About 20 minutes into Kneecap’s set at the Glastonbury music festival on Saturday, the Irish-language rap group stopped the show to discuss a topic that has made it one of Britain’s most talked about — and infamous — pop acts.
“I don’t have to lecture you people,” Mo Chara, one of the band’s rappers, told tens of thousands of onlookers at the festival. “Israel are war criminals,” he said.
He then led the crowd in a chant of “Free, free, Palestine.”
Kneecap’s set at Britain’s largest music festival on Saturday was so popular that organizers had to shut access to the arena to stop overcrowding. But it came after two head-spinning months for the group.
In April, Kneecap lost its U.S. visa sponsor after making anti-Israel statements at Coachella. The police in Britain then charged Mo Chara with a terrorism offense for displaying the flag of Hezbollah, the militant group based in Lebanon, onstage at a London show. Several festivals and venues dropped the band from their lineups.
The Board of Deputies of British Jews wrote to Glastonbury urging it not to give Kneecap a platform that could make the band’s views appear acceptable, and Prime Minister Keir Starmer said last week that it was “not appropriate” for Kneecap to play at the festival, or for the BBC to broadcast the performance. (The BBC, which provides live coverage from Glastonbury, did not broadcast Kneecap’s set, and the festival press office did not respond to a request for comment.)
Yet unlike lawmakers, Jewish groups and prosecutors, few in the crowd on Saturday appeared to have concerns about the band or its politics. Amy Pepper, 46, a health worker from Northern Ireland, said the band was “really inspirational, particularly for my kids.” She had seen Kneecap live several times before, she said.
Others said they had discovered the band only through its recent controversies. Farhan Chaudhry, 31, a tech worker waving a Palestinian flag, said Kneecap’s members were “maybe immature and quite brash,” but added, “that passion is why I want to see them.”
After releasing its debut single, “C.E.A.R.T.A.” in 2017, Kneecap — whose three members are Mo Chara, Móglaí Bap and D.J. Próvaí — quickly made a name in Britain and Ireland for tongue-in-cheek lyrics about partying and taking drugs. Its members came together in a working-class area of Belfast where many residents want Northern Ireland to be reunited with the southern Republic of Ireland.
The group reached a wider audience last year with the release of “Kneecap,” an oddball comedy movie telling the story of the group’s Belfast origins. The film won a BAFTA, Britain’s equivalent to an Oscar.
While Kneecap’s lyrics deal more often with hedonism than politics, it has always made political statements onstage, often about Northern Ireland and its relationship to Britain and the Irish Republic. It stirred a minor uproar in 2022, when it advertised itself in Belfast with a mural showing a burning police vehicle. Some Northern Irish lawmakers accused the band of inciting sectarianism, but the band’s members denied that this was their intention.
The band also often made pro-Palestinian statements at its gigs. But that ramped up after Israel invaded Gaza following the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, and Kneecap’s pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli stage patter became a key part of the act. And this year, some of those comments have caused a furor on both sides of the Atlantic.
At the Coachella music festival in Southern California in April, the band displayed an anti-Israel slogan containing an expletive on a screen. The band’s U.S. booking agent and visa sponsor then dropped the group.
Kneecap has a 21-date North American tour planned for the fall, including two sold-out shows at Rooftop at Pier 17 in New York. But its members must now reapply for U.S. visas to play those dates, and immigration lawyers said they could struggle to secure approval.
Mo Goldman, a lawyer based in Tucson, Ariz., said that this was because of the terrorism charge, and because Secretary of State Marco Rubio had ordered diplomats to vet visa applicants who had made critical statements about Israel. Kneecap’s pro-Palestinian pronouncements could also count against its members, Goldman said.
Backstage at Glastonbury, Dan Lambert, the band’s manager, said that Kneecap’s members would not tone down their views on Palestinians to secure visas. “Do the lads lie awake worrying about visas?” he asked: “Why should they? They worry about kids dying. They worry about hospitals getting bombed.”
Support for Palestinians runs deep in Ireland and among many in Northern Ireland. Such feelings are rooted in a belief that the Irish and Palestinian people share a history of British colonialism and that both have suffered under occupation. Since the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks, Irish lawmakers have repeatedly criticized Israel for its actions in Gaza and last year formally recognized an independent Palestinian state.
Lambert, the manager, said the band enjoyed using provocation to get attention, but its comments on Israel and the Palestinians weren’t part of that strategy. Those statements, he said, were “true and honest, and come from a real place of empathy.” (Kneecap posed for photographs at Glastonbury for this article but declined to be interviewed.)
Trouble had already been brewing for the band since March, when the Creative Community for Peace, a pro-Israel nonprofit for executives in the entertainment industry, which is based in the U.S., posted images on Instagram from a Kneecap show in London. The pictures showed Mo Chara holding a Hezbollah flag and draping it around his shoulders. Video of the gig shows that he ended a song by shouting: “Up Hamas! Up Hezbollah!”
After the band’s comments at Coachella, the Campaign Against Antisemitism, a British Jewish group, reported the video to Britain’s counterterrorism police. Hezbollah is a banned terrorist organization in Britain, and displaying its symbols is illegal; Mo Chara, whose real name is Liam Og O Hannaidh, was charged with showing support for it. (In an interview published on Friday by The Guardian, Mo Chara said somebody in the audience had thrown the flag onstage, and he didn’t know what it was when he picked it up.)
The events of the past few months have turned Kneecap into a particular obsession of Britain’s right-leaning tabloid press. The Daily Mail has published over two dozen articles about the band since the police opened the terrorism investigation and has called the group “vile” and “anti-British.”
David Yelland, a former editor of The Sun, said that Britain’s newspapers have joined with lawmakers many times before to make pop acts the subjects of public outrage. He pointed to the example of the Sex Pistols in the 1970s, and said those attacks often had the side effect of driving young fans toward the group.
In September, Kneecap is scheduled to play the 12,500-capacity Wembley Arena in London.
What happens to the band in the long term will depend on the outcome of the case against Mo Chara. A guilty verdict on the terrorism charge he faces carries a maximum sentence of six months in jail. At a court hearing in London in June, Brenda Campbell, Mo Chara’s lawyer, asked the judge to dismiss the case, saying that the police filed the charges later than allowed by law. The judge scheduled a hearing for Aug. 20 to resolve that point.
At Glastonbury, Móglaí Bap, the Kneecap rapper, urged the crowd to come to the courthouse on that date to support Mo Chara and “start a riot.”
One song later, he returned to the subject, as if sensing a new storm brewing. He wanted to “make a disclaimer,” Móglaí Bap said. “I don’t want anyone to riot — just love and support.”
Alex Marshall is a Times reporter covering European culture. He is based in London.
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