Many of the most creative ideas come from a night in the pub. Though oddly, the idea for Kneecap’s debut album instead welcomes the listener into their own – imaginary – local.
If The Rutz existed, it’d be built as a community boozer on a West Belfast street – one which welcomes all types, of all religious types, whether English or Irish speakers.
It may be apt, then, that this concept piece is entitled ‘Fine Art’, but the idea is rather more down-to-earth than that. As Mo Chara says: (Producer) Toddla T’s idea was to tell the story of Kneecap. That’s where the idea came to set the whole thing in a pub… there’s someone offering you a drink, there’s a singsong… really, it’s us taking you by the hand and leading you into our world.”
That world – of hip-hop trio Chara, Móglaí Bap, and DJ Próvaí – is one which began in 2017 with the release of their first single ‘C.E.A.R.T.A.’ (Irish for ‘rights’), which documents a near miss with the RUC on the way to party, loaded up with enough illegal substances to warrant a stretch inside. While the track was quickly banned by Irish language radio station RTE for “drug referencing and cursing”, it also helped nudge the Irish language into the 21st century.
And while traditionalists may baulk at the band’s approach to tradition, a range of modern Irish heroes are getting on the Kneecap train, with Lankum’s Radie Peat, Grian Chatten of Fontaines D.C. and DJ Annie Mac appearing on the album while acclaimed Irish-born actor Michael Fassbender starred in the band’s semi-biopic which took this year’s Sundance Film Festival by storm.
“There’s conservative people in the Irish language community who think that the language should be sustained as an ancient language in all its beauty,” says Mo Chara.”
“We wanted to bring the Irish language into the modern era by incorporating aspects of youth culture into it. There were no words for drugs in the Irish language so we had to invent them. That’s part of the world we want to create, where the Irish language is central and it’s modern.”
And while the language has a larger proportion of speakers in the south, the trio operate under very non-sectarian lines.
“The beauty of Kneecap is that we not only piss off people from the Unionist background, we also piss off people from the Irish community… We don’t discriminate who we piss off.”
Kneecap is currently showing in cinemas across Scotland.
A censored version of this article originally appeared in the Lancashire Post.