Kneecap at All Together Now: Rappers deliver exceptional performance with a soaring, moving peak

Kneecap Main stage, Saturday ★★★★☆Kneecap are by now mainstays of the summer festival circuit. Their rip-roaring rap, tongue-in-cheek humour and propulsive stage presence is familiar to many festivalgoers, but Kneecap’s Saturday night set at Waterford’s All Together Now marks something of a departure for the band. Drenched in blood-red light, with a low, waning moon hanging over Curraghmore Estate, Fermanagh musician Róis kicks off the action with Kneecap’s Fenian album opener Éire go Deo – which features a recording of late broadcaster Rónán Mac Aodha Bhuí. The rappers then storm the stage performing industrial track Smugglers and Scholars, in which they sing about “getting guns with American dollars”, with a more austere edge than their jokey early single Get Your Brits Out. It is perhaps not without good reason that Kneecap’s tone is more sombre than previous years; Mo Chara, aka Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh, was dogged by terrorism charges under the UK’s Terrorism Act for allegedly displaying a Hizbullah flag at a 2024 concert. (In March, a London high court judgment determined he would not face a fresh terror charge in a British court.)READ MORETheir latest studio album Fenian saw the band discuss the series of trials, Palestine, Irish history and the loss of Naoise Ó Cairealláin’s (Moglaí Bap) mother to suicide. The result is a live performance that is more mature, moodier and perhaps meaningful than their usual fare. Carnival references Ó hAnnaidh’s trials and tribulations directly, comparing the court appearances to a circus on a 90s-style hip-hop track. Chants of “Free Mo Chara” recorded live outside Westminster Magistrates Court feature on the track, and the crowd chime in.A play of two acts is maybe the best way to describe the show; with Kneecap’s breakout 2017 single C.E.A.R. T.A serving as a half-time palate cleanser dissecting the performance. The swell in the crowd as the track is performed is something worthy of an encore – people on shoulders, joyous fist-pumping and forceful bellowing.Kneecap at All Together Now, in Curraghmore Estate, Co Waterford, on Saturday. Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill But everything before the singalong hit is heavier somehow, whether due to its subject matter or the seriousness with which the rappers treat it. Veteran political activist Bernadette McAlliskey comes on stage to deliver a pro-Palestinian message, telling the audience “it is our job as human beings and as Irish people who understand colonisation to know genocide is as old as colonisation”. The soaring peak of an exceptional concert is carried by Ó Cairealláin, when he performs Irish Goodbye, the single he has addressed as his “love letter” to his mother, Irish-language activist Aoife Ní Riain, who died in 2020. Ó Cairealláin is joined on stage by track collaborator Kae Tempest, who had performed on the Something Kind of Wonderful stage a few hours earlier, as well as Lisa Canny and Niamh Hinchy of BIIRD and sibling duo Caoimhe and Seamus Ó Flaharta. This is a taste of a new Kneecap; a band that is not just provocative but moving.