Not since the Sex Pistols delivered a volley of swear words on live television in 1976 has a band generated so much moral outrage for what it says rather than what it sings.
The Pistols became targets of cancel culture decades before the term was coined as venue after venue refused to host their Anarchy in the UK tour.
Now the Irish language rap trio Kneecap is facing a similar backlash after their “F*** Israel” graphics at the Coachella festival in California led to a trawl of social media that unearthed videos of a band member shouting “Up Hamas”, telling fans to “kill your local MP” and brandishing a Hezbollah flag.
A gig at the Eden Project in Cornwall has been cancelled, as has a replacement show in Plymouth and three concerts in Germany. MPs have called for Glastonbury to drop the band from this year’s line-up and police are investigating potential glorification of terrorism and incitement offences.
Kneecap’s long list of summer festival appearances across the UK and Europe is in the balance and the Trump administration has been urged to halt a sold-out autumn tour of North America by revoking their work visas.
On Friday American Airlines removed the band’s critically acclaimed quasi-biographical movie from its inflight entertainment menu.
While cancellation propelled Johnny Rotten and his band to fame, half a century later it has put the future of Kneecap in jeopardy.
“This is an existential threat to the band,” one industry executive who has worked with them said. “There are influential people in the business circulating emails telling people to have nothing to do with these guys. I’ve been told personally to play down any association with them.”
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The band’s members — beatmaker DJ Próvai (JJ Ó Dochartaigh, 36) and MCs Mo Chara (Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh, 28) and Móglaí Bap (Naoise Ó Cairealláin, 31) — are said to be “hunkering down” as the storm rages. Two are at home in Northern Ireland and one has sought refuge abroad.
While their film depicts them first meeting in a Belfast police station, the reality is that they met at an Irish language cultural festival organised by Ó Cairealláin in 2017.
Ó Dochartaigh, originally from Derry, was an Irish language schoolteacher and a musician. Ó Cairealláin’s father, Gearóid, who died last year, was a pioneer of the Irish language revival movement across Ireland, establishing a newspaper, schools and a theatre group.
The trio became regulars at Madden’s, a traditional music pub in Belfast city centre, where they met their manager-to-be Daniel Lambert and Kneecap was born.
The band believe there has been a “concerted campaign” against them including “industrial scraping” of the internet to find compromising clips.
Those clips are damning. A November 2023 gig shows one member shouting: “The only good Tory is a dead Tory. Kill your local MP.” Kneecap issued an apology to the families of the murdered MPs Sir David Amess and Jo Cox, which has been poorly received.
Another video from a concert in November last year shows one of the band shouting “Up Hamas, up Hezbollah”.
The band are not without supporters. Paul Weller, Massive Attack, Dexys and Fontaines DC are among dozens of artists to sign an open letter in their defence.
“The question of agreeing with Kneecap’s political views is irrelevant,” the letter says. “It is in the key interests of every artist that all creative expression be protected in a society and that this interference campaign is condemned and ridiculed.”
Controversy has been in Kneecap’s DNA from the beginning. Their first single C.E.A.R.T.A (“cearta” means “rights” in Irish) was based on the night a friend was arrested for spray painting graffiti and refused to answer police questions put to him in English. The recording made it onto a playlist at RTE, the Irish national broadcaster, but was then dropped because of its celebratory references to drug culture.
Even the band’s name is inflammatory, taken from the vicious punishment (administered by gunshot or power drill) inflicted by the IRA and other paramilitaries. The practice continues: in 2024 police in Northern Ireland recorded five “punishment shootings”.
Many in Northern Ireland recoil at the balaclava worn by DJ Provai, whose stage name is a reference to the Provos, the nickname for the Provisional IRA. The band also painted a mural of a burning police Land Rover on the wall of a Belfast pub.
Dame Arlene Foster, the former DUP leader and a butt of Kneecap lyrics, has criticised their “glamorisation of republican violence”.
Yet the story is more complex. The band members come from Northern Ireland’s nationalist community but when they won a court victory over Kemi Badenoch’s attempt to block £14,000 public funding as young artists they split the proceeds between youth groups from both sides of Belfast’s divide.
The Irish flag balaclava was first intended both as a parody of terrorist garb and a means of hiding DJ Provai’s identity from the school where he worked. He eventually lost his teaching job after a video emerged of him baring his buttocks — painted with the words Brits Out — at a gig.
Their Bafta-winning movie, written by an English former tabloid reporter, Rich Peppiatt, depicts a cross-community love affair and is scathing in its ridicule of the dissident republican groups that still haunt Northern Ireland society.
Songs — such as Get Your Brits Out and H.O.O.D — are rooted in West Belfast and the resentment and dark humour of a “left behind” community that has benefited little from peace dividends or Brexit opportunities.
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And extraordinarily, given that they rap at speed and mostly in a language incomprehensible to audiences around the world, Kneecap have drawn hundreds of thousands to gigs that, not unlike the Sex Pistols, are loud, profane and high energy.
Their stance on Gaza is part of the draw for many young fans alienated by the scale of the Palestinian death toll. For years Kneecap have routinely led their fans — from London to Melbourne to California — in chants of “Free Palestine”. In Ireland, support for Palestinian independence is a view shared widely, from President Michael D Higgins downwards.
The band like to talk of fusing irony with provocation, but even supporters feel they blundered with their performance at Coachella.
“To do that at a music festival, after what happened at Nova on October 7, was crass, reckless, undisciplined — they have probably harmed the cause they want to support,” one source said.
Nova’s organisers said Kneecap’s message “deeply hurt” and invited the band to visit an exhibition about the victims and survivors of October 7. “Not to shame or silence,” Nova Tribe said, “but to connect. To witness. To understand.”
But is this the end of their 15 minutes of fame? It would be hard for Glastonbury to cancel Kneecap without incurring an audience backlash: the festival fields were awash with Palestinian flags last summer.
And so far the scandal seems to be growing their fanbase: the analytics firm Soundcharts calculates their online followers and listeners have reached 1.42 million, up 14 per cent in the past four weeks.
