SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Much work has been done over the years to try to revive an endangered language, Irish, recently from a surprising source.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "AMACH ANOCHT")
KNEECAP: (Rapping in Irish).
SIMON: Three guys from Belfast. They call themselves Kneecap. Their brash, often profane Irish hip-hop has sparked a following at home that has caught on. Now there's a biopic, a hit at this year's Sundance Film Festival, in theaters this week, and it stars the group's real members.
MO CHARA: I'm Mo Chara.
DJ PROVAI: I'm DJ Provai.
MOGLAI BAP: I'm Moglai Bap.
RICH PEPPIATT: And I'm Rich Peppiatt.
MO CHARA: And together, we are sexy.
SIMON: Actually, they're Kneecap. And that voice without the Irish accent is the director, inspired to tell a true-ish version of how the group came together.
PEPPIATT: Some of the more mundane things in the film are the bits we had to make up, but some of the maddest things in the film are actually the true bits.
SIMON: I have read, Moglai Bap, you and a friend were apprehended for spraying graffiti on a wall, and you escaped, but your friend didn't, and that's sort of the beginning of your group.
MOGLAI BAP: Yeah. We were allegedly spray painting.
PEPPIATT: I think the case is closed by now, Moglai. I wouldn't worry too much.
MOGLAI BAP: Yeah. So we were spray painting on a bus stop, and then, like, an undercover police car came across the road. And I ran through the housing estate, and I got away. My friend, he got caught and refused to speak English and only spoke Irish. And for that reason, he had to spend a night in the cell.
PEPPIATT: And that became a very big scene in the film.
MOGLAI BAP: Yeah.
SIMON: Yeah. And how did that lead to DJ Provai and your first hit?
MO CHARA: Like, I mean, we all sort of knew that - I mean, the Irish language community in Ireland is small, but in Belfast is obviously even smaller, so we all sort of, like, had this - it was, like, a sort of subculture that was building. And we used to go to, like, gigs and, like, party and stuff together, and we kind of met DJ Provai through that way because DJ Provai used to be, like, a singer-songwriter. And he used to sing songs in Irish and stuff, so we corrupted him and brought him over to the dark side.
SIMON: Well, DJ, how do you feel?
DJ PROVAI: I feel very dark right now. But there's a light at the end of the tunnel.
PEPPIATT: What is that light?
DJ PROVAI: From the red-light district in Amsterdam.
SIMON: Rich Peppiatt, what drew you to want to try and tell this story?
PEPPIATT: I'm a real masochist. That was really the main thing. I realized these would be three really easygoing lads to work with and thought, you know what? I'm going to devote the next five years to doing that. No, I mean, look, I went to one of their gigs, and I was just really blown away by the stage presence, the charisma, the don't-give-an-F attitude that they had. My favorite band growing up was Rage Against the Machine, and I felt very much that the politics are going to have a lot of music and that, in fact, everything had become very PR-ed (ph), very packaged up. And Kneecap were the opposite of that. They really didn't care. And I found it very refreshing.
SIMON: Yeah. Well, let me ask Kneecap. How did you feel about a British filmmaker telling your story?
MOGLAI BAP: Oh, we were very skeptical for the first six months. It took him a lot of pints of Guinness to become our friend. But, yeah, I would say for a long time, the English have profited off the back of Irish labor, cut down all our forests, took away our language. So we were quite skeptical when Rich approached us because we thought after 800 years of colonization, it was going to be 801. But thankfully, it paid off all right.
SIMON: Let me ask because you say in the film your generation is known as cease-fire babies.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "KNEECAP")
MO CHARA: As if our only defining feature was we were not the [expletive] that came before us. Maybe they were right. Maybe we were only ever going to be the moment after the moment.
SIMON: Meaning after the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, following what's called the Troubles - fighting between those who were loyal to the United Kingdom and those who wanted Northern Ireland to be part of the Irish Republic. What does it mean to you, being what you call cease-fire babies?
MO CHARA: I mean, I think it's a term that is mostly what other people give to us. But I suppose it meant that we had opportunities growing up that maybe our parents didn't have. But there was also this vacuum left from the war and, like, you know, all these, like, lack of investments in these areas, and poverty was still rife and, like, you know, there wasn't an awful lot of services and stuff. So there's still, like, a big suicide problem and stuff for our generation. But obviously, we don't have British soldiers on the streets.
MOGLAI BAP: And, like, there was no Irish language school in the north of Ireland until 1972, and there was no secondary school, no high school in Irish until 1991. So we're blessed now that we have the opportunity to get educated in Irish and go to youth clubs in Irish and build a community.
SIMON: And what does that mean to you, the fact that the Irish language is more freely used - let's put it that way - right now.
MO CHARA: It's miraculous that it survived after the brutalization of British laws in Ireland. It was driven to all around the west of Ireland, you'll see, and there's, like, these families that just never broke the chain of Irish. It's them that we have to thank, really, that our stories, language, culture, songs all survived.
PEPPIATT: Yeah. The film is about the Irish language, but it's also something that we've been really gratified by traveling around the world with the film since Sundance when we won the audience award there, that people are really connecting with it about their own indigenous languages, and it's really making people not just look at Irish, but look at, you know, the languages that are in their family and the statistic that we have at the end of the film that, you know, an indigenous language dies every 40 days. I guess a language is very much like the environment in a way. Once you've destroyed it, it's gone.
SIMON: Moglai Bap and Mo Chara - a lot of drugs in this movie. Are you concerned that you're romanticizing drug use?
MO CHARA: For sure.
MOGLAI BAP: No drugs were harmed in the making of this movie.
MO CHARA: I mean, we've always had that. Like, even with our music, people say that, aren't you worried about you're glorifying drugs? We're not talking about crack cocaine, heroin and fentanyl. We're talking about party drugs, like somebody who works five days a week and then goes to a festival at the weekend and takes a pill. We're not talking about the stuff that's ruined communities in America.
PEPPIATT: But it's also important to say that, you know, most people take drugs and don't end up in rehab and don't end up having these social problems. And I think that sometimes there's this thing with film where the minute anyone does drugs, the whole narrative of the film needs to get sucked down that wormhole of someone having to end up in rehab and things like that. And, you know, those films have got a place, but I just don't think every film where people do drugs needs to be about drugs.
MOGLAI BAP: And I think it's a misunderstanding of where addiction and social problems arise from. I don't think drugs are the main cause of addiction. There are so many other elements and social elements that cause that.
MO CHARA: Like economic issues...
MOGLAI BAP: Economic, poverty.
MO CHARA: ...Like, a bit of poverty, lack of investment in places, lack of jobs for young people, people not feeling part of their community.
MOGLAI BAP: It's kind of easy to blame drugs for all that - for all them problems that are still occurring.
SIMON: Moglai Bap and Mo Chara, do you hope you get an audience that doesn't speak the Irish language?
MOGLAI BAP: Most of our audiences don't speak Irish. It's not (laughter) - it hasn't really picked up in America here, Irish (laughter). Still waiting on it to pick up around here.
MO CHARA: I mean, it was a bad business plan on our end if we were expecting just Irish speakers.
SIMON: Yeah, right.
MO CHARA: I mean, we'd be playing in front of the same couple of families in Belfast. But it's the same as any group now, the way we consume music so differently with Spotify and stuff. I mean, I listen to hip-hop in Arabic, you know, or - and Spanish. I don't have to understand everything. But I think it's good. Like, I mean, we come to America, and, like, most people won't speak Irish. Like, I'd say a good 90%, 95% of American audiences don't speak Irish. But what you do have is people up the front - like, there was a young woman up the front in San Francisco, and she knew the set better than I did, like, knew every word. And then I come off, and we all started speaking Irish to her, and she didn't speak any Irish. She just knew every word phonetically.
PEPPIATT: Yeah, rapping in a language that not many people speak doesn't make much sense on paper as a way to go about your career. But the amazing thing about Kneecap is whatever they do, whatever controversy they cause, whatever pushback there is, they always manage to turn it on its head.
SIMON: Moglai Bap, Mo Chara and DJ Provai, who are the subjects and the stars of the film "Kneecap," and the film's director, Rich Peppiatt, thank you all very much for being with us.
PEPPIATT: Thank you for having us.
MOGLAI BAP: (Speaking Irish). It's a pleasure.
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