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You’d be hard pressed to find someone in the UK who hasn’t heard of Kneecap. Last year it was impossible to watch the news without the Irish rap band making an appearance.

Whether it was Mo Chara being dragged to Westminster Magistrates’ Court on charges of “displaying a flag in support of Hezbollah, a proscribed organisation” (a case later dismissed as unlawful, while Kneecap have said they “do not, and have never, supported Hamas or Hezbollah”), or the band’s Glastonbury gig which was so busy that the festival had to close the stage, 2025 will forever be remembered as Kneecap Summer.

But how many of us had our interest piqued enough to go and give their music a listen? I did, and let me tell you, I couldn’t believe my ears. This is what we’ve all lost our heads over? This is… well, utter rubbish.

An unholy three-way marriage of hip-hop, EDM and what to me sounds like parody music à la The Lonely Island or The Midnight Beast, Kneecap’s music is utterly out of step with the politically switched-on, intellectual, informed young lads I’d come to know through headlines. This isn’t the inspired, complex protest music I’d expected; it’s lager-lout chanting to half-baked beats. Surely this isn’t the music all the politicians have got their knickers in a twist over? It’s barely listenable!

Take “Get Your Brits Out”, a bouncy dance number that samples the BBC News theme tune and is illustrated with a cartoon of the late Queen Elizabeth II wearing nothing but her jewels and a bra (I won’t insult your intelligence by explaining the pun). Now, I’m far from insulted by this attack on the British – I just wish the song itself was as strong as the staunch republican message Kneecap stand by. And let’s not get into the absurdity of “Rhinoceros Ket”.

I didn’t, therefore, have high hopes for their third album, Fenian, which is released today and has received rapturous reviews from various music publications. And I was in fact lulled into a false sense of hope by the opening four tracks. “Smugglers & Scholars” is a dark, swaggering, foreboding song, drawing a line between Ireland’s history of rebellion and Chara’s recent brushes with the law, while “Palestine” (which features Ramallah-based artist Fawzi, who raps in Arabic) is an urgent, angry polemic. “Occupied Six” and “Cocaine Hill” are almost brilliant. Have Kneecap finally become the band the headlines advertise?

Not quite. The juvenile “your mum” jokes and primitive production are all still there on Fenian. The title track reverts to their old gimmick of turning choruses into football chants, ready for the crowd (who may or may not engage seriously with the band’s political message) to shout along to at their raucous live gigs. “An Ra” is a toothless satire of British culture, taking aim at such stereotypes as our love for fish and chips and, curiously, Ant and Dec. Given how far Kneecap are willing to take their protest, calling Keir Starmer “Netanyahu’s bitch” on single “Liars Tale” seems particularly childish.

When I told my partner I was writing about how much I didn’t like Kneecap‘s music, he told me I was “showing my age”. And as rude as that sounds, perhaps he’s right. The audience the band are gathering aren’t bothered by the fact that their music sounds like a drum machine being thrown down the stairs; they think lyrics about getting “on the bag” and calling people C-words are funny and that old dullards like me simply don’t “get it”.

But the message of Palestinian, Irish and even Cuban independence is a grown-up, serious one and deserves to be listened to. We live in a world where our pop stars are terrified to say anything out of step lest they be cancelled – for their fearlessness in that respect alone, Kneecap are the most important act of the decade. What a shame the music doesn’t live up to their infamy.

‘Fenian‘ is out now

O aquecimento de Anthony Joshua antes da luta contra Tyson Fury pode ser um erro grave, alerta Shane McGuigan.

Joshua está prestes a boxear seu grande rival Fury ainda este ano, mas primeiro terá uma disputa de preparação contra Kristian Prenga em 25 de julho.

Joshua está retornando ao boxe após a provação de um trágico acidente de carro no qual dois de seus amigos morreram.

Ele usará este próximo campo de treinamento e lutará com Prenga para se livrar de qualquer ferrugem do ringue e ter certeza de que está atirando em todos os cilindros para a luta Fury.

Mas McGuigan, um dos melhores treinadores do Reino Unido, considera isso um erro.

“Os campos de treinamento são lugares solitários. O boxe é um jogo antigo e difícil e se você não precisa dele por dinheiro e está fazendo isso por diversão, e a diversão do esporte talvez não esteja exatamente onde estava.

“Acho que você precisa de seus dentes para enfrentar um grande desafio e isso sempre teria sido uma luta de Tyson Fury”, disse McGuigan. Esportes celestes.

“Também acho que ele é um lutador confiante, por isso precisa daquela luta further de antemão.”

Mas McGuigan refletiu: “É ele passando por outro campo de treinamento sem as pessoas que costumavam estar em seu campo de treinamento. Será uma experiência horrível.

“Não conheço AJ como pessoa, então não sei o quanto isso o afetou, mas imagino que tenha sido um grande golpe emocional para ele, passar por um campo de treinamento sem seus amigos e estar envolvido apenas em testemunhar algo tão horrível.

“Acho que para mudar essa experiência você quer uma grande luta e isso é Tyson Fury. Fazer isso apenas para seguir em frente, para conseguir uma vitória, para entrar em outra grande luta, é cansativo e acho que você tem que pegar o touro pelos chifres.

“Isso vai fazer [him] um lutador melhor? Não, acho que não. Isso vai fazer alguma coisa por ele? Na verdade. Isso apenas fará com que ele seja exposto a esse estímulo de treinamento antes do grande. Mas na verdade isso pode mostrar muitas falhas no que realmente está acontecendo.”

Fury potencialmente fazer uma luta provisória também pode ser um risco, com o tão esperado confronto com AJ finalmente acenando para ele.

“Acho que ele faz isso apenas para acabar com eles. Mais uma vez, não conheço Tyson Fury pessoalmente, mas parece que sim”, disse McGuigan.

Fury e AJ estiveram igualmente perto de lutar antes, apenas para Joshua perder para Oleksandr Usyk em 2021, anulando o que teria sido então uma luta indiscutível pelo título mundial com Fury.

McGuigan observou: “Se Tyson Fury estivesse no lugar de Joshua, acho que ele aceitaria a luta imediatamente e não a luta de aquecimento. Porque acho que ele sabe desde a primeira vez que foi combinado, tudo foi combinado, tudo estava na mesa e eles levaram aquela luta further com Usyk.

“Eles perderam e seriam estúpidos se perdessem novamente”, acrescentou. “Tudo pode acontecer no boxe profissional. Mais lesões, choques de cabeça, todas as outras coisas que acontecem. Acho que eles deveriam ter aceitado.”

Os jogos mentais pré-luta também podem se tornar um problema. Ainda não foi decidido quem fará a caminhada primeiro e segundo, quem será o lado A ou o lado B.

“No closing das contas, são apenas egos. Acho que a razão pela qual eles estão brigando é por causa dos egos. Isso é realmente o que é”, disse McGuigan.

“Sim, eles são lutadores e querem dar entretenimento, mas acho que tem mais a ver com manter sua relevância e se manter no centro das atenções nesse sentido como atleta.

“Eles sabem que não são tão bons quanto antes.

“Realmente não faz a menor diferença quem está andando primeiro no ringue, quem está do lado esquerdo do pôster”, concluiu McGuigan.

“Tudo se resume ao que vai acontecer nos 36 minutos, quando eles passarem pelas cordas e é nisso que eles realmente deveriam se concentrar.

Assistir Chris Billam-Smith x Ryan Rozicki ao vivo Esportes celestes no sábado, 6 de junho

Backstage at Amsterdam’s grand Royal Theatre Carré, hands clasped, dress glam black, hair fire-orange, jewellery a-sparkle, Tori Amos is talking me through her survival routines.

Firstly, on flights. “Especially in the States”, the American singer-songwriter-pianist “really downplays” her 35-year career, 12 million album sales and witchy-seer-poetess charisma. She does that by disguising in “baseball cap and Lululemon. You’re in first-class, and some wealthy guy from the Hamptons is sitting next to me going, ‘So, what do you do?’ I say something like, ‘Well, I’m a very religious, well-looked-after housewife.’ No more chat!” she beams, clapping her hands together. “And then if they ask me my name, I’ll say Sally.”

Secondly, on tour. “My main meal is done [at this point in the day], and I won’t properly eat again until after the show. I’ll have a little broth and maybe a couple pieces of protein. I keep it light, because the show is so demanding,” she says as we talk 17 days and 10 concerts into a tour – her biggest in Europe in a decade – that stretches through America and most of summer.

This one-time child prodigy musician who “turned pro at 13” in the hotel piano bars of Washington DC, and who playfully prefers to couch her age as “59-plus-three”, admits that “it was easier to recover the muscles and everything 20 years ago. People ask me, ‘Do you do yoga?’ And I’m like, ‘Yes, I lift my Bordeaux wine glass to my lips after a long show.’”

Mindfully?

“Mindfully!” she exclaims, laughing. “So, yeah, I carry a cellar on the road. But I’d like to think it’s civilised.”

As we speak on a sunny Saturday, the release of Amos’s new album, her 18th, is still a week away. At this point in the tour she’s only performing the two songs that have been trailed as singles from In Times of Dragons. That’s because “I want the record to be heard as it was done. And it’s a journey record. It’s a narrative.” And what a narrative. The menagerie of cute toy dragons – gifts from her typically adoring fans – clustered on a dressing table is as light as the world of In Times of Dragons gets.

Amos may have lived in the UK for more than half her life, the last quarter-century-plus in Cornwall with her British sound-engineer husband, but over this searing song-cycle she turns her withering, penetrative gaze on her homeland. This, though, is no route-one skewering of the America of Trump, broligarchs and Project 2025.

Her takedown is allegorical and phantasmagorical, the songs’ interconnected lyrics telling the fable of a fictionalised Amos fleeing a billionaire husband. He’s the spouse she calls Lizard Demon King, and he’s a member of a shadowy cabal of tyrannical puppeteers out to replace democracy with dictatorship. This “Tori” must battle across the United States, meeting characters such as the lesbian biker gang portrayed in “Gasoline Girls”, gradually transforming herself into the scaly, fire-breathing creature demanded by this fight for the soul of America. Got all that?

As the North Carolina-born Amos announces, in that singular voice, in the first lines on the album’s Southern Gothic opener “Shush”: “Southern Girls know what it means / when the patriarchy menacingly says / ‘You shush yourself down now’ / ‘You put a finger to those beautiful lips’ / ‘We both know what they’re good for, don’t we?’”

Here be dragons, then. And here be a thrilling, bold and bonkers concept album that will delight her ardent fanbase and that doesn’t stint on the fierce, charged melodies that helped make Amos’s name with 1992’s landmark album Little Earthquakes.

The realisation that she needed to grasp the thistle of what she believes is an existential threat to the fabric of America in this, the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, came early last year. Amos was at her other home, in Florida, watching the presidential swearing-in of the state’s most (in)famous resident.

“I tried to get my head around: how am I going to document this time? I’m not a political journalist. And nobody likes a musician-preacher, unless you have a particular skillset for that, unless you’re a real protest singer-songwriter. That isn’t my style. Usually, mine is to tell a story with character and to get you emotionally involved, more than just politically involved.”

Her 25-year-old daughter, too, was in her ear. Tash, who’s co-written three songs on the album, is finishing her legal studies in DC and about to join a “progressive” District Attorney’s office (“I’d rather not say the city”). She’s “smitten”, says her mum, with criminal law. “She was shaking me awake and saying, ‘You cannot sleep through this. And you can’t stand on the sidelines, Mom, not on this one. Let’s be honest’ – and we agreed on this! – ‘nobody needed you during the Obama years. You still made records. Nobody needed ’em. Now, we need it.’”

Duly fired-up, Amos decided she had to make her lyrical response personal.

“I had to be as close to my real life as I could,” says this Methodist preacher’s daughter, admitting that “there is a side to me that, in the 90s, could have veered a different path after the success of some of the records, and married one of those [rich] guys. Some of them are charming – on the outside. It’s not like I had to go down the rock ‘n’ roll roadie route. That wasn’t, Craig,” she adds, fixing me with a leading look, “the only avenue open to me at the time.”

Equally, she insists that the characters she’s created are “all real. They’re based on different people. The Lizard Demon King is an amalgamation of a few very powerful men behind the scenes.”

One of those appears to be PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel. In “Shush” she quotes a line he wrote in a 2009 essay: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

“He and several others, yeah,” Amos replies. “I don’t name ’em. You did. OK? I never name them.”

Still, there is a rare moment of ripped-from-the-headlines directness in charged piano ballad “Ode to Minnesota”, in which she calls out the activities of the federal agents who shot and killed two protestors in Minneapolis earlier this year (“ICE breathes in fire’s wind”).

“Yes,” she agrees. “It was a sea change. At the time, I was working on a song called ‘Denmark’. And I got a message, a picture from the muses,” she says of the figures she sincerely believes shadow and inspire her. “They’re going, ‘You’re being distracted. Look at ICE. Look at Minnesota. This is what you need to look at.’ And that turned out to be true.”

More broadly, she views the actions of those federally mandated boot-boys as symptomatic of Trump’s America. “Seeing this cruelty – that’s the thing that stays with me. It’s not just the authoritarianism, but the tyrannical side that seems to have an appetite for cruelty and pain. There’s a sadistic element. That’s what started to drive the writing, that I put all in his character, the man that I chose to be with.”

The man real-life Tori Amos actually chose to be with, Mark Hawley, is chill about all this dark fantasising. He has to be, not least as her “rock ‘n’ roll roadie” is her live sound engineer, so he’s experiencing these new songs every night on tour.

A few hours later in the 1,600-capacity Royal Theater Carré, Hawley’s berth at the mixing desk is right beneath my seat. I watch him artfully slide the sliders and twiddle the knobs as Amos – seated, side-saddle, between her trusty Bösendorfer piano and a Yamaha Montage keyboard, and backed by three sister-siren backing singers, a drummer and a multi-instrumentalist bassist – conjures 110 magical minutes of jazz-pop melodrama. The sell-out crowd inhale this in hushed reverence. Then, the minute the main set ends, hordes of the hitherto scrupulously seated Amsterdammers rush to the lip of the stage to bend the knee before their queen’s encore.

Before seeing that, though, I’d wondered: outside of performing for her ticket-buying people, how much shame or embarrassment does Tori Amos currently feel as a liberal American out in the world?

“It depends on the room I’m in,” she replies. “The one thing that the Brits are great at is self-deprecation. And having been here [so long], I’ve watched you all and learned that sometimes that alleviates a tone. Sometimes I just look and say, ‘I have to apologise before you hear my accent…’”

Amos lowers her eyes, as if in embarrassed confessional. “I’m like, ‘I got nothing to do with it…’” Luckily, as devastating, fire-breathing correctives go, In Times of Dragons does all the talking.

‘In Times of Dragons’ is out now

Like many dancers, Strictly’s Johannes Radebe is a guilty smoker. In the absence of an actual cigarette, his right hand arcs and flicks through the air as he talks. He inhales phantom smoke like a Golden Age Hollywood diva: an effect enhanced by the long, shiny, red nails he wears every day while turning in an electrifying performance as drag queen Lola in the musical Kinky Boots on the West End. 

“I have started to feel incomplete without them, oh my gosh!” he laughs, glancing down to admire his scarlet daggers. They’re so extravagantly impractical that I wonder if he can use them as an excuse to dodge daily chores, but he shakes his head in shock at the suggestion.

“Oh, no. I was down on my hands and knees cleaning my floors yesterday. I knew people would be coming back to my place after [the Olivier Awards ceremony] and I said to myself, ‘Johannes, you are a gay man. You cannot be caught by all these theatre people – and a stylist! – with dirty floors.’”

The combination of dramatic charisma and hard-grafting generosity is what has made the 6ft 2in South African one of Strictly’s best-loved professional dancers. As a young man growing up in the township of Zamdela, he reminds me, he put food on his family table with a range of menial jobs including slogging it out with a sponge at the car wash. So he’d earned the right to be lifted and twirled aloft like a glitter ball by Bake Off-winning dance partner John Whaite in Strictly’s first all-male couple pairing in 2021. 

“Being lifted?” he sighs today. “Ohhh, it unlocked parts of me that I did not know were there and did not know needed to be unlocked.”

Today, he’s teamed his manicure with a simple plaid shirt for a video chat that starts cheery, but will bring us both to tears as he describes his journey from the homophobic bullying – the sudden punches and shouts of “Sissy boy” – of his “sad, stifling” school days to sequined stardom.

Radebe was born in the northern South African city of Sasolburg, in April 1987. Times were tough for Radebe’s parents. His mother separated from his father (who worked for Coca Cola) when he and his sister were children and they moved in with his maternal aunt – the woman who became the most passionate supporter of his dancing career, which began at the age of seven.

“But my love of drag came before my love of dancing,” he explains. “It came from watching my mum putting on her lipstick. She had one lipstick that she mixed with Vaseline to make it last longer… I admired the precision as she did it. She looked like a beauty queen.”

While lipstick transformed his mother into that “beauty queen” he mentions, alcohol transformed his father into “an ugly, violent man”. “I loathed my father and I hated alcohol for a long time. My dad was quite blatant about the way he wanted my mum gone when their marriage ended. I hated the way he could make her cry because my mum is the love of my life.”

Her love and affirmation, he explains, “is what helped me push away the suicidal thoughts I grappled with”. The bullying caused him to consider suicide? “Yes.” He recalls how his mother feared for him after a gay friend left the township for Johannesburg. “We heard stories that he was working as a prostitute. He was subjected to anything.” When Radebe’s “dear, beautiful” friend eventually came home, they were HIV positive and “very ill”. Radebe shakes his head. “She had changed her name to a woman’s name. I remember my mum turning around and saying to me, ‘I hope you never come home like that.’ It was a shock to me. I thought her love was unconditional.”

His mother’s reaction to his friend caused Radebe to “battle” with a powerful yearning to express his feminine side. Even after moving away from home at 13 to live with a dance coaching couple in Gauteng province, he felt conflicted over his love of sparkles. “I felt it as I was winning competitions, while I was working on cruise ships and even into my career on Strictly.” He began his TV journey on the South African Strictly in 2014, before joining the British show in 2018.

But he was able to address the issue with his mother after being paired with John Whaite in the dance contest. “I flew back home immediately after the finale” – in which he and Whaite came second to actress Rose Ayling-Ellis and Giovanni Pernice – “and I got to watch it with my whole family on Christmas Day because the show airs a week later there.” How did that go? “I cannot tell you how much joy!” He says. “There were tears, apologies, affirmations. Even my uncle said, ‘You guys look so beautiful together.’”

Choreographing dances with Whaite caused Radebe some sleepless nights. “I’m such a late bloomer,” he admits. “I struggled with creating dances for two men in the beginning. It was Shirley Ballas who pulled me aside. She said, ‘You need to entwine the movement. Stop dancing side by side…’” Put some more romance in it? “Yes. I didn’t sleep at all that night.”

He was facing up to his years of “shying away from the world, hiding who I am, resisting the gaze of people who might judge me”. He realised this pairing would require him to “change all my methods, because I have always danced with women. Women are my people. I didn’t know how to handle a man.”

When he realised he wanted Whaite to lift him, he approached the conversation with trepidation. “I said, ‘I want to do something beautiful here. I want you to lift me but I don’t want to hurt you.’” But in Whaite’s arms, he was giddy to find his muscular form “transformed into a feather. He made me fly. I have lifted so many women and so I know the care that goes into looking after and celebrating another person’s body that way. It is such a vulnerable place to be in and yet I had never felt so safe.”

Tears well up in his eyes. “I have always been the matriarch, the provider, the one with the responsibility.” He recalls all the years he “felt the responsibility, as a boy, to look after my mother and sister. It was not my responsibility, because I was a child. But I forced myself because otherwise we would have had nothing to eat.”

But when Whaite picked him up, all that weight fell away. “In all my years of dancing, it was the first time I had been looked after that way. I said, ‘Oh my gosh, John, I feel so safe in your arms,’ and he said, ‘You should’.”

In later interviews, Whaite was quoted as saying he “fell in love” with Johannes during their time on the show. But Radebe is annoyed at how the statement was taken out of context. “It was not tasteful, how John was misinterpreted on that,” he says. “John had a partner who was a big part of our journey, who was bringing in our lunches to the rehearsal studio. So I was sad at how that got reframed by the media.” But he does say: “I had never formed such a good friendship so fast, after we clashed in the beginning. It was wonderful. Wherever you are, John my love, I love you!”

While Whaite is married, Radebe remains single and brushes off my suggestion that he seems to be in the right state of mind to find love himself. “I live at the Coliseum while I’m in Kinky Boots,” he shrugs. “And when that finishes, Strictly will come around again, so I think I’m just too busy…”

Radebe is proud of helping change the culture with their on-screen partnership. “I get letters from children who loved watching us,” he says. He’s aware homophobia is still present in the UK (where he was recently granted the “glitterball of citizenship”).

“I know that for sure, it exists. But I also know I can walk into a coffee shop in all sorts of small towns, and find I get breakfast for free because somebody just loves watching me on Strictly and wants to do something wonderful for me.

“And how beautiful is that? I never feel lost in this country.”

Back in South Africa, he also feels attitudes are changing. “When I go home, I visit the family that took me in, and [the man who bullied him most severely when they were boys] still lives down the road with his mother, so I often bump into him.” Have you talked to him about how he made you feel? “Yes, I have. We confronted everything. He said, ‘I just wanted to say I’m sorry,’ and I said, ‘No, no, no, you don’t know the half of it, do you want to know the truth or do you want to leave it at that? Because honey, I’ve moved on and I don’t need the apology.’”

But to his credit, his former bully did want the truth. So the pair sat down together and talked it through. “We played some music. We had a long conversation. He has kids now and I think the thought of anyone making his kids feel how I felt helped change his views…” As they parted, Radebe gave him a copy of his best-selling 2023 autobiography, JoJo: Finally Home.

But today he breaks down in tears as he admits it wasn’t until he took the role of Lola in Kinky Boots that he realised he was truly loved and accepted for who he is. He knew he’d have to work on his singing to hold his own with X Factor-winning co-star Matt Cardle. And he decided to “tone down” his dancing to allow the rest of the drag queens in the cast to shine. “But when I come out on stage and the crowd applauds me in my red dress, when they accept me with all my imperfections?” He wipes away tears. “It feels so wonderful.”

He admits he was worried about how his mother would react to the part. “But now I FaceTime her while I’m putting on my Lola make up and she tells me I look beautiful.” He says that they spoke about her reaction to his trans teenage friend and he realised her disapproval came from a place of fear for him. “There were rumours that my friend took his own life.” And she just didn’t want that for you? “No. She wanted to protect her son.”

Radebe wishes his father were still alive to see the show. “Lola gets to tell her father she loves him. I would absolutely love to have a conversation with my dad about everything. I wish I could say I am sorry, because now I’m a man, and I understand him. Because of him, I do know what it feels like to feel a father’s love.”

In Kinky Boots, Lola’s homophobic father is dying of lung cancer. It allows her to quip camply that “the fags got him in the end”. Radebe winces when I ask if he has plans to quit smoking. “I did try vaping,” he says. “But it’s not as elegant and I dropped it in a day.” He shrugs. “But I have decided I will go to a clinic once Kinky Boots is finished.”

He smiles and takes one last lingering faux drag. “It’s bad for me, isn’t it? I deserve to treat myself better.”

‘Kinky Boots’ is at the London Coliseum until 11 July (londoncoliseum.org)

For confidential support, Samaritans are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Call for free on 116 123 or visit samaritans.org