The boundaries between Protest and Art

The boundaries between Protest and Art Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 01

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• 1:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  Confess it to the petrol dentist, you westward castles. Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. I'm currently bare chest and bare chest and in my underpants because it's roasting in my office. The air conditioner still isn't fixed. It's absolutely fucking boiling and seagulls are roasting on my roof. I feel like I'm recording from the cabin of an 18th century coffin ship on the way to America. The heat of the Atlantic, the baking sun and seagulls roasting on the ship. If this is your first podcast, consider going back to an earlier episode. To familiarise yourself with the lore of this podcast, I'm doing an impromptu podcast this week

• 1:45Blindboy Boatclub?

  because lots of people have been asking me to speak about the band Kneecap, who have been all over the news and are currently under investigation from the UK Counter Terrorism Unit, which is fucking ridiculous. It is outrageous. So I signed a statement. I signed a statement basically saying that this was outrageous. Myself and other artists, Kneecap asked me to sign it, but myself and...

• 2:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  Fucking Christie Moore, Fontaine's DC, Kojak, Lancome, Mary Wollipers, The Pogues, Massive Attack, Paul Weller, people with their heads screwed on, artists who have their heads screwed on, signed this statement, not just in defence of, of Kneecap, but in defence of art and democracy, because this is political censorship and intimidation, political intimidation. This is, this is actual cancel culture. This is actual cancel culture. This is a government doing cancel culture on artists. So I signed that statement

• 3:03Blindboy Boatclub?

  and it was in the news. So loads of ye were asking me, can I, can I speak about it? So I will, I'm gonna speak about it this week. Kneecap are, they're a rap group, they're artists, they're performers, they perform characters. Politics, political statements are part of their art, part of their artistic expression. They're anti-colonial, they're carrying on the, the Irish anti-colonial tradition in art. That's what they're doing. But they also use humour and silliness and fun and crack and irony and exaggeration. And their work, it exists in this, this shimmering spectrum between irony and sincerity and

• 3:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  truth and hyperbole. And it's for an incredibly literate audience, an audience who grew up with timelines, scrolling timelines, that are silly and violent and serious and disgusting and frightening and silly again. An audience that have the, the digital literacy to decide what to take seriously and what to see as, as a joke and everything in between. So Kneecap played at Coachella, Coachella over in America, California, I think, Palm Springs Desert. Coachella is a big deal.

• 4:29Blindboy Boatclub?

  It is internationally, globally huge. It's the coolest, biggest festival that any act could perform at. When Coachella is happening, all of the eyes of the world are pointed at Coachella. The audience in Coachella, it's mostly young, white Americans. That is the vast majority of the audience. They're as young, white, American kids. So, kneecap from Belfast that did their gig at Coachella. That's a huge moment. Not many Irish acts get to perform at Coachella. Kneecap do their gig and then they have a screen behind them. And then on screen, they display the text.

• 5:11Blindboy Boatclub?

  "Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. It's being enabled by the US government, who arm and fund Israel despite their war crimes. Fuck Israel, free Palestine." Kneecap presented that as, as art, drawing an artistic, drawing a fucking performance as art. What made it particularly poignant and effective and impactful was they presented those words in the English language clearly as large, giant text on a screen. It was a visual message. They gave us the news headline that you felt you should be seeing, but you've never seen it.

• 5:56Blindboy Boatclub?

  Thousands of people in the fucking, thousands of people in the audience. "White American kids have got cameras and now they're videotaping these words on screen. Israel is committing genocide. It's enabled by the US government, who've armed and funded Israel despite their war crimes." The audience start to cheer. So now not only is it artistic performance, now it becomes a meme. It becomes a meme online. Kneecap are from Belfast, are from West Belfast.

• 6:29Blindboy Boatclub?

  They grew up with huge, big political murals in their communities, walls on the sides of houses, painted with very clear and direct political messages, anti-colonial messages that you won't see printed in the newspaper, that you won't see in the media. Neecap grew up around these murals. And when they put those words on the screen at Coachella, it's like they brought the tradition, the Irish tradition of the fucking Belfast murals to Coachella, to the world stage, in solidarity with the people of Palestine. And there was global fucking outrage. There was outrage that this had happened. Now, first off, nothing

• 7:13Blindboy Boatclub?

  Neecap said isn't true. The International Criminal Court, the highest court of international justice in November 2024, issued arrest warrants for the leader of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, accusing him of war crimes. That's the International Criminal Court saying that. The International Court of Justice in 2023 filed a case accusing Israel of committing genocide against Palestine, the International Court of Justice. In April 2024, the United Nations Human Rights Council called for Israel to be held accountable for possible war crimes. The UN Independent

• 7:54Blindboy Boatclub?

  International Commission of Inquiry in March 2025 reported that Israel is committing genocidal acts and that it's also using sexual violence against the Chinese. Very recently, February 2025, Michael Fagri, who's the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, he's accusing Israel of using starvation as a weapon of war. Intentionally depriving people of food is a war crime and that this amounts to genocide. December 24, Amnesty International conclude that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians. So all I'm

• 8:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  doing there, I'm citing, I'm citing my arguments there with, because who the fuck am I at the end of the day, only someone with a bag on their head. I'm citing my arguments there, I'm backing my arguments up with the institutional pillars of Western democracy.

• 8:57Blindboy Boatclub?

  And human rights. I'm citing the people, the human rights lawyers, the experts, whose job is to identify war crimes and genocide and to say, stop. I'm citing those people. So, Niket's statement at Coachella also aligns with the position of the highest international criminal courts. It's not controversial. Now, the vast majority of corporate media that we've been looking at over the past two years, that would lead you to believe that those statements are in fact controversial. Because there's a very clear bias towards Israel in the vast majority of corporate media that I'm seeing.

• 9:40Blindboy Boatclub?

  And it couldn't be any more obvious right now because, like Russia, Russia's doing horrendous things to Ukraine. Bombing apartment blocks, killing civilians, targeting his civilian population. But when Russia does this, the headlines are very clear, very, very clear, that Russia have deliberately targeted and murdered innocent civilians for the purposes of terror. Really clear in the reporting. It's not clear at all when Israel does it. The language is obfuscated in some way. Civilians in Gaza die. Civilians in Ukraine are killed by Russia, who are trying to kill them. And also Russia are ostracized by the international community with sanctions.

• 10:25Blindboy Boatclub?

  And Israel receive the support of Western governments and Western media. So because we're swimming in that sea of skewed narratives, I can understand why some people would think that it's controversial, controversial, to say that Israel are committing genocide. No, you'd be agreeing with the position of the top international human rights lawyers and international courts of justice. There's nothing absurd or offensive or wrong or incorrect about the statements that Niket posted as art at Coachella. Nothing at all. And that's the fucking problem. That right there was the problem. You had Sharon Osbourne.

• 11:08Blindboy Boatclub?

  Sharon Osbourne calling for Neecap to have their visas revoked from America, which I did a podcast on this years ago about the history of heavy metal, but Sharon Osbourne's husband is Ozzy Osbourne from Black Sabbath. Black Sabbath's early music is rooted in an anti-war message. They went from, Black Sabbath grew up in Birmingham.

• 11:32Blindboy Boatclub?

  So like they grew up after World War Two, surrounded by unexploded Nazi bombs. They played in rubble as kids and alarms would go off when someone would find a bomb that hasn't exploded. And Black Sabbath's sound, they invented heavy metal, became focused on the dangers and evil of war and warmongers. And Black Sabbath's, like they were just a lot of lads from Birmingham. No one ever thought they were going to be big or invent a genre like heavy metal. No one thought that. When they went to America, their fans were made up of anti-Vietnam War protesters, anti-Vietnam

• 12:11Blindboy Boatclub?

  War protesters and veterans, American veterans of the Vietnam War, who were traumatised and had their limbs blown off. Early Black Sabbath was art as protest against the violence and insanity of war. So fucking hell, it was just very annoying to have Sharon Osbourne, not only Ozzy's wife, but she was Black Sabbath's manager, to have fucking her calling for Neecap to get their visas revoked. For fucking what? For telling the truth at Coachella, because that was really, really dangerous.

• 12:49Blindboy Boatclub?

  Young American kids, all of a sudden, are screaming this cathartic scream of, someone finally said it. Neecap made it okay to say free Palestine. Neecap made it okay in America amongst young white kids at Coachella. Neecap made it okay, normal and cool to say a genocide is happening and it's enabled by the US government. And it happened in a rogue way, in a medium that can't really be controlled. And Neecap have been doing this very interesting thing where...

• 13:26Blindboy Boatclub?

  So protest.

• 13:29Blindboy Boatclub?

  Protest is is now becoming kinda unsafe. Like today in Ireland, in Ireland today. The cabinet are are gonna approve new legislation that makes it illegal to wear face coverings at protests. Now, that's a tricky one, because sometimes, sometimes people wear face coverings at protests to agitate, to turn those protests into riots. Bad actors can use face coverings at protests to throw petrol bombs. But then other people might wanna cover their faces at a protest because it's becoming dangerous to protest, especially if you're on the left.

• 14:10Blindboy Boatclub?

  If your protest is challenging systems of power, then you're being watched. If you wanna protest housing, you wanna protest vulture funds, you wanna go to a Palestine protest, you wanna protest the the use of Shannon Airport by the US military. If you do that, there's police there, there's guards there, and they watch and they take notes and they take videos of who the left-wing protesters are. Also, like, the guards are gonna start rolling out, well, they are, they're rolling out facial recognition technology cameras that are powered by AI. Do we not have a right to privacy with our facial data? I mean, I wear a fucking bag on my head, you know what I mean?

• 14:54Blindboy Boatclub?

  But pretty soon, within the next five years, we're gonna be walking our cities and all of the cameras on the streets are gonna have artificial intelligence facial recognition in them. The camera that's pointing at you, it's not just recording you, it knows who you are. That's why they're banning, that's why they're banning masks at protests. It's for fucking surveillance. In America, people are being arrested at Palestine protests. People who go to a protest in support of Palestine. In 2024, there was like 3,000 students were arrested across the US. Students who were protesting for, I don't like this genocide, I don't like seeing toddlers being murdered by bombs. 3,000 protesters were arrested in the US.

• 15:39Blindboy Boatclub?

  And also, they faced academic consequences at their universities. They were suspended, people were expelled. If you're not from the US, especially if you're from a Middle Eastern country, and you are protesting on behalf of the people of Gaza. In the US, you might get deported. It's happening. People were deported. Two weeks ago, the Irish government, the Irish government said to young students, Irish students who go to America on J1 visas, which is like, it's like a two month or something work visa that a lot of Irish, like 18 or 19 year olds get to go and work in America for the summer. The Irish government warned these kids and said, don't go to, don't, don't get

• 16:20Blindboy Boatclub?

  involved in any protests in America because you might get fucking deported and not allowed back into America ever. In, in Britain, the fucking British Army is supporting the genocide in Gaza, offering direct support, reconnaissance flights, spy planes, sharing information with the IDF, right? Britain sells weapons to Israel. So Britain is fully complicit in the genocide that's happening in Gaza. In August 2024, there was an arms factory in Kent and some

• 16:57Blindboy Boatclub?

  protesters were like, we don't want this arms factory giving bombs to Israel to kill kids. So some protesters protested at the arms factory. They were, they were arrested as, as, they were arrested under the Serious Crime Act 2015. So these protesters were arrested because they protested at an arms factory and they were, they were legally accused of being members of an organised crime group. Just Stop Oil protesters, like this, this year, just stop oil protesters who are protesting against the destruction of our fucking planet, the biodiversity collapse that we're seeing right now. People who went, we're gonna fucking protest here and we're gonna be, we're gonna do it properly. We're gonna be difficult. We're

• 17:41Blindboy Boatclub?

  gonna sit in the middle of roads. We're gonna disrupt people's days. It's a fucking protest. Protest is inconvenient. That's the point. We're genuinely facing climate collapse. So some people are protesting to try and, try and stop this. They were jailed for three fucking years. The two women who, who, they, they didn't even damage the fucking Van Gogh painting.

• 18:05Blindboy Boatclub?

  As a spectacle, as a stunt, as a piece of performance art, I would argue. They threw tomato soup on the Van Gogh paintings, on the sunflower paintings. Didn't damage them. They merely inconvenienced the protective frame that's on the paintings. This was a symbolic act. Those women got two years in jail for throwing soup on a painting? No, they got two years in jail. They got two years in jail to tell you and me, don't protest. No, no, no, protest is gone now, that's done. Protest is dangerous. I know you have a right to protest, that this is enshrined in your rights as a citizen of a democratic country. This is actually a cornerstone of democracy, is the right to protest.

• 18:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  I know you have that right, but we'll figure out a way to call you a terrorist, or we'll figure out a way to call you a member of an organised crime group and we'll put you in jail. It's a clear message that's being sent out. Post George Floyd, post Black Lives Matter. It's a message that protests, no. If we're not going to arrest you, we're going to watch you. You might not get a job in five years. Yeah, because you see, we've got these facial recognition cameras that scan the crowd and they've got artificial intelligence. And that protest that you went to, because you didn't want to see toddlers getting blown up in Gaza.

• 19:35Blindboy Boatclub?

  That protest, we're trying to pass legislation to make that anti-Semitic, right? Which means in five or six years' time, you could go for a job. You could go for a job and the photograph that you submit, in five years' time, when you're going for a job, the photograph that you submit, you might come up on a list of people who are anti-Semitic because the artificial intelligence facial recognition cameras took your photograph at that protest five years ago. So stay at home, just stay at home, don't protest. That's the covert messaging. That is the covert messaging that we're getting in Western society over the past two or three years, through the various state apparatuses.

• 20:18Blindboy Boatclub?

  Whenever I'm trying to understand shit like this, shit to do with power, power and structures of power, I always go at it through the lens of a fellow called Al Thuser. Al Thuser was a Marxist philosopher and his theory was about... Like, how do you get most people to go, "No, I'm not going to that, I'm not going to that protest, it feels kind of unsafe, I'm just gonna not do that, I'm gonna not go to the Palestine protest, I'm just gonna leave it off." A person gets to that place, because you see, the thing is, 10 years ago, 10 years ago, if I'd have said to you 10 years ago, which is 2015, "Don't go to that protest, they're

• 21:01Blindboy Boatclub?

  watching you, don't go to that protest, you don't know what the consequences would be, you might not get a job in 10 years, you don't know." If I said that to you 10 years ago, you'd go, "Shut the fuck up, you lunatic, I have a right to protest, and I'm going to that protest, and I would protest peacefully." That's what you'd have said 10 years ago. Like, we had the water protests in Ireland, the huge widespread protests to stop the privatization of water in Ireland, that unified a lot of people across the spectrum. It was a beautiful expression of democracy.

• 21:36Blindboy Boatclub?

  They were unified, assertive, popular, peaceful, but disruptive protests. Disruptive because the protesters would go to the middle of Dublin, and traffic would stop, and trains would stop, and they would actually, they'd shut things down, and the whole country went, "Yeah, how dare you try to privatize our water, water is a human right, we want it kept free." And it worked, the protests worked. Now, I don't think that could happen again, I don't think that many Irish people could unify like that, it would be split in some way. There'd be conspiracy theories in there, you'd become paranoid about the protest, one

• 22:19Blindboy Boatclub?

  group would be this, one group would be that, somehow it would become about immigrants, you'd be scared the police are gonna be there, you'd be scared that it's gonna be a riot. We're like that now because the window has shifted, the window of acceptability has shifted. In 2018, I think it was, housing protesters in Dublin occupied a vacant property in Frederick Street in Dublin. They occupied this property to protest the housing crisis, to protest vulture funds, to protest inequality. What happened? Something previously unthinkable.

• 22:54Blindboy Boatclub?

  The guards, the Irish police, showed up, right? They stepped back, the Irish police stepped back. And then thugs, who weren't guards, just thugs with masks with balaclavas, came out of an unmarked van and physically assaulted the protesters. And there were photographs and it was all over the media. So something new happened there. The Irish police, who are supposed to protect everybody to uphold democracy, they stepped back and did nothing while masked thugs broke the law and assaulted people while the guards stood back and watched. And it was all on camera. And this sent a strong fucking message to everybody. Uh-oh, protesting is dangerous now.

• 23:38Blindboy Boatclub?

  They're not playing by the rules anymore. Weird shit's happening. And this just creeps into the discourse of the media. And all of a sudden, you get yourself in a situation now where you're like, oh, protest sounds a bit scary. Bad things might happen. It doesn't feel like your democratic right anymore. You don't feel proud to be, no, I'm gonna peacefully protest, as is my right. Isn't this democracy wonderful? That's gone now, there's a paranoia. That's deliberate. That is very deliberate. That's called the manufacturing consent. I consent to the idea that protesting is dangerous and has consequences. Even though it's supposed to be my democratic right,

• 24:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  I consent to the anxiety and paranoia that it's actually dangerous and the state is not my friend. That's manufactured through the state apparatuses, which is the repressive state apparatus. That's the police, military, courts and law, right? That's the repressive state apparatus. And then that's disseminated by the ideological state apparatus, which is schools, the media is a big one, and politicians. And it's a way that...

• 24:54Blindboy Boatclub?

  Capitalism alongside so-called democracy, right? You see, they can't just say protest is illegal. If you go out on the streets tomorrow and protest, it's banned and you're gonna be arrested. They can't do that, you see, because that's not democracy, that's fascism. So instead you get this slower cooperation between the repressive state apparatus and the ideological state apparatus, the media in particular. You get this slower messaging, which then creates obedience, obedience with the dominant ideology. So it's working, it's really working. It's working because protest feels dangerous now.

• 25:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  And the point that I'm making is, this is what I find so interesting about kneecap and how kneecap have gone globally fucking huge right now. Kneecap have used art to create a new space, which is a form of protest, but doesn't look like a form of protest. So the young people who go to kneecap's gigs, they're not just going there to have crack and listen to tunes and dance around. They're going to a space where they can protest, but it feels safe to do so. Because it doesn't look like protest, it doesn't look like resistance, it's protest wearing a balaclava.

• 26:17Blindboy Boatclub?

  And it's not called protest, importantly, it's called a music gig, even though it works as protest. And it's very ambiguous, and there's humour involved, and there's irony involved, there's fun involved, there's sittiness involved, there's this entire spectrum of celebration and dance, and then all of a sudden, boom, there you go. Israel is committing genocide and it's being enabled by the US, free Palestine, and then back to crack again. And that's scaring the absolute fuck out of the system, because that's really hard to control and really hard to define. And when kneecap did that at Coachella, Western governments scrambled very quickly to try and shut them down, to try and shut them down, and now they're being censored.

• 27:02Blindboy Boatclub?

  So someone found footage of them at a gig, apparently saying up Hamas and up Hezbollah. Counter-terrorism police in England went looking at that. Kneecap had to quickly release a statement saying, "We don't support Hamas or Hezbollah", which- So Hamas, Hamas are what's known as a proscribed organisation. So if, if kneecap had literally said, no, we stand by our words there, we, we, we support Hamas, they could have actually gone to jail there for 14 years. That's the law in the UK for expressing support for a proscribed organisation. And what I'd argue there is that when you're at a fucking kneecap gig, first of all, they're playing

• 27:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  characters. When kneecaps say, up the rah, up Hamas, up Hezbollah, it, it needs to be viewed with, with context and intent. Nobody in that audience, in the kneecap audience, is gonna hear that and think they literally mean that. They're playing with slogans through characters, like a type of collage, like a type of collage in the context of a, of a performance at the gig. The intended recipients, the people at the gig, they understand the context and intent. They understand that they're in an artistic space now, where there's a, a fluidity of

• 28:28Blindboy Boatclub?

  meaning, a, a meta-modern fluidity of meaning, a bit like when you scroll your Instagram feed. And I'm able to say that because like kneecap, in interviews, in interviews, in, in like two or three interviews, they were asked, who are your biggest influences? And kneecap said, the Rubber Bandits. But you know, when I was in my fucking twenties, I was in a, a musical act called The Rubber Bandits, and we had a song called Up the Rah. So before I get on to this, actually, let me do my little Ocarina pause. I'm gonna play, um, I don't have my Ocarina, I'm gonna blow into a, a plastic bottle, and you're gonna hear an advert for something.

• 29:16Speaker 03

  Come on.

• 29:21Blindboy Boatclub?

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• 29:25Speaker 01

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• 32:40Blindboy Boatclub?

  Very disappointing, I apologize. Can't get a decent tune out of it. Look, fuck it, you get the point. I've articulated chest from a chest infection and I'm trying to stop myself coughing. That blowing didn't help. Support for the podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page, patreon.com/theblindwhitepodcast. If you enjoy this podcast, if it brings you mirth, merriment, entertainment, distraction, information, food for thought, whatever the fuck has you listening to this podcast, please consider supporting it directly via the Patreon page. This podcast is how I earn a living. It's my full-time job. It's how I pay for all my equipment.

• 33:22Blindboy Boatclub?

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• 34:04Blindboy Boatclub?

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• 34:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  So back to kneecap, which this episode is about art and protest. And, and the line between the two. And as I mentioned, I used to be in a, in a, a musical group called The Rubber Bandits. And we had a song called Up the Ra. And we were on stage with our plastic balaclavas. And our DJ, DJ Willie O'Dee, would literally dress up like he's in the IRA and wave around an Irish flag and an AK-47. And we used to bring out dancers called the, I can't believe it's not the IRA. And they would be dressed up as the IRA with balaclavas on. And they'd play drums and have guns. And we'd all shout up the ra.

• 35:29Blindboy Boatclub?

  Sometimes we had gay strippers in tongs with balaclavas on. And they'd bend over and you could see their balls. Or we'd have women in bikinis.

• 35:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  With balaclavas on, and we'd all be shouting up the ra with this song Up the Ra from 2006 or 2005. And the song itself was just this ridiculous, a misinterpretation of Irish history and then listing out loads of celebrities and saying that they're in the IRA and basically getting an entire audience to shout up the ra while people on stage have guns and are dressed like the fucking IRA, which was 100% inspired by Public Enemy, who used to have the security of the first world, they called it, up on stage. They used to have dancers that were like the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam. They'd play with that revolutionary

• 36:25Blindboy Boatclub?

  iconography. And we got killed for it. We used to do that in fucking London. We'd get kicked out of venues. We used to do it at festivals. And when I'd get challenged on it by journalists, they'd always say, up the ra doesn't mean up the ra in this context. I'd tell them, when I was in Limerick, I'd see graffiti on bus stops of someone draw a picture of Bob Marley and a speech bubble coming out of his mouth saying up the ra or Tupac would be involved. So you'd take these loaded slogans and just collage them, put them beside something else, take them wildly out of context, take the imagery of physical force republicanism and juxtapose it with other things and just see what happens

• 37:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  in the space as artistic performance. Like, in art theory, there's a name for this. It's called the carnavalesque. It was a lens that a fellow called Michael Bakhtin, I think he was a philosopher or an art critic, what Bakhtin, he looked at folk traditions throughout Europe, especially in medieval times, where you'd have carnivals and during carnivals, the ordinary people would dress up, would wear masks. They'd openly mock the ruling class. It was a more, like, a subversive performance where established authority, hierarchies

• 37:49Blindboy Boatclub?

  and norms are temporarily inverted during the carnival, are mocked using humour, vulgarity, parody. Like, kneecap wearing balaclavas and singing about the fucking ra on stage, being from West Belfast. It takes power away from political oppression by turning it into like a rebellious farce. And we don't need this explained to us because we understand these rules. The carnivalesque is part of culture. And I know this because I did my master's degree on this back in 2015. There's a documentary, there was an RTE called The Rubber Bandits Guide to 1916,

• 38:31Blindboy Boatclub?

  which is an hour-long, utterly ridiculous, but rigorous history documentary about the 1916 Rising. And Up the Ra, the music video is in this documentary. But I submitted that documentary as my master's thesis in art college and defended it at master's level as an example of the carnivalesque. And kneecap are doing the same shit. And this is why, this is why it's disingenuous to call the fucking anti-terror police on art. But when we used to be singing Up the Ra in Belfast in like 2012, 2013, dressed as the IRA with guns and balaclavas and tricorders.

• 39:13Blindboy Boatclub?

  The kneecap lads were there in the audience with all their mates, as little kids as teenagers, looking up going, that's fucking cool. So there's a little bit of that DNA in what they're doing. And that's not me sucking my own dick. Kneecap have said explicitly in interviews that their biggest influence was The Rubber Bandits. And I'm very proud of that because The Rubber Bandits didn't. I wasn't able to earn a living in The Rubber Bandits. It didn't bring any success and I was quite miserable because I'd be working my hole off and nothing would come of it. And also, as a middle-aged man, I now cringe at a lot of the material because some of the songs are just dumb as fuck and were misogynistic or transphobic

• 39:58Blindboy Boatclub?

  and just crude for the sake of being crude without being clever or having a message underneath. But it is lovely to have Up the Ra, which I would have considered to be a really silly, stupid song at the time that I didn't think anybody would like. Like, it stayed on my computer for about a year longer because I'm like, this is too ridiculous. This is too silly. This is stupid. Don't put this out. People will laugh at you. It's nice to see little bits of that DNA nearly 20 years later in kneecap's career. And they're doing fucking brilliantly. They're global. But the thing is. If they say fucking up Hamas, up Hezbollah at a gig in character in the middle of their

• 40:40Blindboy Boatclub?

  performance, in that space juxtaposed with songs about doing drugs and a DJ called DJ Pro V in a tricolour balaclava, you cannot take that literally. Like that alone, there's a man called DJ Pro V, which is a play on provisional IRA. There's a fella called DJ Pro V with a tricolour balaclava. That's a cartoon. That's an exaggeration. That's a performance. That's the world of growing up in West Belfast, finding its way out through the playfulness of creativity. So if someone in that space, just like if it was a play,

• 41:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  if someone in that space says up Hamas, up Hezbollah, kill your local MP, the audience fully understands the context and the intent. No one's walking away thinking, better go kill my local MP now. No one's thinking that because that's not the context and intent. So it's highly disingenuous to take those words as literal and then try and investigate them with fucking anti-terror laws. And this business anyway of who decides who's a fucking terrorist and who's not. Like Hamas are a prescribed organisation, but the things that Israel do, the things that the IDF do amount to terror. It's terrorism. They're

• 42:05Blindboy Boatclub?

  attacking civilian populations. Terrorism is when a civilian population is attacked for the purposes of intimidation and that's, they're doing it every single fucking day. Like Jesus Christ, like the news moves so quickly, but the Hezbollah pages.

• 42:25Blindboy Boatclub?

  Israel planted bombs on 200 pagers that lads from Hezbollah used in Lebanon. And then those Hezbollah fighters went about their days in their homes, in the cities. They just went about their days unbeknownst to themselves and Israel turned them all into suicide bombers. Innocent people died, innocent people died while they were just out enjoying their life because a fella from Hezbollah happened to be beside them. That's not a human shield. Israel turned that person into a suicide bomb in a public place. 200 IEDs went off in Lebanon, all at once.

• 43:07Blindboy Boatclub?

  One of the largest terrorist attacks the world has ever fucking seen, but it's not called a terrorist attack. Are Israel a prescribed organisation? The IDF, are they a prescribed organisation? No, you can go to jail if you protest against them. Fucking HTS. Like, the news moves so quickly, but I think like six months ago there, remember Syria? The Syrian civil war just ends suddenly. Assad is gone from power and this new crowd, HTS, just move in like heroes and now they rule Syria. It just happened. They were terrorists a few years back. A few years back, they were a prescribed organisation.

• 43:48Blindboy Boatclub?

  The leader of HTS, who currently, the guy who led the coup to overthrow Assad, he was one of the world's most wanted jihadists. They were part of ISIS, just like two years ago, three years ago. The overthrow of Assad in Syria, most likely, I reckon it was CIA and Mossad. It was a foreign intelligence controlled coup, but they just, they used the media to reinvent this leader of HTS, who a year ago was a terrorist. They reinvented him. They made him look like Che Guevara.

• 44:28Blindboy Boatclub?

  He wears a green olive drab shirt and he has the beard and he doesn't look Islamic anymore. And they made him look like Che Guevara, just revolutionary enough, but not Islamist. So that's someone who was a terrorist about a year ago, prescribed, but is now not. So like two years ago on this podcast, if I'd have said, "Up HTS", then I'd be supporting a prescribed organisation and I could go to jail. But now I can say, "Up HTS" because they're not terrorists anymore. The Mujahideen, there were lads in Afghanistan in the eighties. And the Mujahideen, who were led by a fella called Bin Laden, Osama Bin Laden,

• 45:12Blindboy Boatclub?

  they weren't terrorists at all, not in the 1980s, because the Americans were working with Bin Laden in the 1980s. They were giving him loads of guns and weapons and training because in Afghanistan in the 1980s, it was controlled by Russia, by the Soviet Union. So the CIA worked with Osama Bin Laden and the Mujahideen to fight the Russians in the 1980s. And they were reported as heroes, freedom fighters. American media was fawning over the Mujahideen in the 1980s in Afghanistan. And then they became the Taliban. And then they became the Taliban and Bin Laden became a terrorist, the biggest terrorist in the world.

• 45:55Blindboy Boatclub?

  Even though 10 years previously, he was an ally. And then the Taliban were terrorists for years. And then America handed Afghanistan back. And when they handed Afghanistan back, they stopped calling the Taliban terrorists. This shit is all about words. It's all about words. The British Army in the north of Ireland, in Belfast, where Neekap are from, in the 1970s, the British Army had the Military Reaction Force, which were a covert, this is all evidence-based now, this is all out in the open. They were a covert, plainclothes members of the British Army.

• 46:35Blindboy Boatclub?

  Who just used to shoot civilians, shoot random civilians, to stoke sectarian conflict, create chaos and justify the presence of the British military. The British military did terrorism in the north of Ireland. In the 1980s and early 1990s, there was the Force Research Unit, which replaced the Military Reaction Force. Margaret Thatcher set them up. Again, covert military, plainclothes, used to smuggle guns in from South Africa, used to work with unable, um, loyalist paramilitaries, massacring, shooting dead, innocent Catholic civilians. British military terrorism. Look up the Ballymarfi massacre. The Ballymarfi massacre in 1971.

• 47:19Blindboy Boatclub?

  British military just shooting Catholics for the crack. They used one man's skull as an ashtray. It's the British Army. Bloody Sunday, Derry, 1972. Catholics marching for their civil rights. Peaceful protest inspired by Martin Luther King, marching for their civil rights. Twenty-six people shot by British soldiers. Fourteen dead, shot in the street. For marching for their civil rights? That's terrorism. I consider that to be terrorism. I consider the British Army to be terrorists because they've done terrorism. Want to talk about killing MPs? Bobby Sands, Bobby Sands was an MP. He was also an IRA member. He was in jail. He was in jail in 1981.

• 48:02Blindboy Boatclub?

  And he was a member of the IRA. He was a member of the British Parliament. He was elected. And he didn't want to wear, he didn't think that IRA prisoners should have to wear prison uniforms because that would make IRA prisoners criminals. They wanted to be viewed as prisoners of war during a war. So he went on hunger strike and Margaret Thatcher just let him die. She killed Bobby Sands. She killed an MP. And I'd argued that fucking...

• 48:36Blindboy Boatclub?

  For Keir Starmer to want to use the anti-terror police to investigate Kneecap for their performance at a gig, it violates, it violates their rights under the Good Friday Agreement. I'd argue that. Because under the Good Friday Agreement, Kneecap are entitled to cultural identity and freedom of expression. There's clauses in there that protect, like the murals, the murals that are in Belfast, that protect these things so that they can express political beliefs through art. And solidarity with Palestine is part of Irish cultural identity. We didn't just pick Palestine for the fucking laugh. There's literal shared

• 49:17Blindboy Boatclub?

  history through colonisation. The Kilmeical ambush, 1921, where the IRA ambushed a lot of auxiliaries down in West Cork. My grandad was involved in this. He was in the IRA and my two granduncles. But this is 1920, let's say 1920. They ambushed these auxies, as they're known. There was auxies and they were blackened hands. These were paramilitary force of the British Army. They were called police, but they were, Winston Churchill sent them to Ireland to terrorise the civilian population. Collective punishment of the

• 49:57Blindboy Boatclub?

  civilian population, that was the job of the blackened hands and the auxies. The auxies were the officer class. They were posh. So anyway, during the Kilmeical ambush, the IRA fire upon these auxies and killed 17 of them. So 17 very posh coffins were sent back to England. And it was a very instrumental ambush in getting independence for the free state, the 26 counties. But these auxies were led by a fella called Sir Hugh Tudor. And when the Irish War of Independence ended in 1922,

• 50:38Blindboy Boatclub?

  Sir Hugh Tudor, he literally just got all the Augsies and all the Black and Hands that were in Ireland, and they moved to Palestine. They went to Palestine, which was controlled by Britain at the time. It was called mandatory Palestine. And the Zionism, Zionism project had begun, where European Jewish people were to colonize Palestine. And this was enabled by the British, but the literal people that were used to do it were Black and Hands and Augsies that had been in West Cork and Kerry and Limerick. And they brought their, their collective punishment that they practiced on the Irish, they brought that and introduced it to the civilians of Palestine.

• 51:19Blindboy Boatclub?

  And that little shared history there, that shared history of, of the literal same, the same men, the same people who were shooting Irish civilians in the back, those same men got to do it in Palestine. That starts a long tradition, a long tradition of solidarity, which continues all the way along to the seventies and eighties. And Palestinian flags become a very common sight in Ireland. So Palestinian solidarity is, is, is part of Irish culture and Irish tradition and Irish history going back a hundred years. And that solidarity should be protected under the Good Friday Agreement as artistic expression

• 52:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  and not have Keir Starmer using the fucking anti-terror police on a gig. And of course, what it's all about. This is about, A, sending a message to loads of, because I bet you there's a ton of fucking artists who didn't sign that kneecap, who didn't sign the kneecap letter, because they were frightened, frightened of repercussions, I guarantee you, frightened that they'd get investigated by anti-terror police if they show solidarity with Palestine at their gigs. So it sends a clear message, don't do this. Gigs are gigs, festivals are festivals. This is not a place for protest.

• 52:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  And if you make it a place for protest, then we might call you terrorists. That's what this is. Neecap are the sacrificial lambs because they're having tons of gigs cancelled. Big gigs getting pulled all over England. And we'll have to wait and see what happens with Glastonbury. And if they do get pulled from Glastonbury, I would hope that a lot of acts would pull out in solidarity. But in a society where protest is becoming dangerous and risky, festivals and gigs are now becoming a new artistic space whereby it's liminal. It's not protest, it's art, but it's doing the job of protest. And the government are after fucking, the British government have capped this now and they're trying to make an example of kneecap. They're trying to, they're trying to, I doubt anything's even going to come of this.

• 53:27Blindboy Boatclub?

  I, I highly doubt that the anti-terror police will successfully investigate and prosecute kneecap, but I don't think that matters. I don't think it matters at all. What matters is the message that they're doing it because that sends out the message to other acts, don't even try it. And also what it does, it, it's, it stops everybody talking about genocide. It stops everybody talking about the message that kneecap put out at Coachella. That there's a genocide, that's not controversial because all the international criminal courts agree, there's a genocide, it's been enabled by Western powers and we should talk about this.

• 54:12Blindboy Boatclub?

  And now when everyone gets the focus on kneecap and how bold they're being and all of this controversy and pulled gigs, it's a big shiny colourful distraction where you think you're talking about Gaza, but you're not. Your attention is a resource.

• 54:30Blindboy Boatclub?

  Your critical thinking skills are also a resource. Your mental energy is a resource. And it's a, these are all limited resources. We only have so much attention, so much capacity for critical thinking, and so much time in the day to do it. And the ideological state apparatus, the media, want you to spend all those resources, all of those, those precious valuable resources of critical thinking and attention. They want you to spend all of that. Thinking about kneecap. Thinking about kneecap. And you think you're thinking about Gaza? You're not. There's a dog in the classroom. There's a dog in the classroom and he's wearing a school jumper. What'll we do about the dog? Oh my God, he's running around.

• 55:15Blindboy Boatclub?

  We get him outside? Keep him here? No, don't. Get him outside. There's a dog in the classroom and he's wearing a school jumper. Oh my God, this is amazing. Did you learn anything at school today? No. Why? There was a dog in the classroom and someone put a school jumper on him. The ideological state apparatus of the media are using kneecap as a dog in the classroom with a school jumper on. They're doing it during genocide class. This podcast was a bit of a rant. It was a bit of a phone call. I don't know if you can tell from my voice. I had a, a cunt of a chest infection for the past couple of days. And I'm very happy I was able to put a podcast out this week because it was getting ropey. I had a bit of a fever as well. But I'm doing okay now.

• 56:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  But the podcast was husky. It was a husky podcast. I'll catch you next week. Dog bless. Wink at a swan, rub a cat, genuflect to a worm.

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