Brendan O'Neill takes aim at Kneecap ahead of Glastonbury show: ‘cult of the keffiyeh'

The Australian

4 days ago

Kneecap, the Northern Irish hip-hop punk trio who are playing at Glastonbury this weekend, bring the controversy with their IRA-inspired balaclavas and pro-Palestine stunts. Pundit Brendan O'Neill reckons they're part of the 'cult of the keffiyeh'. This is an edited transcript of his interview with The Australian's Claire Harvey for our podcast The Front.
Brendan O'Neill: I am a free speech absolutist and I don't want them thrown off the ticket at Glastonbury. I don't want their gigs cancelled. You know, we've got politicians here in the Labour Party and the Conservative Party saying they shouldn't be able to play at Glastonbury. I might be too old to appreciate their kind of weird Irish language hip hop, but I don't want politicians setting the performance list for Glastonbury. That's not a world I want to live in.
Claire Harvey: I wonder about the idea of punk in 2025 and if in any way it's compatible with featuring at Glastonbury where the tickets are nearly 800 Australian dollars a person now. What do you think? Can you be a punk and be a headliner at Glastonbury?
Brendan O'Neill: Glastonbury has changed so much over the decades. I think the first ever Glastonbury was 1970, and it was basically The Kinks and Mark Bolan and women running around with no bras on and men with long hair and beards, smoking weed, having sex. It was a hippie fest. It was quite rebellious, it was quite counter-cultural. More recently, the average age of people going to Glastonbury now is around 50. They all tend to be upper middle class because you have to be in order to afford a ticket. So it is completely anti-punk. It is the most conformist festival that Britain holds. So the idea of Kneecap going there and being welcomed as punks, I think it rather gives the game away, which is that they are kind of phony punks. They might seem like punks to boring old farts who like going to music festivals, but to kids, most normal young people, I think they probably look a bit square.
Claire Harvey: Does this tell us something about where music is now though, that you need kind of three guys, one of whom wears an Irish flag balaclava to give you a sense of rebellion?
Brendan O'Neill: The one who wears the Irish tricolour balaclava, by the way, which I always think looks like a tea cosy rather than a balaclava. He is nearly 40 years old. Let's just get this into perspective. He's in his late 30s.
Claire Harvey: He used to be a schoolteacher, I think, didn't he?
Brendan O'Neill: Yeah, he used to be a schoolteacher. He's nearly 40. He is far too old to be carrying on like this, in my view. You know, the truth about Kneecap is that they met at an Irish language centre in Belfast. One of them is from Derry, two of them are from Belfast. They're basically a cultural studies outreach programme. That's essentially what they are. You know, they are singing the praises of minority languages. They are talking about the trauma of history and the impact it has on young people's mental health. There is nothing you hear from Kneecap that you wouldn't see in a Guardian editorial or in a United Nations statement about the importance of protecting minor languages or the importance learning from history. They are … They do push actually a very conformist, elitist view, but they have, as you're suggesting there, they do look punkish.
JJ O Dochartaigh, who performs as DJ Provai in the Belfast hip hop trio Kneecap, is a former schoolteacher. Picture: Helle Arensbak / Ritzau Scanpix / AFP
They kind of have the IRA fancy dress. They dress up with a balaclava and they kind of steal valour from physical force republicanism of the 1970s and 80s. They kind get a bit of momentum and a bit sex appeal from harking back to that when provisional IRA was seen by some people in Northern Ireland as an adventurous, daring guerrilla movement. Because they don't really have anything punkish to say in 2025, they kind of have to look back to the past for that sense of rebellion. So they look punkish. Occasionally they sound punkish, but if you dig a little deeper, there's not much going on.
Claire Harvey: The band members themselves might be old enough to remember some of the Troubles, but many of their fans wouldn't be. Is that part of the equation here? Do you think that it's kind of glamorising something that for people who live through it in Northern Ireland or in the rest of the UK or in Ireland, might not think it was kind of cool?
Brendan O'Neill: Yeah, that's an issue, certainly. And that does make Kneecap jar with a lot of people in mainland Britain in particular, where there's a very different view of the IRA than there might be in parts of Northern Ireland. People like Kneecap are referred to as Good Friday babies. So these are the kids who were born after the Good Friday agreement or around the Good Friday agreement, which came into force in 1998. They are people who never experienced the conflict, the so-called Troubles, don't remember bombs going off every day, don't know remember shootings happening every day. You know, the fact that Kneecap is called Kneecap is in itself quite revealing because of course that was a punishment meted out by the IRA, primarily against Catholics. It was a horrendous punishment. Mostly meted out to the Catholic community itself, and often for drugs offences. This is one of the great ironies of Kneecap. Kneecap's lyrics are 90 per cent about drugs. They love drugs by all accounts. They sing about taking ketamine and how much they enjoy it. And the great irony, which I think they probably know themselves, is that Kneecap would have been kneecapped by the IRA in the 1970s, because if you dealt in drugs in those communities or even took drugs, you'd be in trouble with the IRA volunteers, as they called themselves.
Claire Harvey: Someone else who's probably not following them on YouTube are the leaders of Hamas. Although Kneecap seemed to be fans of them and what's got their lead singer in trouble now is some alleged chants of 'Up Hamas, up Hezbollah' and allegedly displaying a Hezbollah flag at a gig. Now he's pleaded not guilty to that. He's also requested an Irish translator at Westminster Court when he has his appearance. I thought that was a nice little touch.
Brendan O'Neill: If they want to speak Irish in an English court, that's their business. I don't really have a problem with that. This is what I find quite infuriating about the love for them amongst so-called radicals and progressives, which is that the thing that they're in trouble for, that they are alleged to have done, we have to kind of use that language because the court case is ongoing, they are allegedly to have waved the flag of Hezbollah, they are alleged to have said up Hamas, up Hezbollah. Um, one of them, the guy with the tricolour tea cosy on his head, he posed with a copy of Hassan Nasrallah's book. Hassan Nasrallah was the, uh, former leader of Hezbollah who was killed by Israel a few months ago. This is a book that refers to Jews as the descendants of apes and pigs. To my mind, that's a pretty serious matter. And I'm not sure that progressives and radicals would be rallying around a hip-hop group that had posed with a book that referred to black people as monkeys. And yet when it comes to this group, which has posed with Hassan Nasrallah's book, and which has allegedly praised those two anti-Semitic armies, Hezbollah and Hamas, they seem not to have a problem with it. There's a serious element to this, which is an extraordinary double standard. And there are a lot of Jewish people in the UK, I know this for a fact because I've met them, I've spoken to them, who are worried about this case because they see the music industry, the popular music press, lots of young people, Glastonbury itself, they see all of these institutions rallying around these three lads who have allegedly praised one of the armies that carried out the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust.
Kneecap's stage at Coachella, 2025.
Claire Harvey: They are pleading not guilty but they do wear keffiyehs in public, they speak about the people of Palestine, they refer to it as a genocide, they criticise Israel by implication. They're certainly invoking something underneath young popular culture that seems to be resonating all the way up to the kind of 50-year-old rich people who go to Glastonbury. Why is that so appealing, you know, why is that punk now?
Brendan O'Neill: I've called it the cult of the keffiyeh, which is that, you know, it's so interesting to me that for years and years we heard about the crime of cultural appropriation. You were stealing the culture of a minority group and apparently that was the worst thing you could ever do. Now, you go to any campus in the west Anglo-American world and you will see rich white kids, as far as the eye can see, in Arab headgear. I think it's a signifier of virtue. It is a kind of sartorial way to show the world that you are a good person. You're on the side of right, you're on side of Gaza against 'evil' Israel. The irony, I think, with a group like Kneecap, is that the truth of the matter is that their opinions are perfectly acceptable in dinner party circles. I've never heard them say anything that would be out of place as some soiree at the National Gallery in London or somewhere else, you know, I mean, it is now the most expected conformist position you can hold and the keffiyeh has become the garment of those classes. So when Kneecap wear that and make those statements, I just think to myself, that's not as radical as you think it is.