The first time the Irish band Kneecap was scheduled to perform in Boston, opening for the Dropkick Murphys in early 2020, the show was canceled because of COVID. Instead, the band and their manager made their way to Croke Park, the South End dive bar. After downing some drinks, they shut down the jukebox and began bellowing songs.
They got kicked out.
The three members of Kneecap — rappers Mo Chara and Móglaí Bap and DJ Próvai, all stage names — are no strangers to disobedience. “Kneecap,” the recent feature film about their unlikely rise to prominence, opens with Chara infuriating a police officer by refusing to speak English after an arrest.
Instead, he speaks Irish, the ancient language (sometimes called Gaelic) that has been a source of pride for Irish republicans and contention for British authorities for centuries. Kneecap’s two frontmen rap in a chaotic mix of English and Irish, inspired by Bap’s real-life father, Arlo Ó Cairealláin, a former paramilitary who has been on the run for years. (Michael Fassbender plays Arlo in the film.)
The movie, a vivid comic drama that’s part “Trainspotting,” part “8 Mile,” stars the Belfast trio as themselves — Liam Ó Hannaidh (Chara), Naoise Ó Cairealláin (Bap), and JJ Ó Dochartaigh (Próvai). The band’s meteoric rise, in Ireland and beyond, attracted several other suitors who wanted to make films about them, they said in a recent video interview, ahead of their headlining gig at the Paradise on Saturday. But they didn’t trust anyone until Rich Peppiatt, a journalist turned filmmaker, came calling.
After dodging the director’s messages for a few months, eventually the band agreed to meet with him.
“We realized with Rich that he was very serious, that it wasn’t just a throwaway comment,” said Ó Hannaidh. “When we sat down, it wasn’t like, ‘Oh, this is gonna be my thing, and youse are just gonna be part of it.’ It was like, ‘I want this to be collaborative. I want to hear your stories.’”
The band only formed in 2017, but they have more stories than Belfast has churches. Most of them are real, or real-ish. It was actually a friend of Ó Cairealláin’s, not one of the band members, who drew the ire of British police when he refused to speak English.
“We like to pepper up the stories,” said Ó Cairealláin. “But there are a lot of parts of the movie that are true.” The film begins with a christening in the forest, interrupted by a British army helicopter searching for the baby’s father (played by Michael Fassbender).
“You would think that’s a made-up story,” said Ó Cairealláin, “but that’s actually true.” In reality, he was the baby being christened on a Mass rock in the forest.
Also true is the roundabout way that Ó Dochartaigh joined the two rappers as their DJ. He was a secondary school teacher who taught in Irish. He and his girlfriend were involved in the human rights campaign that eventually led to the Identity and Language Act of 2022, an official act of Parliament that recognizes and protects the Irish language after centuries of restrictions.
Older than the rappers but intrigued by their use of the language, Ó Dochartaigh used his musical skills to lay tracks for their first single, “C.E.A.R.T.A.” Quickly realizing that his students were coming to the group’s small-time local gigs, he began concealing his identity by wearing a ski mask, which would become his trademark. He wore it during the band’s interview with the Globe.
In school on any given Monday after a Kneecap gig, the students “would be rapping the lyrics in the corridors,” Ó Dochartaigh recalled. His superiors launched an investigation to find out if he was in fact the DJ Próvai who dropped his trousers onstage to reveal two words, “Brits Out” — one on each buttock.
“Eventually I had to walk the plank,” he said.
After the band showed up at Sundance earlier this year to promote their film, they took advantage of a few days off to go skiing for the first time. Ó Dochartaigh claimed he took to it right away. Less successful was Ó Hannaidh.
“I kept gradually going right,” he said with a laugh, “straight to the bar.”
At first, the band had no notion of getting recognized beyond their own neighborhood in West Belfast, let alone around the globe.
“It was just a bit of craic, the first song,” Ó Hannaidh said, using the Irish slang for good-time banter. “It was a shock to us that it has reached any other community, in America, whatever.”
But the band quickly released a series of singles, including “Gael-Gigolos,” which imagined the two frontmen as male prostitutes working to pay off a debt to paramilitaries, and the self-explanatory “Get Your Brits Out.”
As their notoriety has grown, the band has found solidarity with various resistance groups around the world. Kneecap’s second album, “Fine Art,” came out in June, with nods to mosh-pit rap and the rapid-fire electronic music known as grime.
“Hip-hop is obviously from the bottom up,” Ó Hannaidh said. “There’s this common struggle. There are similarities that we draw on.
“Oppressed people have always used their voice as the last means of resistance,” he continued. “I listen to a lot of hip-hop coming out of Palestine. You don’t need to understand the words to understand the message of it.”
As the credits roll on the “Kneecap” movie, the band lays out its crusade: “Stories are built from language. Nations are built from stories.”
If they’re a political band, they say, it’s by default.
“It wasn’t our decision to make the language political,” Ó Hannaidh said.
KNEECAP
At Paradise Rock Club, 967 Commonwealth Ave., Boston. Saturday, Sept. 21, 7 p.m. Tickets $24.50. crossroadspresents.com
James Sullivan can be reached at [email protected].
This post was originally published on here
