MUSIC INTERVIEW: ENTER SHIKARI

New Album, New Approach, Same Passion & Aggression from the Pride of St. Albans

By: Team Buzzine

January 27, 2012

With their third album, A Flash Flood of Colour, London-based genre-skipping multi-hyphenates Enter Shikari are finally poised to take the leap from musical cult favorites to stadium-smashing superstars in the US. To this point, their wild cross-pollination of rock, rap, hardcore, and electronic musical elements have made them both massively distinctive and monstrously hard to promote across these united states of American media and consciousness.

But a return to the grassroots approach that has worked so well for the boys in almost every other major market around the world has started to pay dividends, and after two summers of expanding minds on the Warped Tour, all is primed for the new album, not least a new business partner in the form of LA-based independent legends in their own right, Hopeless Records. Enter Shikari’s Rou Reynolds and Rob Rolfe sat down with Buzzine’s Stefan Goldby at the conclusion of that last Warped Tour trek to look forward to 2012 and a new assault on the world’s musical senses and sensibility…

Stefan Goldby: First we take St. Albans, then we take the world. Can you talk a little bit just about the beginnings of the band? I know it’s lost back in the mists of time at this point, but enquiring minds still want to know…

Rob Rolfe: We first knew each other in primary school – me, Rou, and Chris (Batten) the bassist, and we individually picked up our own instruments. And then, when we were about 12, we just decided to start playing together to see what we could do. We played a lot of covers, like Beatles covers, Stereophonics, Oasis – those kinds of things. And then when we were 16 or 17, I was at a different secondary school and met Rory (Clewlow), who we recruited in to play guitar so that Rou could focus more on electronics and singing. Then we became Enter Shikari. So we’re all St. Albans, born and bred lads. All just grown up together, and that’s basically how we started.

SG: The first two records dropped in 2007 and 2009, but you didn’t do it traditionally. You didn’t follow the ‘album with a couple of singles coming off of it’ path, instead you created a constant stream of music from the beginning. Was that a calculated and deliberate plan for a changing world, or was that just organic to the way the band developed?

Rou Reynolds: I think, as a band, we kind of write anywhere, anytime. So even after an album campaign or whatever, we’re still sort of making music, and as soon as we record a track, we’re also buzzing and just want to get out there as soon as possible. So I guess we’re quite lucky with having our own label as well: we can just do what we want and release a tune here and there. It doesn’t have to follow-up from anything; it can just be on itself.

SG: With a little bit of hindsight, how do you think the band that’s playing here today is different from the one that started out?

Reynolds: We recently just released a DVD and we had to trawl through so much footage from years and years ago – some really embarrassing, incriminating footage.

Rolfe: Bad haircuts… [Laughs] Interesting, er… stage presence, if you call it like that…

Reynolds: So we’ve come a long way, yeah. But that was it – just going up and down the country playing every show we could get, and just slowly got better, I guess.

Rolfe: We’ve slowly become somehow more professional, yet we always manage to have slightly less profession than anyone else on the touring scene. We managed to do it somehow, just to maybe keep our feet on the ground or whatever you want to call it… or maybe we’re just useless and unprofessional. [Laughs]

No, we’ve obviously matured as people and as musicians and as songwriters, and I think growing up together and progressing and maturing together has really sort of molded the shape that Enter Shikari has now become, as opposed to four people growing up separately and then suddenly making music together. We really know the ins and outs of each other and what works, and I think that has helped us create our final sound of what we are now. Of course, we’re always changing, so the next album will be different and the next album will be different to that, and so we’ll see where we go.

SG: If you’re talking about maturity and you’re talking about creation, it’s definitely a sign of maturity that you go to Bangkok for work. [Laughs] There’s a certain kind of dedication that’s required of that move. Or at least to be able to go there and actually be able to focus and actually do some work! You spent last May and June in Bangkok recording this new record. First of all, why there?

Reynolds: We were sitting in our studio on Old Street [in London] – the studio we were renting with our producer – and he basically just started saying, “ I know this guy out in Thailand just built this studio; he’s trying to get people over there, trying to get his business moving…” and so we started joking around… Every day we’d come in on the Tube in the horrible middle of London and think, “Oh, but don’t worry, next week we’ll be off to Thailand,” and it was just this running joke. And then he started saying, “Seriously… this space is free… he’ll give us a really good deal, blah blah blah,” and we started actually thinking about it properly, and then we were just like, “Well let’s just do it.”

Rolfe: F*** it, yeah: It’s just such an opportunity. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing to go record out in this fantastic studio in paradise... It was absolutely away from all distractions, it was literally like four walls in a little compound in the middle of the jungle, about an hour and a half south of Bangkok. It was just an ideal place to focus on the music and on the writing and on getting an awesome-sounding album.

SG: Is there one day from the recordings that stands out more in your mind than the others?

Rolfe: Not really. All the days were similar. We’d wake up, rub our eyes, get some breakfast, and then just head straight into the studio. We’d maybe have a bit of a swim to freshen yourself up, and then head straight into the studio. The thing is, there was nothing else to do, other than eat, sleep, and record music. So all my memories of it are the entire time as a whole, as opposed to one day or another.

SG: I’m in a slightly weird spot, because we are talking before the album has been sent to anybody yet. So you know what it is; I have no real clue, beyond a track here or there… always an interesting time to talk to a band. What can I expect from this album? How is it different?

Reynolds: I think, with every record, we’ve gained more confidence to really rake in every corner of our musical influence spectrum and not be afraid to just experiment with every sound that influences us. So again, this is just a step in that direction. It’s just mental. It contains every little bit of music that we enjoy.

Rolfe: I hate to sound cheesy, but expect the unexpected. [Laughs]

SG: You’ve always been on your own label in the UK. You had pretty much free reign. That wasn’t the case in America. You originally decided you needed a major label for support – perhaps because of the size of the country - it’s a big old place, needs massive tour support, whatever your thinking was. You’re going to go back to the independent route with this new record in partnership with Hopeless Records, right? So what do you think you learned from your early experiences in the US…?

Rolfe: Don’t sign to a major!

Reynolds: We learned what we already knew, really. Not that we grew up as a really DIY, punk, screw-all-the-suits and all that stuff… we were never really like that; we just did it because that’s the way we’d always done things. It seemed logical to us. And then we signed to a major because America is just too big. We can’t do it the same way we did it back in Europe. And what’s happened is we’ve ended up doing it the same way we did in Europe – not out of choice; it’s just grown organically because the label didn’t do anything for us whatsoever. They hardly even released the actual record as a physical thing, so we didn’t really gain anything from it.

Rolfe: If anything, they just held us back, because they wouldn’t release our music, they wouldn’t let us sell it at our own shows or anything like that. We’ve been out here for five years, desperately trying to push it and push it and push it, and like Rou says, it’s come to the point where we never thought we could do what we did in the UK, but it’s exactly what we have done, just because we had no other choice. But finally now it’s really been picking up, really growing from real-life stuff as opposed to just being shoved down people’s throats by the major record label.

I think, to be honest, it’s a better way to do it, and if anything, I’m quite glad that they didn’t just put us through the machine and churn us out like every other big pop artist that they have whatever, because otherwise we wouldn’t seem as real or as genuine a band as we really are. I think it’s been a lot more organic this way, and it just feels like we’ve done the right thing.

SG: Your music is so hard to pigeonhole, so you could always see where a major label was going to struggle with a traditional approach…

Rolfe: For a long time, when we first talked about coming over to America, it really seemed like things were gonna happen because we’ve got a major label – brilliant, they’re backing us, and we’re gonna get a lot of press, a lot of big support. Then we got this really big booking agent booking us, and “Wicked, we’re gonna get some great support slots and we’ll get some great shows…” And then it ended up that the label did f***-all for us, and the guy booking us really didn’t understand what we were, so he didn’t know what to do with us, and he put us on completely the wrong shows, and it actually went completely the opposite way and took so long to get off the ground.

When we went to SXSW, we thought the whole point of it was that everyone from the music industry is there, and there’s loads of press there to be got at, and you literally fly all that way for just a couple of shows, then you go back just because from there it’s meant to spread out… But it seems like all we got from that was playing in front of a couple hundred kids. There was no press for us, and we were just struggling. And our tour manager, Keith [Reynolds], went down and was actually going around to people trying to get press himself, because our label didn’t do anything about it. Trying to get anything out of them has been like bashing our heads up against a brick wall; it’s been so difficult. Like trying to squeeze blood out of a stone. But we’ve moved on; we’ve learned a lot from it, and we’re in a much better position now than we were, and we’re happy about it.

SG: Nice job finding the positive in all of this… and actually, we just talked to Pendulum about something loosely related to all that a couple of months ago: They said they found it really useful to yo-yo between playing for a crowd that’s yours before you even hit the stage, but then going back to having to win people over every night again. Is there a silver lining in that it does keep you sharp, keep you hungry, keep you wanting to keep growing?

Rolfe: It definitely helps to keep our feet on the ground; it definitely keeps us level headed. It lets you know you’re not a god, you’re not untouchable; you’re just the same as everyone else. You go somewhere else and no one knows of you; you play in front of literally 30 people, whereas back in the UK you were playing in front of 3,000 people. It’s good to keep up knowing that you have to keep working at it and keep pushing it. You don’t want to get complacent about it. We don’t want to go, “It’s already there, we’ve got fans; we don’t need to work to get ‘em because they’ll follow us whatever we do.” It really brings you back down to Earth and keeps you solid and your feet on the ground.

SG: Your live show has been a huge part of Enter Shikari from the beginning. One of the hardest things with a live show is to actually capture it: So when it came to putting out that recent Live From Planet Earth DVD, how close do you think that comes to showcasing the intensity of being there?

Rolfe: Obviously you can never really capture the buzz and the feeling of the night, let alone the sound is not going to be as good, but I guess that’s why we put so much footage on the DVD - because we wanted people to see what we’re like in front of the big crowd and the little crowd, and you can get as good as any idea of what it was actually like on the night. But at the end of the day, you’ll never be like actually being there, I think.

SG: Talking of being there… You just have spent a second summer here in America on the Warped Tour. What is it that makes the Warped Tour different from all the other things you get to do?

Reynolds: We have nothing like this back in Europe. Each country has its weekend festival where it plays maybe two or three places, so this is very different because you’re like a circus touring around somewhere, getting to know all the other bands you’re playing with. Eight weeks on tour is a long time.

SG: Tell me about the best night you’ve had on stage so far.

Rolfe: I think the audience is a massive factor. No matter if it’s a huge audience or if there’s ten people there, if they’re really up for it and they’re waiting to have a good time and know that they’re gonna have a good time, then we absolutely feed off of it, and we end up having a great time. We’ve played gigs where the sound is shocking. Literally a PA in a room with 300 kids, the PA is about that big; all we get through it is the vocals and the electronics – nothing else was miked up, yet it was one of the best gigs that we’ve ever had… The particular one I’m thinking of was in Garfield, New Jersey, and it was so hot, so sweaty – there weren’t any lights. It was just the town hall or something; it was just the normal lamps on. And there were three fans in the room; two of them didn’t work, so there was no air circulating. But it was the most fun gig we’ve ever had. We all ended up just in our boxers, sweating our tits off, kids stage-diving, all the crowd going mental… It was just so much of a buzz and so much fun, that it just made a killer show for us.

Reynolds: The thing is, we don’t really need anything. For us, a stage and PA, and hopefully some people to turn up.

SG: I feel bad that we dwelled a bit on your false starts in America instead of the music and the great experience that goes along with it, so let me try to balance that out and end the day on an up-note. You guys have had a pretty incredible run around the globe the last few years: What has been the single best shining rock-star moment?

Reynolds: The first one that always comes to mind for me is when we played Reading and Leeds Festival Main Stage, and we did “Juggernauts,” and the amount of people crowd-surfing was ridiculous. First of all, we were playing to 50,000 people, and there’s loads of footage on it on YouTube. It’s just such a crazy sight. Just to be playing the main stage was crazy enough, but then to be doing that, and as far as I know, that was the world record for crowd surfing. Security down at the front was just calling in more and more security, and there were just literally hundreds running in trying to catch all the kids coming in over the barrier.

Rolfe: They must have heard of us, because I swear someone blew a whistle and then suddenly 50 more guys in yellow shirts come running up.

Reynolds: And there were so many kids that came over the barrier, and of course all the security were just helping them over, and there was no one leading them out. So then in front of the barrier, between the barrier and the stage, there was a little mosh pit of kids that just didn’t go anywhere. It was crazy. [Laughs]

Rolfe: Yeah, that was pretty wild. The one time that I really said to myself, “God, music has been good to us,” I think was when we were recording in Thailand, and I was lying in the pool, and I lie there with an ice cold beer in my hand, the sun shining…I was making some awesome music. I was just lying there thinking, “F***: The music industry has been good to us.” We are lucky. We count our blessings every day. [Laughs]

SG: Finally, just because I’ve seen and heard so many good people make such an ass of themselves trying to do this, I’d love to see you try. How would you describe the music of Enter Shikari?

Reynolds: Generally, we just don’t, and we try to encourage people not to. And that goes with music in general. We’ve never been fans of genres really, but the only limits we set on ourselves is, it has to be passionate and aggressive, and that’s it.

Enter Shikari’s fantastic new album, ‘A Flash Flood of Colour,’ is out now via Hopeless Records.