When Kneecap burst onto the scene in 2017, they had no idea that rapping in Irish about drugs, drink and giving the middle finger to the authorities would take them to the other side of the world – including to a free pop-up gig at Melbourne’s Federation Square on Monday.
“We just put the first song out for us and our friends,” says Mochara (real name Liam Og O hAnnaidh), one third of the band and one of its two singers. “It was something we enjoyed, something we thought was good, but we never really thought beyond that.”
Kneecap: Mochara, DJ Provai and Moglai Bap, in Melbourne.Credit: Penny Stephens
But their songs about life in post-Troubles Belfast, sung from the Catholic perspective, quickly gained a following, including among loyalists. And when the film Kneecap, a somewhat fanciful retelling of their story, was released last year, their fame spread exponentially.
Now they’re on their first tour of Australia, with eight shows in little more than a week, including at Golden Plains this past weekend and three sold-out shows in Melbourne (plus today’s freebie) this week.
“It’s class that the film’s done so well,” says Mochara, describing it as “a story as old as time, where a language is driven almost to extinction by colonialism”.
Kneecap are political but playful, toying with the hard-and-fast positions that spelt so much trouble during the worst of Northern Ireland’s sectarian battles (their name comes from the slang term for the infliction of a deliberate wound in the knee, often by gunshot, favoured by gangsters and the IRA).
But about one thing they’re deadly serious: the preservation and proliferation of Irish language and culture.
“I think we come at a time when people are more interested in indigenous cultures and languages,” says the band’s other singer, Moglai Bap (aka Naoise Ó Caireallain). “People are looking for a bit more substance, especially with where things are these days – pop music and everything’s a bit more homogenised.”
Moglai’s father, who passed away recently, was an Irish language activist. He would no doubt be proud to see how much his son and his bandmates – producer DJ Provai (JJ O Dochartaigh), a former schoolteacher, is the third – have done to advance that cause.
