The Prime Minister calling Kneecap’s Glastonbury 2025 performance not “appropriate” was always going to achieve the exact opposite of what Sir Keir Starmer had hoped.
The festival was never going to cancel the booking, it would have been viewed as a mark against free speech, and in the end, Starmer’s comments quadrupled the crowd size. An hour before the Irish rap act was due to come on, the festival’s app was notifying punters that the West Holts stage was full and encouraging people to turn around for safety. (Putting Kneecap on the relatively small stage was one of a handful of programming hick ups so far from this year’s festival; at midday today the Kaiser Chiefs appeared to have double the crowd size headliners The 1975 pulled in last night).
Naturally, the PM’s statement only blew more oxygen on the hip-hop trio’s fire. Through their Irish language rap, they have been campaigning for freedom for Palestine, as well as an end to tensions in Ireland. The Prime Minister made his comments because Kneecap member Liam O’Hanna appeared in a London court on a terror charge after displaying a flag in support of Hezbollah at a concert in London.
Amid the set stuffed with “f*ck Keir Starmer” chants and plenty of Palestine rhetoric, they suggested the crowd rioted outside Parliament, before backtracking minutes later. “I have to make a disclaimer,” they said. “I don’t want anyone to start a riot.”
Kneecap at Glastonbury 2025: some chants cross a line, but there is brilliant wisdom too
Thousands of people turned up dressed primarily in green in support of Palestine. During energetic synth-led, dance-inflected tracks like H.O.O.D and Get Your Brits Out, green and orange flares changed the colour of the sky. The group mainly rap in English but performed a couple of tracks in Irish throughout their hour-long set. DJ Próvaí leads rap duo Liam O’Hanna and J. J. Ó Dochartaigh and their sound fuses rap, hip-hop and dance. They went mainstream after their semi-autobiographical film Kneecap was nominated for six BAFTA awards. Released in 2024, it chronicled the rise of the working class trio from Belfast.
Watching Kneecap is a discombobulating experience. Calls for mosh pits to “open up” come across as aggressive but are prefixed with calls to look after one another. Clearly, telling 40,000 people to riot at Parliament crosses a line. And yet, at other times there is brilliant wisdom to their sentiments. “One day it’ll be controversial for the bands and celebrities who didn’t speak about Palestine,” they said.
It’s funny to watch the Glastonbury audience engage with them. At one point, the band asked the crowd who was planning to watch Rod Stewart tomorrow. (In an interview with The Times this weekend, Stewart suggested we should give Reform a chance, a particularly un-Glastonbury sentiment.) A sea of “yeaaas” diluted to “booos” when it was clear that on this land, the old rocker had gone out of fashion. “The man’s older than Israel,” they quipped. “Google it.”
Half politically-motivated, half curious middle class tag-along types who’ve read about the Kneecap controversy and couldn’t resist turning up to the most zeitgeisty set of the weekend, it was the quintessential Glastonbury experience. By the end the sky was more green that blue with flares, and Glastonbury had reconnected with its roots in political activism.
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