Q&A by Brad Balfour
With the same jolt of energy that propels the film “Kneecap,” the group Kneecap —from Belfast, Northern Ireland — shows the same energy in an interview that they do in a performance. The trio answered questions with the same shotgun style they demonstrate in their Gaelic rapping.
And now with the film exploding everywhere, the band is finding an international audience for both the movie and their music. The trio consists of rappers/lyricists Liam Óg “Mo Chara” Ó Hannaidh and Naoise “Móglaí Bap” Ó Cairealláin with JJ “DJ Próvaí” Ó Dochartaigh providing beats and music.
Ó Hannaidh and Ó Cairealláin are part of the “ceasefire generation” living in the Gaeltacht Quarter of West Belfast. As children, they learned to speak Irish from Naoise’s father, Arlo [played by Michael Fassbender in the film], a former republican paramilitary. He fakes his death to evade British authorities, so Naoise’s mother Dolores [played by Simone Kirby in the film] becomes a recluse. Arlo lives in hiding and is disappointed by his son’s hedonistic lifestyle and lack of initiative.
When Liam is arrested at a drug-fueled bash he refuses to speak English to the police, insisting he can only speak Irish. JJ Ó Dochartaigh, a music teacher at an Irish-language school, arrives to serve as a translator during Liam’s interrogation. JJ helps him avoid charges and hides Liam’s notebook —rich in possible rap lyrics — by taking it home.
Thus, the origin story of the group Kneecap —at least, as told cinematically — that emerged from the confluence of these three. They hit the scene, coinciding with the struggle for Gaelic speakers to be acknowledged by the British/Northern Irish authorities as the legitimate language of the Irish community. The more the authorities oppose this linguistic community, the more they fight for a law to legalize it.
Kneecap raps in a mixture of English and Irish and their lyrics often contain Republican (as in the fighters for Irish statehood) themes. Their first single “C.E.A.R.T.A.” (Irish for “Rights”) was released in 2017, followed by “3CAG,”their debut album, in 2018. “Fine Art” — their second full release — came out this year.
Enter into this scene Irish/British director Rich Peppiatt, who realizes there’s a rich story to tell. Voila, the quasi-biographical film “Kneecap” about the group — where they plays themselves as characters alongside a pack of actors playing crucial figures in their lives. The movie was released later the same year as their latest album. It was a hit at the Sundance Film Festival and is now Ireland’s contender for an Oscar nomination.
This exclusive interview was conducted just as the film was being released in New York theaters.
Q: Speaking about this whole experience, were you all blown away by the fact that it went so fast? First [director Rich Peppiatt] comes and wants to make a movie, then it gets made. Then it gets into Sundance, and into New York at Tribeca Festival. Who ever thought that a movie about a Gaelic hip-hop group was ever going to get that far? Who was most amazed first?
Mo Chara: Him, Rich [laughing]. Once we started, and met Rich, it was a bit of a slow process at the start. We were working out what the film was going to be like, what stories were in, and what weren’t. Obviously, it has been such a rollercoaster in the first couple of years; when he got involved we couldn’t fit [in] the amount of stories that had to fit into the hour-and-a-half window we had for the movie. Towards the end of the script, just before filming, we knew we had a good script.
Then there was a break with Covid. It would have been done even quicker if it wasn’t for Covid. But Covid was actually a good thing for the film. It was towards the end of Covid, when we got Michael Fassbender on board. If it wasn’t for Covid, he might not have been available. So that was, obviously, a plus there for us. We knew we had a good script. We knew we were on to something. No matter how niche, it wasn’t a language that not many people speak. It’s a topic that people are interested in around the world now.
Q: Who’s the best Gaelic talker?
Mo Chara: Haha, this guy here.
Moglai Bap: I’m Moglai Bap so far.
Q: Talk about how it was growing up speaking Irish. Were you writing in Gaelic as well? How does that process work? Were you writing lyrics? Do you write lyrics that might be in English and then transfer them?
Mo Chara: The thing is…. Obviously, a lot of people always ask us, “Why did you decide to rap in Irish?” it wasn’t a decision. We speak Irish, all of our friends speak Irish, and that’s how we communicate. You wouldn’t ask someone in Portugal, “Why did you decide to sing in Portuguese?” But, for some reason in Ireland, people feel like it’s a big political statement that we’ve done by doing it. It’s just a language we use to socialize. Whatever comes out, we don’t confine ourselves and say, “It’s only in the Irish language or it’s only English.” It’s just whatever we feel at the time.
Moglai Bap: It makes it twice as easy. Is that right? Twice as easy? It makes it twice as easy. Twice as many rhymes. So, we’re actually just writing easy. I had nothing to do with translating the Irish language.
Mo Chara: If you don’t know the words in one language, you can open up a whole new dictionary of words for that rhyme. It’s actually a lot easier.
Q: In a lot of ways, people don’t think of Northern Ireland as being Gaelic speakers. They’re thinking of it more in the South and certainly in the West country.
Mo Chara: That’s what 100 years of colonization will do.
Q: Even Irish people here in the States aren’t as aware of this fight for the language there in Northern Ireland.
Mo Chara: Yeah. Still, we had no legislation. [We] had no legal right until 2022 [to speak the language]. The language had never been recognized as an official language in the country. Obviously, that’s up north; in the south it is. But up north, it had never been recognized. This is a language that is over 2,000 years old. The English language is a lot younger than that. The English invasion of Ireland was 800 years ago. At one point, there were eight million people living on this island and nobody spoke English.
Moglai Bap: The good old days.
Mo Chara: The good old days.
Q: How do you two work it out on the lyrical side? Or are you more on the musical side?
Mo Chara: He’s the maestro [looking in the direction of JJ].
Q: The DJ, right?
Moglai Bap: Yeah. And the sex piece.
Q: You play the sex piece. Looking at you with the turntables… Turntables? Well, you were actually…
Mo Chara: He was more of a cassette man. I started writing for Gramophone [chuckles]. You should be using Gramophones.
DJ Próvaí: I would bring the Gramophone back.
Q: How do you two decide who does the lyrics? You have one song to yours, one song to yours? Or do you interact at a point you think, That’s it we got it!”? Or is it pure spontaneity?
Mo Chara: It depends. You start off, probably someone writes a chorus. But you want to get the first one done before the next person gets the first one, because he might use all of the same words you have.
Moglai Bap: You have to change it up.
DJ Próvaí: It’s a race.
Mo Chara: You don’t have to race against time.
Q: It’s a bit of a hip-hop battle.
Mo Chara: Yeah, it is. It’s healthy competition. But yeah, it’s one of those that will be [done] in the studio together. Or it was [done] separately in separate corners. You’ll have an idea for a track. We know what story we want to tell or what topic we want to talk about. And we’ll say, “Hey, we’re going to aim for at least 16 bars. If not, [we’ll] settle on eight bars or whatever, but aim for 16.” So the me-16, him-16, and then a chorus, probably. Then eight choruses, maybe 16, if anything else. It depends on the track. But yeah, it’s like healthy competition — who can get their verse recorded in the studio first?
Q: Obviously, you two are the big mouths. You play a different but crucial role. It wouldn’t exist without your crucial role. Talk about that role.
DJ Próvaí: I can speak slowly, I think so.
Mo Chara: I don’t know. Yes. Just follow everything.
Q: Talk about all the musical ideas, tracks and rhythms and things like that. Do you have things you listen to that prompt you?
Mo Chara: When I started with [music], I started as a singer-songwriter with a guitar. That’s how we met as well. He was organizing festivals, and he was coming around. I was like, I’m drinking a fest.
DJ Próvaí: You were getting in free, so you could drink in the restaurant.
Moglai Bap: I was pretending to volunteer.
Mo Chara: We were getting tickets for festivals for free and stuff. So we said, “Maybe there’s something in this. Get some free tickets.” And then I did that thing after this rain painting incident. Kneecap was born and now here we are in New York.
Q: What was it like organizing festivals? You got to see a side of doing the business that is outside of just being in the band.
Mo Chara: It was pretty good. I spent a lot of time in the Basque country. You know the Basque country?
Q: There’s definitely a connection to the Gaelic/Celtic side of things and a lot of Basque musicians.
Mo Chara: Absolutely. For sure, they have a very strong music scene, and I went over there. I spent like six weeks there seeing how cool it was, having contemporary music. Looking at festivals and the Basque, thousands of people. So I got Basque. That’s why I started with that festival, and they kind of came along. He was playing at it. I grew up speaking Irish, and felt there was a lack of social and creative spaces for young people to meet outside of school and have parties together. That’s why I wanted to get involved in the festival. There was a small group of us in Belfast, all of our friends. We all speak Irish and party together. There was no festival that represented that. And from that festival, back in a social gathering, Kneecap was born out of all that culture.
Q: You did that one gig after your screening with Tribeca. Do you hope to be doing a full-scale gig here in New York soon?
Moglai Dap: At the Knockdown Center in Brooklyn this September. Fact check that, please.
Q: When did you guys figure you really had something? We see what’s in the film, and I don’t know how much the film truly reflects things or how meta it gets. But in the real world, when did you know you had it — that it was grounded and that you had a band? When you knew the music was happening and you’d found a way to work together.
Moglai Dap: We just put the first song out for the craic, as we say in Ireland.
Q: Not the kind of crack we have here.
Mo Chara: “Having the craic” means having a good time. There’s no calm down off our craic. There’s no calm down off the Irish craic. There was not much contemporary Irish music like ours on the radio. So we were going to be playing on the radio. They had us down for a track of the year when it was.
Q: We see that in the movie.
Mo Chara: Basically, that’s the thing in the movie. Nobody’s actually listening to the song. Everybody assumed it was just like another song in Irish, just going to be lovely, innocent song, talking about stereotypical Irish things. It was meant to be a song of the year. And it just got pooed in the last minute. That’s where someone started a petition. After that, we [blew up] locally, and went viral.Then we decided, fuck it, we’ll do a second track. That’s where we took the opportunity out there. We never depended on radio after that. We built our own social media platforms. We built our own Instagram and Twitter and Facebook. Because of that there, we didn’t have to rely on the mainstream means of getting popular or getting noticed without our own platforms.
Q: JJ was wearing the mask — what was it called? — a balaclava. That’s connected, in a way, to the IRA experience where they wore balaclavas to hide what they were doing. [Was it more than you making it hard for people to think about it]?
DJ Próvaí: It was the worst kept secret in Ireland. [I was teaching at] a convent school where they’re not really compatible with our lifestyle. “Nuns/No drugs.” I had plausible deniability at first. Then, it went as soon as people started coming to the gigs and rapping the lyrics in the corridors of the school. They did an investigation and I had to walk the plank. That was when they saw a photo of my bum with “Brits out” on it.
Moglai Dap: That’s when the nuns knew.
Q: They recognized the bum [ass]?
Mo Chara: They recognized that arse straight away. [Band members chuckle] It’s very peachy.
Q: I guess that ended your relationship with the nuns but it did give you an opportunity to buy better equipment.
DJ Próvaí: Those bridges were burnt. My clean path to heaven is muddled. That’s a kind of purgatory there. Less nuns, more bums.
Q: Now that you have achieved this plateau of the moment, what doors did it open up for you in terms of creatively or technically speaking? Equipment speaking? And ideas about the opportunity? You’re presenting Gaelic to an audience that has no roots in Gaelic, so it changes the focus in a way.
Mo Chara: I feel like with all the stuff we’ve “not” achieved over the last couple of years, the movie with Michael Fassbender in it or the debut album, which has been in the Irish charts now for the last five weeks, number two. It’s at number two again.
All these achievements that we’ve had over the years gives legitimacy to any crazy ideas we have that we can go to people with now like PR stunts, for example. At Sundance, we got a police jeep. Well, we got a jeep and we turned it into a police jeep.
Q: Where is the jeep now?
Mo Chara: We actually had to give it back. Then we bought one and we got a new one in Ireland that we’re doing up as the police jeep, the old RUC ones. But we drove around South Lake City with flares, green white noise. It looked like a garden. It looks like the ones up in the north where we were from, so they’re like rocket proof. Because of all this legitimacy now that the band has, we can approach all these crazy ideas we have and not be turned down.
Q: Like a Public Enemy [the legendary political hip hop act] of your culture.
Mo Chara: If there are doors opening there, they wouldn’t have been open if it wasn’t for the legitimacy of the last couple of years. We’re just keeping that in mind.
Q: Would you have continued on without having the movie happen?
Mo Chara: For sure. The movie “ended” our musical careers more than anything. If we had happened to be shit actors or if Rich the director was shit or the script was shit — all these things — we would still be the band, whereas whoever’s working on the movie, the movie crew, moves on to the next movie. If the movie is shit, they’ll still have work. It would be a band who has a really shit career. I think that wouldn’t do much for our music careers. But thankfully, it paid off. God bless Rich.
Q: Are you expecting some acting jobs along the way?
Mo Chara: The offers have come in. We’ve been out for a couple of weeks, I can say. But, yeah, definitely. We all had a great performance.
Q: With the balaclava or not?
DJ Próvaí: All my future roles would be with a Balaclava. The Godfather 4 cameo.
Q: What you need to do is to get a sponsorship from the manufacturers of balaclavas.
Moglai Dap: The IRA. [laughing]
Q: You’re missing an opportunity there.
Mo Chara: I think we’ve started selling Kneecap items.
Q: You’ve had this incredible opportunity to travel the world now, and all that. Who do you want to meet along the way?
Moglai Dap: Rick Rubin.
Mo Chara: I’d love to meet Rick Rubin [the mega-producer of the Beastie Boys and Public Enemy]. We’re constantly getting compared to the Beastie Boys, but I think that’s just because we’re white and we rap.
Q: Well, you have a rock side.
Mo Chara: I think there’s not more Beastie Boys than before, but I feel like it’s one of them. Once they see you coming away, the guys are up and they’re like, oh, Beastie Boys? But Rick Rubin’s a good one. I’d love to meet Rick Rubin. I made eye contact with Dr. Dre. Sitting down with him would be great.
Q: You have to meet Chuck D. From Public Enemy
Mo Chara: Chuck D… We were smoking joints with Be Real from Cypress Hill. We got severely stoned and actually weren’t able to talk much.
Q: Is the pot pretty good here in the States?
Mo Chara: Well, it depends on what you want. It’s not like the stuff we have at home.
Q: When you get older, it’s a little harder to come back from it.
Mo Chara: Yeah, [you need] recovery for a few days.
Q: You’ve got the band. What about your previous songwriter career? Do you think you’re going to revive elements of it?
Moglai Dap: Yes, myself and Justin Bieber are getting together.
Mo Chara: He’s a ghostwriter.
Q: Were you writing on a guitar while playing it? Or were you doing keyboards?
Mo Chara: Mostly guitar.
DJ Próvaí: Sing us a song.
Moglai Dap: Maybe later, but he’s got jet lag.
Q: You raised an important question. When talking to Rich he didn’t mention that it hadn’t really been seen in Ireland. Now that it’s going to be released in Ireland, are you approaching this with some trepidation or excitement?
Mo Chara: More excitement. Obviously, there’s a big length between Ireland and Scotland, especially in Glasgow. They have a very similar history to us. Obviously, we’ve been going around the world doing Q&A’s and stuff, but we don’t really sit in on the movie. But in Glasgow, because there’s so many colloquial things that people in Glasgow will get that Americans won’t get, we knew it was going to go down a storm. So me and Moglai sat in the back and watched it — it was like a fucking concert. They loved it. They understood every joke. It’s only going to be double that when it comes out in Ireland. I’m very excited to see the Irish audience’s reaction to it. We’ve had a few screenings in Belfast that worked really well, but I want to see what you’re saying. Yeah, all corners of Ireland.
Q: Especially in the Gael Talk region. That should be interesting to have it there.
Mo Chara: We had it in Galway, the Film Fleadh. We won three awards there. I think it was the first film to ever win three awards at the Galway Film Festival. Yeah, we have to experience the Irish audience, and I think it’s going to be a whole different experience. Because we’re in Utah, and Jay Adams comes on in the movie, and everybody under 30 in Utah doesn’t know who the fuck Jay Adams is, nobody laughed. And there’s the scene with the Orange Order chasing Mo Chara. [The Order is conservative, British unionist and Ulster loyalist organization which opposed Irish nationalism/republicanism].
The funny thing is, as well that people in Belfast –– whenever it’s released –– will see that bridge that I’m getting chased over is an iconic bridge that separates the two different communities. That’s the Ace Bridge. We had to do that at like six o’clock am; filming started on Sunday morning. It was like, get in and get out before everybody wakes up.
Q: You got to hit all the festivals in Ireland?
Mo Chara: When we released, there won’t be any more Irish Film Festivals. We only got the opportunity to go to a few. We’re going out touring with the music.
Q: You’re touring as well. Are you excited to get back to get on the road and tour?
Mo Chara: I’m excited to go back into the studio and do some music again. And I don’t see the movie business. It’s a lot different from the music scene. The music’s all about moving a lot faster, a lot more intensely.
Q: Are you going to try to balance it out between music and film? Are you going to stay in touch with Rich? What are you going to do?
Mo Chara: Stay in touch with Rich? Probably not. [laughing] We have two albums. We have a few albums to finish first, and we’re trying to balance two of them out. Anyway, money talks. If the money’s right, we’ll be earning.
Q: Family, friends, have they seen all that you’ve accomplished?
Mo Chara: Mostly, right. But no, I think next in Belfast is the premiere, and all our families, everyone’s girlfriends and friends and whatever, [will be there].
Q: Are you glad that you can have a political impact, as well?
Moglai Dap: Our internet presence will be out of our hands after everyone has watched this movie.
Mo Chara: Unaffordable overnight!