The energetic, almost riotous gigs of Enter Shikari are one of the band’s most defining features, yet when speaking with Rob Rolfe, the drummer of Enter Shikari, it seems it’s just all in a days work for the four-piece band from St.Albans.“They’re always good fun – we basically go out on stage and aim to have fun and we find that if we’re enjoying it the audience enjoys it as well. We go out, play our songs and just rock out and have a good time.
2012 has been a spectacular year for Enter Shikari. The four-piece band from St. Albans have been on a constant tour since their recent album peaked at number four in the UK album charts in January. They have also collected Kerrang!’s ‘Best Live Band’ award, AIM Independent Music Awards’ ‘Album of the Year’ accolade and were voted the best act at the Leeds and Reading Festivals by NME readers all in the space of one summer. Vocalist Roughton ‘Rou’ Reynolds also was awarded ‘Hero of the Year’ by Kerrang! as Rob jokes, “I don’t know exactly quite how he is a hero but we’ve all had a good laugh about it!”
Rob admits that the latest album ‘A Flash Flood of Colour’ is “very difficult to describe”. Fans of the band have always struggled to define a genre for their music and it seems Enter Shikari themselves don’t have a title for what they produce. “It’s kind of all over the place! It’s rock-based music with a lot of dance influence. I guess you’ve got to approach it with an open mind; it’s very diverse with lots of different influences in it. It can be quite passionate and aggressive at times and other times it can be very melodic and subtle and soft.”
I asked Rob about the band’s dynamic considering it’s been almost ten years since the band’s formation. “We’re all obviously ten years older now than when we first started as Enter Shikari and we’ve all matured a lot…well…‘a lot’, I don’t know, maybe we haven’t matured at all, just got older, certainly. I think we’re still as close as we ever have been, we were friends before we got into the band which really helped us, we weren’t just stuck together like a lot of bands were which is where a lot of the tension comes from, because we’ve grown up together we sort of know each others boundaries and know how to work best with each other.”
Speaking with Rob amidst a tour that has seen Enter Shikari’s visit over 20 countries and which isn’t set to end until January 2013, Rolfe stated the band didn’t get tired of the travelling involved: “I’ve always been in love with travelling and that’s one of the most amazing things about our career is that we get to travel so much and this year we got to go to some places that we’ve never been to before, like South Africa, for example, and every time you go to a new place and you have fans out there who know your lyrics, it’s just incredible to think ‘how do these people know us? We’ve never been to this country before’. I guess that’s the power of the internet. But, they were really amazing, really receptive. We had a huge crowd in the festival that we played and it was just fantastic and great fun.
Despite the serious success of their latest album, Rob humbly admitted “I don’t really consider myself famous. I cringe every time I hear myself say the word. We just recently played in Russia where I think our fans are the most fanatical – they go absolutely mental out there, they completely swarm us and give us hundreds of presents and it’s really two different worlds; you come back home and you’re suddenly back to reality, back to real life and then you go away and you’re in this weird band/tour bubble. I still find it strange when people recognise me on the street or come up and ask for an autograph.”
When I questioned Rob about the best band they’ve toured with he didn’t hesitate to answer. “Hands down The Prodigy. I think they’ve been, for us as a band, one of our biggest influences and then when we got the chance to tour with them around Europe doing arenas it was just amazing, a dream tour for us. We bit their fingers off at the chance to get at it and it was absolutely incredible going out playing to 20,000 people a night and then also every night getting to sit back and watch our favourite band play. It was absolutely incredible.”
Quizzed on their ideal touring partner, Rob chose a group outside of the box. “I suppose Noisia, they’re three guys from Holland, dance producers, and we’ve been meaning to do a collaboration with them for a while but for one reason or another it hasn’t worked out, but that would be great if it could take place.”
It didn’t take much convincing on my part to encourage a York date on a future tour. “Definitely! We used to come to York quite a lot because Chris’ [the bassist’s] family used to own a little cottage there. I really love the town, it’s a gorgeous place but at the moment I have to say I don’t think we have anything booked, but that’s not to say that we’re never going to play there again.”
Recently there’s been quite a lot of press on the band’s openness about political and social issues in their lyrics, penned by Rou. “It’s always been something we’ve been very aware of and the more we find out about it, the more we travel, the more it influences us and we feel stronger about it, or more confident in how we feel about it. It turns round and comes out in our creativity… I’m kind of surprised that less people do [write about it], in a lot of respects it seems like the world is collapsing around us and there’s stuff that’s so interesting, that we’re so passionate about, it confuses me that other people aren’t singing about it.”
After speaking with Rob it was clear that Enter Shikari’s fantastic success comes from the band simply having fun and doing something they love entirely and voicing their honest opinions on the world through their music. Undeniably down-to-earth and extremely hard-working, they really give back to their fans from high-energy shows and dedication to their music.
Despite a really busy year, Enter Shikari definitely don’t plan to slow down as their December tour ‘A Flash Flood of Christmas’ brings the band back to the UK, although their take on Mariah Carey’s ‘All I Want for Christmas is You’ isn’t likely to be on the set list. “To be honest I don’t think we have time to get anything special musically as when we come back from America we pretty much go straight into the UK tour. I’m sure someone’s going to have a Santa hat on at some point, maybe even some artificial snow – we haven’t really gone into the details of the production yet. It’s going to be a big party anyway that’s for sure, it always is.