Kneecap rail against Starmer in ‘Corbyn moment’ at Glasto

At about 3.30pm on Saturday afternoon, Glastonbury attendees received a notification via the festival’s official app: the global music West Holts stage was at maximum capacity, no further attendance would be admitted. It was a set by Kneecap, the Irish hip-hop act whose performance defied the instruction of the prime minister, Keir Starmer, who earlier last week told the Sun that the trio’s appearance would be “inappropriate”.

Kneecap began 2025 with mainstream plaudits, winning a Bafta in February for their rowdy self-titled feature film that fictionalises their West Belfast origins.

But that changed in April. Performing at Californian music festival Coachella, as is customary during the group’s shows, screens flashed the message: “Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people”, and the words “Fuck Israel. Free Palestine”.

Within a week, Kneecap’s US booking agent had dropped them, with Fox News accusing the trio of bringing “Nazi Germany” sentiments to the US, and TV presenter Sharon Osbourne publicly urging US authorities to revoke their visas.

In March, the 27-year-old rapper Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh – who performs as Mo Chara – was charged with a terror offence after allegedly displaying a flag in support of Hezbollah at a gig. He is on bail after a court appearance at Westminster magistrates court this month and denies the charge.

On Saturday inside the stage area, there were many Palestinian flags. Kneecap walked on stage to a remixed sound collage of the band’s recent high-profile news appearances.

At first, the trio avoided those headline topics: a huge part of Kneecap’s appeal comes from their raucous and sometimes surreal rapping about quotidian Irish life or their much-vaunted affection for ketamine. Addressing the row, Móglaí Bap defended his bandmate against a “trumped-up, partisan charge”, saying it was “not the first time there was a miscarriage of justice for an Irish person in the British legal system”. Mo Chara, wearing a keffiyeh, led the crowd in chants against Starmer and in favour of Palestine Action, the activist group set to be proscribed by the Home Office.

Police are assessing videos of comments made by the band Bob Vylan and Kneecap at Glastonbury to decide whether any offences may have been committed.

Avon and Somerset police said: “We are aware of the comments made by acts on the West Holts stage at Glastonbury festival. Video evidence will be assessed by officers to determine whether any offences may have been committed that would require a criminal investigation.”

The punk duo Bob Vylan performed on the stage before Kneecap, and led the crowd in chants of: “Free, free Palestine” and: “Death, death to the IDF”. After the set finished the Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, tweeted: “This is grotesque. Glorifying violence against Jews isn’t edgy. The west is playing with fire if we allow this sort of behaviour to go unchecked. The cultural establishment needs to wake up to the fact this isn’t protest, it’s incitement.”

The culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, has spoken to the BBC director general about the Bob Vylan performance. A government spokesman said: “We strongly condemn the threatening comments made by Bob Vylan at Glastonbury. The culture secretary is seeking an urgent explanation about what due diligence it carried out ahead of the performance and welcomes the decision not to rebroadcast it on BBC iPlayer.”

During Kneecap’s set, band member Naoise Ó Cairealláin said: “The prime minister of your country, not mine, said he didn’t want us to play, so fuck Keir Starmer.”

Glastonbury attendee James, 29, from Clapham, south-west London, was measured and sceptical about what he felt was a group making the conflict part of their “marketing”, but said he completely stands by the band’s pro-Palestine politics and finds it “very odd that the British government felt the need to comment on this at all”.

On stage, Mo Chara paid tribute to the Eavis family and conceded that the pressure the festival organisers were under was enormous.

Despite the festival’s long-running politics for peace – they have it has partnered with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament since the early 1980s – there are no mentions of the Gaza conflict in any of the festival’s official communications and imagery. Videos between acts by the charities Oxfam and Greenpeace allude to the conflict without naming countries. On the Left Field, the site’s centre for radical debates and polemical performances, there was no scheduled discussion on Gaza, but Billy Bragg used his Friday night set to pay tribute to his “comrades up the road” in Kneecap, and performed a Bob Dylan song with rewritten lyrics about the Gaza conflict and “the Fox News agenda.” 

On the Pyramid Stage, during Irish singer songwriter CMAT’s celebrated set, she led the daytime audience in “free Palestine” chants, while headliners The 1975 took a different approach, with singer Matty Healy arguing that the audience “don’t need more politics. We need more love and friendship.”

Photograph by Justin Ng/Avalon

• This article was amended on 3 July 2025 to correct the spelling of Mo Chara's name.