Kneecap: ​‘There was no word for cocaine in Irish’

It’s April, and after an ear­ly flight to Belfast, I’m tak­en to the Falls Road. I’m here to inter­view Repub­li­can-Irish rap trio Kneecap: Mo Chara (Liam Óg Ó Han­naidh), Móglaí Bap; (Naoise Ó Caire­al­lain) and DJ Pró­vaí (JJ Ó Dochar­taigh), stars of their own epony­mous biopic. Its Brit direc­tor, Rich Pep­pi­att, is also in the room. Specif­i­cal­ly, I’m in the Cultúr­lann, the Irish lan­guage cul­tur­al cen­tre co-found­ed by Móglaí Bap’s (or Naoise’s, as he intro­duces him­self ) father in the ear­ly 1990s. The Cultúr­lann is made of old red brick, with a Pales­tine flag anchored out­side blow­ing in the Belfast breeze – as I under­stand it, a pre-Octo­ber 7^th fix­ture of the cen­tre. It’s home to a cosy café and book­shop, yet upstairs, where I inter­view Rich and the lads sep­a­rate­ly, there is a the­atre and class­rooms where they took their six months of act­ing lessons.

“Because we’re doing some­thing involv­ing non-actors play­ing them­selves, we just want­ed them to feel very relaxed and that meant allow­ing them to speak how they speak, which is, you know… every oth­er word is a ​‘cunt’,” says writer/​director Pep­pi­att. Kneecap have court­ed con­tro­ver­sy over the years for their inci­sive yet provoca­tive con­dem­na­tions of British domin­ion in the North of (or, North­ern) Ire­land, whether that be unveil­ing murals of on-fire police cars, or their BBC theme tune sam­pling anthem ​‘Get Your Brits Out’ (fea­tur­ing an illus­trat­ed cov­er of our late Lizzie, mam­maries dan­gling). Kneecap (the film) is as fre­net­ic and polit­i­cal as the band’s lyrics, with a sharp and hilar­i­ous voiceover com­men­tary from Mo Chara, whose refusal to speak Eng­lish to the police when arrest­ed in pos­ses­sion of drugs catal­y­ses the film’s nar­ra­tive (DJ Pró­vaí, who works at a local lan­guage school, is roped in as the trans­la­tor), to scenes of drug binges por­trayed in clay­ma­tion or sweaty close-up.

“The film itself is not far from the sto­ry­boards,” Pep­pi­att con­tin­ues. ​“Ryan [Kernaghan]’s a bril­liant cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er. My favourite part of mak­ing this film was the two months we spent togeth­er in my kitchen. There’s over 1,000 sto­ry­boards for the film. Every tran­si­tion, every­thing was planned, I just gave those sto­ry­boards to the edi­tor and said, ​‘Gimme that assem­bly’.” But for the self-con­trol required of the direc­tor, what was it like work­ing with three unruly rap­pers? ​“They were very dis­ci­plined… for the most part. It was cer­tain­ly a chal­lenge for them, as they are ulti­mate­ly laws unto them­selves, and I wouldn’t want it any oth­er way. The time they real­ly let loose was when Michael Fass­ben­der was in town.”

Kneecap is what Pep­pi­att describes as a ​“tri-pro­tag­o­nist” film, with Mo Chara’s rela­tion­ship with his protes­tant girl­friend pro­pelling his arc, where Provai’s secret musi­cal endeav­ours with some way­ward drug deal­ers are in oppo­si­tion to his life as a school teacher and his rela­tion­ship with law-abid­ing lan­guage activist girl­friend, Caitlin (Fion­nu­la Fla­her­ty). Fass­ben­der plays Móglaí Bap’s father, a mil­i­tant repub­li­can named Arló aka Bob­by San­dals, who has faked his own death and left his son and wife (played by Simone Kir­by) sus­pend­ed in pur­ga­to­ry back in West Belfast.

Once I’ve shuf­fled down to the next class­room, I ask the band how they han­dled the struc­ture of a film set and also what it was like to work with Michael Fass­ben­der. ​“I loved it,” says Mo Chara. ​“It was such an excit­ing sev­en weeks. Real­i­ty kind of fuck­ing dis­ap­pears, you’re up every morn­ing and it becomes its own wee fuck­ing world. I fuck­ing loved it, it was pure ther­a­peu­tic.” Móglaí Bap adds, ​“It’s the first time we’ve had a sched­ule in years. We were just wak­ing up at 1pm every day, smok­ing a joint, doing some music and back to bed.”

Móglaí Bap, who has the most scenes with Fass­ben­der of the three, tells me Bob­by San­dals liked to watch YouTube videos on set. DJ Próvái, slight­ly old­er than the two rap­pers, and usu­al­ly don­ning a bal­a­cla­va, tells me that one night he drank a whole bot­tle of crème de men­the and threw up in the pub toi­let: ​“It looked like Preda­tor, all this green stuff,” ​“That’s dis­gust­ing,” I say reflex­ive­ly. ​“Yeah, imag­ine how we felt!” Móglaí Bap replies laugh­ing. ​“Then,” Próvái con­tin­ues, ​“I look up and see Fass­ben­der and Neil Lennon, the Celtic man­ag­er, look­ing down at me, and he says, ​‘Hap­pens to the best of us’. I thought to myself: ​‘Fuck this is a weird time in my life’.”

Pri­or to Kneecap, and true to the film, DJ Próvái was an Irish lan­guage teacher known as the ​‘Justin Bieber’ of the lan­guage local­ly. His char­ac­ter has the most trans­for­ma­tive shift away from his demure life as an edu­ca­tor to an (often) coked-out DJ. ​“When we test­ed with audi­ences, Próvái was the favourite,” Pep­pi­att recalls. ​“But you have like Simone Kir­by who’s my Ma in the movie, and Jess [Reynolds], and Josie Walk­er, all these class actors who all brought dif­fer­ent tal­ents to the movie”, Móglaí Bap chimes in after the créme de men­the sto­ry. This is before I could ask if the female foils to their char­ac­ters were an inten­tion­al cor­rec­tive to their rau­cous hyper­mas­cu­line image. ​“The women that were involved, they brought such a depth to the whole sto­ry. They changed it around because it would have been just a load of smelly boys run­ning around misbehaving.”

Mo Chara is quick to tell me, ​“Fass­ben­der was incred­i­ble, but they were the ones that real­ly changed the sto­ry. You know what I mean?” Próvái con­tin­ues, ​“It was the women who were always the fore­run­ners, they’re for­got­ten in his­to­ry in fuckin’ Irish Repub­li­can­ism, they were the ones out bang­ing the bin lids when­ev­er the British army was try­ing to come into the areas.” ​“Thank­less fuck­ing job back in the day. Any of the emo­tion­al scenes in the film is dri­ven by the female char­ac­ters.” Mo Chara rounds out. The end card of the film is a ded­i­ca­tion to Irish mam­mies, in par­tic­u­lar, Móglaí Bap’s moth­er who died by sui­cide. The band’s 2021 sin­gle ​‘MAM’ raised mon­ey for Samaritans.

From here, the con­ver­sa­tion flows, and the lads – who are swelling with pride over their film – start telling me what they think makes it so spe­cial. ​“Some­thing I think that’s class that most oth­er films don’t have is like, the psy­chol­o­gy of lan­guage and how it can be used as a weapon,” Móglaí Bap starts. Through­out the film there’s a ten­sion between the char­ac­ters of Móglaí and Arlo, with the lat­ter refus­ing to speak Irish to his son because he feels his drug use and lifestyle brings shame to the repub­li­can cause. ​“The lan­guage, for it to live, it has to progress. What­ev­er is in Eng­lish has to be in Irish, there’s hip-hop with pro­fan­i­ty and drug ref­er­ences in Eng­lish so it has to be in Irish because the young peo­ple are going to try to find it.” ​“There was no word for cocaine, it’s not a native plant in Ire­land,” he adds. ​“And then MDMA and ket­a­mine, they all exist­ed in Eng­lish, but we didn’t have them in Irish, so we’d trans­late these words before Kneecap, rep­re­sent­ing this new sub­cul­ture that involves the Irish lan­guage and mod­ern youth culture.”

Pep­pi­att takes up the thread: ​“In terms of Irish lan­guage cin­e­ma, there’s a sense of, ​‘Oh you’re doing a film in a lan­guage that peo­ple see as being archa­ic’, so you set it dur­ing the famine, or in the past, or in a rur­al loca­tion. But no, we’re gonna do an Irish lan­guage film that is urban and present, and no-one’s done that. It’s not very often you find your­self in a posi­tion where you’re mak­ing some­thing that no one else has done.” Like all good biopics, Kneecap mythol­o­gis­es the band’s ori­gins. The trio met at an Irish lan­guage cul­ture fes­ti­val to which they all con­tributed, not a police sta­tion (as sug­gest­ed by the film). Yet the vital­i­ty of the mes­sage is the same.

Over the course of our con­ver­sa­tion, I learn that the first Irish pri­ma­ry school was start­ed in 1972, with no sec­ondary school until 1981 and that Kneecap firm­ly believe the lan­guage belongs to the peo­ple of the land, not the peo­ple of any reli­gion or polit­i­cal move­ment. ​“Protes­tants from around the North who always want­ed to learn some­thing about Irish were denied the oppor­tu­ni­ty because there was no leg­is­la­tion that schools had to pro­vide it. Every­thing here comes from Irish, and I think every­body deserves that edu­ca­tion” says Móglaí Bap. The young men talk at length about the Skaino Cen­tre and peo­ple set­ting up Irish lan­guage cours­es and schools in the large­ly Protes­tant East Belfast, ​“Lin­da Ervine. She’s a fuck­ing leg­end,” Móglaí Bap tells me. ​“She had Orange­men come and protest her Irish class­es at the start”.

When Mo Chara tells me that as few as 15 years ago, it would be unimag­in­able to have this lev­el of sup­port for the lan­guage, I say that equal­ly it might feel incon­ceiv­able to have such a groundswell of sup­port for Pales­tine too, a cause they’ve been vocal about. ​“It’s always been sol­i­dar­i­ty with Pales­tine and Ire­land, but par­tic­u­lar­ly up North in Belfast. We done a lot of fundrais­ing for the AIDA refugee camp a few years ago and we helped raise funds to build a gym there, because his broth­er runs a gym in Cork”.

Móglaí Bap’s broth­er now runs the ACALÍ Pales­tine gym, ​“He was over­whelmed by how bad the sit­u­a­tion was. There’s a lot of amputees over there, a lot of peo­ple who have lost limbs and that was his spe­cial­i­ty, train­ing peo­ple with dis­abil­i­ties.” He tells me a lot of equip­ment sent there was con­fis­cat­ed by Israel, so they had to be sent through dif­fer­ent coun­tries piece by piece.

They talk about the awk­ward neces­si­ty of mak­ing state­ments on Pales­tine dur­ing their live shows in Amer­i­ca, mes­sages that slot in between songs about get­ting plas­tered and being on the dole. The con­ver­sa­tion flows along to Irish-Amer­i­cans: ​“We can’t for­get Irish Amer­i­cans oppressed minori­ties when they got to Amer­i­ca, and because they were white they were able to rise through soci­ety by join­ing the police,”, Mo Chara says, almost unprompt­ed. ​“Peo­ple get com­fort­able and for­get about oppres­sion,” says Próvái.

Due to Covid, their debut album ​‘Fine Art’ was a long time in the mak­ing and was only released in June of 2024, just ahead of the film. It meant that the album end­ed up hav­ing some influ­ence on the film. ​“We start­ed writ­ing ​‘Sick in the Head’, and that whole scene with the 808 in the class­room, is based on that tune from the album.” Mo Chara says.

Before I leave, and when I’ve stopped record­ing, Mo Chara tells me he was sur­prised to be asked direct­ly about Pales­tine, as it’s some­thing they often have to bring up inde­pen­dent­ly. The film fea­tures a flash of the Pales­tine flag hang­ing from the flat of a tow­er block, one of the many polit­i­cal frames in the film amongst shots of the famous Falls Road murals. On my way out the door before my flight back to the bel­ly of the beast, I tell them I’m off to get a filled soda, so off I went.