he’s subsequently enthused – Kneecap minds were blown in March when Irvine Welsh tweeted: “Just saw the Kneecap film and it was absolutely fucking phenomenal.”

“Our film’s massively inspired by Trainspotting – only with less heroin – so Irvine Welsh saying on social media, and in a subsequent interview, that he loves it has been a massive confidence booster,” Móglaí Bap says.

“He actually lied and said it’s better than Trainspotting,” DJ Próvaí interrupts before his bandmate resumes: “When we talked to the director, Rich Peppiatt, about his vision for the film, it was Trainspotting and Amélie he kept referencing because they’re both very choppy and fast with lots going on. For us, the storytelling side of things was massive and is what we’ve been doing ever since Kneecap started.”

The poster says “Based on a true story” but just how literally should viewers take the Kneecap movie?

“Very literally… but with a pinch of salt!” suggests Móglaí Bap. “We like to keep the lines blurred with regards to what’s true and what’s not. We don’t want to take the audience by the hand and spoon-feed them because it spoils the magic.”

“There’s enough truth in all of the stories – even the really crazy ones – to justify any moral outrage they might cause,” Mo Chara adds helpfully.

When did Kneecap have their collective lightbulb moment and say, “Let’s make a film!”

“It was my idea, I think,” claims Móglaí Bap.

“No, it was my idea,” Mo Chara counterclaims.

“Fuck off the both of yous,” DJ Próvaí interjects. “St. Patrick came to me in a dream and said, ‘You must make a film.’ No, Rich Peppiatt emailed us and said he was interested in doing something. It was a long process of us ignoring him because we’re very apprehensive about English people trying to profit off of Irish people. We marked Rich’s emails as spam but he was so persistent that we agreed to meet and let him buy us drink. After a few pints of Guinness we knew he was serious and that this wasn’t some random fucking thing he’d thought of.”

FASSBENDER, FUCK OFF!

Having never acted before, Kneecap embarked on six weeks of intensive drama lessons, which transformed them into veritable Daniel Day Lewises – or should that be Lewisi? Whichever, their performances in the film are stunning even when compared to the likes of Michael Fassbender who plays Móglaí Bap’s screen dad, Arló. How the fuck did they manage to bag themselves a Hollywood A-Lister?

“He kept ringing us up to the point where we had to say, ‘Fassbender, fuck off and leave us alone!” Mo Chara deadpans. “He was crying his eyes out, saying he was skint and begging for the role… No, we had a list that he was top of, largely because of how amazing he was as Bobby Sands in Hunger.

“We were trying to move on with the film and then Covid hit, which was actually a blessing because it gave us time to push for bigger stars like Fassbender, who we got towards the end of lockdown. It was a real long-shot because Michael had been concentrating on his Le Mans 24-hour driving – he hadn’t done a film in ages – but miraculously he said, ‘Yes!’”

“I think he saw it as a continuation of playing Bobby Sands,” DJ Próvaí ventures. “Arló is who he could have become if he’d survived: a fella who’s fucked off with the whole way the Republican movement’s gone.”

“He definitely didn’t do it for the pay cheque,” Mo Chara says, which is probably true given that Kneecap cost £145 million less to make than Fassbender’s last superhero outing, X-Men: Dark Phoenix.

Once again, the veteran thesp makes it all look effortless, which of course it isn’t.

“For him, I think it is,” Móglaí Bap disagrees. “I didn’t see him sweating once making that movie. I had a good few pints with Michael and he was sound.”

Adds DJ Próvaí: “He used to do Zoom calls with us to learn the Ulster Irish because he’d learned his in Killarney as a youngster. We’d be saying his lines with him and thinking, ‘How the fuck is this happening!?’”

SPOILER ALERT: Playing opposite Fassbender as Móglaí Bap’s mum Dolores, is Simone Kirby who had to go on the mitch from the Hidden Assets set in Limerick to shoot her part.

“The scene where Dolores comes down the stairs and finds Arló, who’s been missing presumed dead, sitting there in the chair is the best in the film,” Móglaí Bap says. “Simone’s just another fucking amazing character actor.”

There should be a trigger warning for the pneumatic sex scenes where Móglaí Bap whispers sweet Buckfast-fuelled nothings to his Loyalist girlfriend, Georgia, who’s brilliantly played by Jessica Reynolds.

“I could have done with a trigger warning myself because those scenes were really nerve-wracking,” he winces. “Jessica, on the other hand, was totally cool about it. We had two intimacy coordinators and a closed set. At the start I was worried that it was going to be very awkward, but it was best for everyone.

“Technically it’s a sex scene, but it’s really just a fucking argument with two people screaming obscenities at each other. We’ve had a lot of pushback against the ‘Blow me like a Brighton bomb’ line – a lot of the funders wanted that taken out – but we held tight over it. It’s an English director and a Unionist character saying it, so it’s fine.”

Have they enjoyed love and/or lust across the barricades for real?

“I’ve stuck me Mickey through the wall,” DJ Próvaí informs me. “Cross-community glory holes for all!”

Er, quite....

THE SNEAKY ONES

Kneecap have said in the past that they have more in common with a lot of working-class Unionists than they do with the upper echelons of the Nationalist community. Is there an East Belfast Kneecap?

“Young Spencer from the Shankill Road is a lovely fella,” Mo Chara says. “‘P.R.O.D’ is his mantra but he’s also got a song about his friends that goes, ‘I’ve got blues and whites and oranges and greens.’ We respect anyone who’s unapologetically themselves and open about it. It’s the sneaky ones you’ve got to worry about.”

“There’s another guy who’s been around for years, Jun Tzu, who’s supported us and has brilliant lines like, ‘I was born in Belfast/ Hear the shotgun shell blast/ And your soul’s going to hell fast.’ His da was in the UVF but became a pastor in Manchester. That’s what it’s like on the ground – most young people we meet don’t give a fuck (about your background).”

Another person who allegedly begged the boys for a part in Kneecap is Gerry Adams.

“That was definitely more surprising than getting Michael Fassbender,” Móglaí Bap says. “He manifests himself during the scene where we’re in a ketamine-induced stupor. It’s so unbelievable that most people think it’s CGI but, no, Gerry really turned up and apart from changing ‘fucking’ to ‘flipping’ was happy to follow the script.”

For some reason, all of the drug scenes, which can be tricky things to shoot, ring true.

“Practice makes perfect,” says Mo Chara.

“We’re method actors,” Móglaí Bap adds before DJ Próvaí wins the round with his “Meth-head actors!”

“There’s another scene where we’re pouring bags of stuff over each other, which doesn’t ring true ‘cause you’re obviously not going to waste it like that,” Móglaí Bap resumes. “Chucking pills around and starting aggro at house parties is where it’s at!”

I have to confess to being something of an amphetamine sulphate fan during my long-distant youth.

“That’s the poshest term I’ve heard for speed,” he laughs. “You can still get it – more so in England – but why would you if you can afford cocaine?”

If it wasn’t for that pesky Taylor Swift, Kneecap would have claimed their first Irish No. 1 recently with Fine Art, which features guest turns from both the aforementioned Grian Chatten and Lankum singer Radie Peat.

“You get them drunk enough that they have to agree,” Móglaí Bap says of the recruitment process. “Radie was going on holiday to Mallorca, so we only had her for ten minutes in the studio – which was five minutes more than was needed. She nailed it first take. Grian is a challenge to get anywhere so we had to send someone down to Brighton to pick him up, bring him to the studio and stick him in front of the microphone. Once you have him, though, he’s fully committed.”

Were they trad fans growing up?

“Oh, aye, he plays the whistle,” Mo Chara says pointing at DJ Próvaí who adds, “I used to go every week to Comhaltas. There are stacks of them around Ireland, which gives you the opportunity to sit down in the fucking corner of a pub and play some tunes.”

“We have a massive friend group and a good 90% of them play trad,” Móglaí Bap says.

So they grew up listening to both Planxty and Ice-T?

“Planx-T, there’s the crossover!” Móglaí shoots back.

Kneecap’s actor friend and near neighbour Anthony Boyle told us recently about the mural outside his old school of IRA commander Brendan Hughes who has almost rock star status locally. Asked whether that strikes a chord with them, Mo Chara nods and says, “Bobby Sands is a hero to people in our community. A lot of people think of the IRA as being stone cold fucking killers out for blood but then you have somebody like him, a gentle soul who just felt he had to do what’s necessary to fight against occupation. He really, really taints that idea the Brits have of what the IRA were. They were teachers, shopkeepers and other local people who stood up for what’s right.”

“All over the world there’s streets named after him,” DJ Próvaí notes. “He was a poet, a writer and a singer-songwriter. Before he died at the age of 27, he was elected the MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone. He achieved so much in his short life.”

I remember reading his harrowing descriptions of the Maze in An Phoblacht.

“My first job was selling An Phoblacht for a pound,” Móglaí Bap recalls. “Have you read Bobby Sands’ One Day In My Life? It’s an account of the torture and all the other shit he went through, written on toilet paper and smuggled out of prison.”

“He was on hunger strike for 66 days, by which time he was covered in bed sores, blind and hallucinating while his body started eating itself,” DJ Próvaí adds.

SEVENTY-FOUR DAYS WITHOUT FOOD

“While everyone else was pretending to be Cristiano Ronaldo or Lionel Messi, I was reading about Kieran Doherty the hunger-striker when I was at primary school,” Móglaí Bap resumes. “He did 73 days without food, which was the most of any of them and has the same birthday as me (October 16). All of our families are Republicans and have members who’ve been to jail.”

Asked who Kneecap’s other political heroes are, there are shouts of Colonel Gaddafi, Fidel Castro, Stacey Dooley (?!) and Jeremy Corbyn who they met last year in the Democratic Republic of Islington.

“Jeremy’s a fucking gentleman,” Mo Chara says. “He did loads for the Guildford Four and got Gerry Conlon a house when he first came out. He was re-elected recently as an Independent, which is a real ‘fuck you’ to Keir Starmer.”

Backing up a couple of paragraphs, Kneecap’s recommended reading list also includes Tim Brannigan’s Where Are You Really From? and Richard Conlon’s In The Name Of The Son: The Gerry Conlon Story.

Kneecap were among the leaders of March’s boycott of South By Southwest, which has subsequently led to the Texas showcase festival dumping the US Army as a main sponsor.

“It worked well because there was collective action from the start,” Mo Chara says. “Once we came out with our statement, we talked to Gurriers and most of the other Irish artists who were supposed to be there. Some of them were already in Texas and for various reasons felt they couldn’t pull out which was fine as well.

“Like with the BDS movement, it’s hard to be perfect. As Bernadette Devlin said recently at a Palestinian rally in Dublin, ‘All you can do is your best.’ We can’t all of a sudden throw away our Puma shoes or whatever. If you were to take it to its ultimate conclusion, you’d be walking around naked and hungry so, yeah, just do your best.’”

Having spent quite a bit of time there recently, can they understand the messianic grip Trump has on large swathes of America?

“You won’t find many Trump supporters at our gigs but, yeah, a lot of Irish-Americans are going down that route,” Móglaí Bap sighs. “At the same time, the last person you’d want to run against him is Joe Biden. Fuck me, that cunt looks like a Halloween decoration. You could put anyone else up against Trump and expect common sense to prevail.”

Common sense has prevailed – well, at least partially – with Sleepy Joe announcing his decision to quit the race 72 hours after this chat.

What was their reaction to Trump being shot?

“For fuck’s sake, that sniper was as bad at shooting as the England football team,” Móglaí cackles.

“I said, ‘He’s set it up himself for the clout because now he’ll definitely win the presidential election,’” DJ Próvaí suggests. “He got a sharp-shooter to shoot him in the ear.”

Próvái can’t believe that Jack Black has pulled the plug on 35 years of Tenacious D because of Kyle Gass’ birthday wishes comments.

“Over a joke... it’s stupid,” he says. “Soft cunt, wind your neck in, Jack!”

Talking of controversies – which Kneecap become embroiled in more than most – what was the mood like in the Late Late Show studio after Próvái broke RTÉ’s impartially rules by whipping off his top to reveal a Palestine football shirt underneath?

“You could feel the tension and hear the frantic chatter in Patrick Kielty’s earpiece,” he recalls. “Kielty’s sound as fuck but has to say, ‘There’s two sides to this…’ when obviously there isn’t. They got more complaints for the fucking Late Late Toy Show than there were for me doing that.”

Were they escorted from the studio?

“No, they gave us free drink and a round of applause,” Móglaí Bap grins. “They thrive off that sort of stuff.”

Kneecap’s support for Palestinian sovereignty is deep-rooted.

“Way, way before October 7, you’d have seen Palestinian and Basque flags alongside Irish ones on the Falls Road,” Móglaí continues. “There’s always been solidarity in West Belfast for other occupied territories.”

Finally, are they pumped up for their Electric Picnic return?

“Oh, aye, fucking right!” Mo Chara concludes. “There’s always something really great about EP and not just because it’s the biggest. We got one year where it rained but otherwise it always seems to be sunny. The last time we played Rankin’s Wood there was a 3,000 cap and people were spilling out of the place.

“It’ll be even more rammed this year after the film. Also, The Wolfe Tones are playing the Main Stage, which will definitely be the biggest gig of the weekend. How many bands reach the peak of their careers in their ‘70s? It’s going to be fucking epic!”

• Their Fine Art album, and the Kneecap movie, are out now. Kneecap play the Electric Arena at Electric Picnic on Saturday, August 17, at 7.15pm.