Kneecap, the Irish hip-hop trio known for their bilingual verses in Irish and English and fiery political commentary, have had a big summer.
Their debut album, “Fine Art,” released in July. Their self-titled film “KNEECAP,” which chronicles their raucous rise and rampage across the Irish musical landscape, released internationally to rave reviews and is available now for rental on digital platforms. The film is the first Irish-language film to debut at Sundance and is also Ireland’s submission to the Academy Awards for Best International Feature Film.
Ahead of their sold-out show in Boston on Sept. 21 at the Paradise Rock Club, band members Mo Chara and Móglaí Bap sat down with Jared Bowen, GBH’s executive arts editor and host of The Culture Show, to discuss their recent successes.
“It’s been very busy,” said Mo Chara. “It’s not very often that you are doing PR for an album and a movie at the same time. So we were rushed off our little Irish feet for a while.”
Although “KNEECAP” is a fictionalized retelling of the band’s career, it remains rooted in reality.
“We like to keep the lines pretty blurred in terms of what’s fact and what’s fiction, but a lot of the crazier stories in the movie are true,” said Móglaí Bap. “At the start of the movie, when I’m being baptized on a mass rock. A mass rock was a place where Catholic Mass was told... during the 18th century when Catholicism was outlawed. There was a British Army helicopter that thought they had uncovered themselves an IRA training camp, but it was just a bunch of Irish-language hippies in a forest with a priest.”
The film stars the band as well as legendary Irish actor Michael Fassbender, who served as a steadying force on set.
“It was a real pleasure and an honor for us to give Michael Fassbender his big break,” quipped Mo Chara. “That was a joke, obviously, but [he’s] somebody we look up to. They say the better the actor, the easier it is to be on screen with.”
Fassbender plays Arlo, the father of Móglaí Bap and a former Irish Republican Army member on the run from the authorities.
“To be honest, acting with Fassbender was probably the easiest part of the movie,” said Móglaí Bap. “He was a breeze, and we would just hang out between scenes, and he’d just show me funny videos on YouTube. And as soon as the camera went on, he would just completely change. And when he came on set, not only did the crew up their game, but the catering on the day got way better. We got, like, real cutlery, and proper ham instead of Spam, et cetera.”
Throughout the chaos and hilarity of the film, the band remains acutely aware of the tensions and issues in current-day Irish society, particularly among the “ceasefire babies” born after the Good Friday Agreement that ended the Troubles in 1998.
“We were the first generation that didn’t have British soldiers on the streets, and there was no real physical oppression in front of us, there was other forms of oppression,” said Mo Chara. “We’re able to use humor as a means to talk about serious issues... It creates a dialogue for people to talk about subjects that would initially be very hard to speak about.”
Móglaí Bap added, “The day-to-day life for young people in the North is this challenge of the legacy and how we go forward. And I think that the movie touches on that and how humor can be a way for us to take the sting out of the past and for us to move forward.”
To hear more from Kneecap, listen to the full interview above. Listen to The Culture Show daily at 2 p.m. on 89.7.
