The BBC refused to provide a live stream of Kneecap’s performance at Glastonbury yesterday, after a member of the Irish hip hop trio was charged with a terror offence for allegedly waving a Hezbollah flag at a concert last year. It was therefore unfortunate that the preceding act, Bob Vylan, decided to lead chants of “death to the IDF” to crowds saturated with Palestinians flags. Even more embarrassingly for the BBC, the screen behind the two members of Bob Vylan bore the caption: “Free Palestine. The United Nations have called it a genocide. The BBC calls it a ‘conflict’.” Kneecap themselves conducted chants of “fuck Keir Starmer” as a clapback to the Prime Minister saying that their appearance on the Glastonbury stage would not be “appropriate”.

All this only emphasises how farcical the campaign to censor and criminalise the Belfast group has been. It calls to mind the Father Ted episode “The Passion of Saint Tibulus”, in which the protest against a supposedly blasphemous film, rather than acting as a deterrent, causes more people to want to see it.

In recent months, Kneecap have found themselves in an awkward position. They have steadily been crossing the frontier from a niche radical act into mainstream success and fame, not least thanks to a feature biopic released last year. That ascendance has created contradictions between Kneecap’s radical chic and the pressures that come with being integrated into the mainstream.

It’s easy when you’re an obscure band to bellow “kill your local MP” or bray “up Hamas, up Hezbollah”. You don’t have to be accountable to anyone else, and few are even sufficiently aware of your existence to take umbrage. But once you reach a wider audience, the stakes change. Like it or not, you now have to contend with the responsibilities of public relations.

What’s more, you don’t get to express political affinity with Hamas, the most violent faction of the Palestinian national movement, and Hezbollah, a proxy of the Iranian Ayatollah. Kneecap’s promotion of these groups, seeing them as providing an underdog indigenous resistance to Israel akin to the Irish national struggle against British imperialism, contradicts the otherwise anti-sectarian message in their music. The band’s solution when criticised for this has been to retreat into an outwardly apolitical humanitarianism that just wants Gazan civilians to stop being massacred by the IDF.

Every radical artist’s dream is to somehow pull off having it both ways. That means mainstream visibility, critical prestige, financial success and headline spots on legacy festivals like Glastonbury, and yet, at the same time, not having to dilute the political and artistic principles which initially won over your hardcore fanbase. It’s a hard line to walk, and most fail. This is why the biggest fear of any radical artist is to become “inauthentic” or sell out. Kneecap could defang their rhetoric, but to their core fans that would represent a surrender. If they remain steadfast, they risk being banished from the mainstream. That is their dilemma.

Kneecap are both a bête noire and a cause célèbre. More people in Britain likely have an opinion on the group’s politics than have ever listened to their music. The irony of the effort to censor them is that it has only bolstered their anti-establishment bona fides, while also boosting their popularity and success. Kneecap’s cosplay radicalism may inspire Left-wing activists who see Palestine as a key element of the Omnicause, but they aren’t a threat to anyone, let alone the powers that be — they’re more cringeworthy than menacing. Censoring Kneecap is not only wrong on principle but makes them seem more dangerous than they really are. Liam Gallagher likely had it right when he dismissed them as “a bunch of squares in knitted face thongs”.

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Ralph Leonard is a British-Nigerian writer on international politics, religion, culture and humanism.

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