“THEY TRIED TO stop this gig,” Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh (aka Mo Chara) proclaimed at the start of Kneecap’s festival set in London on Friday night.

“Honestly lads, you’ve no idea how close we were to being pulled off this gig. Has anybody been watching the news?”

You’ve likely heard the news that the Belfast rapper is referring to – last week, Ó hAnnaidh was formally charged under the UK’s Terrorism Act and is scheduled to appear in court on 18 June.

Ó hAnnaidh was charged in connection with allegedly displaying a flag supporting Hezbollah during a gig in London last November, according to UK police.

The charge follows the circulation of a video of Kneecap’s performance at the O2 Forum in Kentish Town, London.

The video drew media attention last month and was later reviewed by police, leading to the launch of a formal investigation and a charge against Ó hAnnaidh.

Kneecap have explicitly denied ever supporting Hezbollah or Hamas since the concert video resurfaced.

Just days after the charge was announced, Kneecap fans turned out in force on Friday to support the Irish-language hip-hop trio at their biggest ever festival headline gig.

Kneecap played on the main stage at Wide Awake Festival in Brockwell Park in London, despite calls from several leading UK politicians for the festival to not allow the Belfast trio to take to the stage.

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To their critics (of which Kneecap have many in the UK), they’re reckless agitators who have finally crossed the line – during Friday’s gig, the band joked about appearing “in the belly of the beast”.

Despite the widespread criticism that the trio face in the UK, the gig received rave reviews.

‘What a craic’

The band received four out of five stars in The Guardian’s review of the Wide Awake gig. In the review, Kneecap’s activism on Gaza was hailed as “patently heartfelt rather than posturing radical chic”.

Despite missing several fadas in the band members’ names and ending the review with the line “what a craic” (just terrible), the Guardian looked fondly on Northern Irish band’s activism – and ketamine references – saying that Kneecap are still performing “loud and proud”.

The Telegraph, who previously described Kneecap as “the pop provacateurs who went too far” and “bona fide media folk devils”, similarly gave the band four out of five stars in their review of the Friday gig.

Their review described how Kneecap “presided over a 90-minute carnival of mayhem, defiance and controversy” in London, adding that the audience was “one big party”.

“Who would have thought it? The controversies only seem to have fired up Kneecap’s supporters,” The Telegraph’s James Hall wrote.

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He made sure to separate the art from the artist however, adding: “I can’t defend Kneecap. There’s reclaiming your culture and there’s saying stupid things, and in trying to do the former they’ve done a lot of the latter.”

The London Evening Standard also awarded the gig four stars, hailing the group as “irreverent, ambitious and irrefutably themselves”.

Describing how the band encouraged the crowd to belt out the chorus to Your Sniffer Dogs are Shite, the review claimed: “that’s ballsy, and those weren’t even the most eyebrow-raising lyrics”.

Kneecap once again earned four stars from The Times, with the paper’s chief rock and pop critic Will Hodgkinson stating that the band created an “historic moment” in front of 20,000 adoring fans on Friday.

Hodgkinson highlighted that Kneecap had donated the entirety of their fee from the festival to Médecins Sans Frontières – who currently have a number of aid workers deployed across Gaza.

The critic also described the gig as “seriously good”.

“Exciting, funny and anarchic, with a rebellious edge that has not been seen in rock or rap for years,” Hodgkinson wrote.