Summer festival season officially kicked off on Friday at Wide Awake, an indie and electronic festival held in London’s Brockwell Park. Based on the crowd, here are my predictions for the items that are going to dominate the fashions on the field over the coming few months: Irish flag balaclavas, Ireland jerseys, and Palestine flags.

Maybe that had more to do with this year’s headliner, Kneecap, the bawdy rap trio from Belfast who, in recent weeks, have found themselves at the center of a political firestorm. On May 21st, Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh—who goes by the moniker Mo Chara—was charged by British police with a terror offense relating to a video from a November 2024 concert in which one of the group’s members brandishes the flag of Hezbollah. (The UK government classifies Hezbollah as a terrorist group.) Ó hAnnaidh’s charge arrived after a chaotic six weeks for Kneecap: In April, they split with their U.S. booking agent after a Coachella set where they projected graphics stating that “Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people… enabled by the U.S. government.” This, in turn, led to the band losing their U.S. visas.

The furor in the U.S. added fuel to the British political firmament’s previously established distaste for the group; in late April, videos surfaced of the band saying “The only good Tory is a dead Tory; kill your local MP” at a show in 2023, and “Up Hamas, up Hezbollah” at a show last year. Kneecap apologized to the families of murdered members of parliament Jo Cox and David Amess, and argued they “do not, and have never supported” Hamas or Hezbollah. But a wave of summer shows were canceled in response, with conservative leader Kemi Badenoch—a uniquely detestable political figure in a country that perfected the form—calling on Glastonbury to remove the band from this year’s bill. By the time Ó hAnnaidh was charged, dozens of British artists, including Pulp and Massive Attack, had thrown their weight behind Kneecap, signing a statement alleging that the band was victims of political repression and censorship.

If this all seems faintly ridiculous—that a band of baby-faced party-starters, whose music is as frequently about the joys of solvent and ketamine abuse as it is stridently political, have gotten a bunch of MPs more steamed than the fact that the UK has continued to export arms to Israel despite a ban, and that those arms have supported an offensive that’s taken the lives of some 55,000 people, a figure experts suggest is a massive undercount—well, I don’t know what to tell you. The absurd nature of the controversy around Kneecap wasn’t lost on the band, of course. When they took the stage on Friday night—Mo Chara and Móglaí Bap, aka Naoise Ó Cairealláin, in their tracksuits, DJ Próvaí (JJ Ó Dochartaigh) in his flag balaclava—Mo Chara kept returning to one phrase, delivered with winking disbelief: “Has anybody been reading the news lately?”