Belfast rap trio Kneecap announce they will be coming to New Zealand

Belfast rap trio Kneecap announced they will be coming to New Zealand in March next year.

Members Mo Chara, Móglaí Bap and DJ Próvaí's told Nine to Noon tickets for the New Zealand dates will be on sale this week for their Wellington (5 March) and Auckland (6 March) shows.

They are the stars of a new eponymous, semi-fictional film about their formation and rise to prominence, appearing alongside compatriots and leading Irish actors Michael Fassbender and Simone Kirby.

The comedy-drama Kneecap, directed by Rich Peppiatt, was awarded at the Sundance music festival earlier this year.

The group is garnering worldwide attention for their use of the Irish language intermixed with English. Their second album, Fine Art, debuted in the top three of the Irish and Scottish album charts in June.

And their first Australian tour, set for early next year, has had extra dates and upgraded venues to meet demand as three dates sold out.

'We embrace controversy'

The trio, who met at a festival for contemporary Irish music, wanted Irish music on the same platform as English songs, Móglaí Bap says.

"I would listen to a lot of music growing up like Eminem, a lot of hip hop, a lot of modern music in English. And I always felt like that was never available in Irish and always felt kinda I wasn't seen as a person, as an Irish speaker, as a young Irish speaker," Bap says.

"In Ireland, we have this real rich history of storytelling, like it was just a massive part of our culture, … and also we're big hip hop fans and we realised that we had a story to tell and, you know, the best driving force of that would be through hip hop because hip hop is all about storytelling," Mo Chara says.

"It's also got a very anti-authority message behind a lot of hip hop that came out of America. So it was something that we related to."

Their first song was born after Bap and his friend were chased by an undercover cop for spray painting 'Cerata' (meaning 'rights' in Irish) at a bus stop the night before an Irish Language Act march in 2017, he says.

'C.E.R.A.T.A.' was banned from airplay on Irish-language radio station RTE due to "drug references and cursing" but fans successfully petitioned to get it back on the airwaves.

"When we done it, we had no intention that anybody outside of our local area would be interested in the song. Number one, it's in Irish and it's like colloquial to Belfast. So we didn't think that anyone actually would be interested in it, then we just done it, as we say in Ireland, for the crack," Bap says.

"But thankfully people were interested in it. I think we came at a time that people were more open to listening to music in different languages … So I think that's why Kneecap came at the right time."

Their name comes from the history of paramilitaries shooting people in the back of the knee, known as kneecapping, for antisocial behaviour or drug dealing.

"We embrace controversy … We don't want to become this big political band all the time. But where we're from, it's very hard not to be political and to be our authentic selves," Mo Chara says.

"It shouldn't be a massive political act to speak the language of Ireland in Ireland, and so the fact that people think that, that it is put in that box, that we are political for even using the language, really kind of highlights the problems they have with the language themselves," Bap says.

"The language itself is demonised for too long as well, and it was always used as a kind of weapon for sectarianism. So only one side of the divide, as it were, were speaking Irish, the Catholics, and now you can see people from the Protestant side learning Irish and seeing that as a part of their heritage as well and being proud of speaking it and seeing the benefits of it," DJ Próvaí says.

Bap says there's a sense of duty among young people to carry their heritage after having their language "driven to almost extinction by 800 years of colonialism".

"It's important that we keep it alive, you know, and obviously what we're doing … it's the modern face of the language in the cities, like young people party, we're all young. We get up to some mischief and we're doing it through our native language again," Chara says.

"I mean it's empowering as well that we're able to have this shared experience with people from all different types of backgrounds and all different indigenous cultures around the world," Próvaí says, "because as you see, like over in New Zealand as well, there's been a massive revival over the last couple of decades where people are actually proud of speaking the language where before there have been a lot of shame associated with indigenous languages and just because they were beaten out of the people for so long, you know, but it's come full circle now."

Kneecap, the film, is in New Zealand cinemas from 24 October.