Major European music festivals drop Kneecap amid anti-Israel controversy
Two major music festivals have ditched Kneecap amid the ongoing controversy of their anti-Israel statements.
The Hurricane Festival in the north of Germany and its sister event, the Southside Festival in south of the country, have both cancelled planned appearances from the controversial rappers this summer.
Headlined by American rockers Green Day, the June events are broadly the German equivalents of the UK’s Reading and Leeds festivals, with Hurricane one of the largest festivals in the country.
Kneecap were scheduled to perform to a combined audience of 120,000 people at both, but have now been dropped by production company FKP Scorpia.
A spokeswoman told German newspaper Die Welt: “The band Kneecap will not be performing at Hurricane and Southside Festivals this year.”
No explicit reason was for cancelling the band, though the rappers themselves tweeted that they will instead perform shows in Berlin, Hamburg and Cologne in venues hosting between 1,000 and 1,500 people early in September.
Their post stated: “Tickets for our first ever German headline shows are on sale now with links below. Also: The band Kneecap will not be performing at Hurricane or Southside Festival this year.”
The Young Forum of the German-Israeli Society welcomed the move, with federal chairman Lasse Schauder stating: “Anyone who supports or glorifies terrorist organizations like Hezbollah or Hamas should not be allowed a place on concert stages.”
The band’s cancellation comes as controversy continues to grow around a massive outdoor show they’re due to play in Belfast over the summer.
Kneecap are playing in the support slot to Dublin post-punk band Fontaines DC at the Vital Festival, which takes place on Boucher Playing Fields – a venue owned by the city council.
Several Unionist councillors have expressed misgivings over public land being used to host the group in the wake of their recent scandals.
Council spokespeople state “events programming remains a matter for the organisers”.
The group refuses to comment to the News Letter, with Kneecap’s manager – Daniel Lambert, a former Irish diplomat turned chief operating officer of Dublin premiership football team Bohemians FC – telling this newspaper: “There’s journalism and then there’s the News Letter Belfast. Nobody from Kneecap will be providing comment to your ‘paper’, ever. Free Palestine.”
But the group did post a message on social media claiming they’re facing “a coordinated smear campaign” after their remarks on Israel at the Coachella festival in America this month, adding that they’re “taking action against several of these malicious efforts”.
Kneecap blazed messages reading ‘Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people’, ‘It is being enabled by the US government who arm and fund Israel despite their war crimes’ and ‘F*** Israel. Free Palestine’ across large screens during their Coachella set, and publicly complained when the imagery was cut from livestreams. They’ve since been accused of anti-Israel hate speech.
Last year, however, the group angered many left-wing fans when, despite their frequent comments backing Palestine, they broke a boycott to play an English music festival sponsored by a company with financial ties to arms manufacturers suppling Israel’s military.
Half of the acts booked for the Great Escape pulled out but Kneecap refused, leading to accusations of hypocrisy; the rappers said they had to play as they’re a “working band” while dismissing their critics as middle-class. The incident happened a couple of months before the release of a movie about and starring the group.