Perth Music

Enter Shikari are a band from the UK that, even though they have only released one album, have gained considerable success after turning down many offers by record companies to release their debut album ‘Take To The Skies‘ independently. After playing multiple festivals around Europe including Glastonbury, Reading, Leeds, Download, Oxegen and Rock am Ring, Enter Shikari will make their first visit to Australia for the 2008 Big Day Out. Lead singer Roughton ‘Rou’ Reynolds caught up with Justin Middleton for this exclusive interview.

Click here to download the podcast of the entire interview. (9:50 - 1.1Mb)

I asked Rou to give a brief history of the band “Me, Rob (Rolfe) the drummer and Chris (Batten) the bassist have been in some sort of a band since we were in primary school and it was not until we were about 16/17 that we made Enter Shikari and that’s when Rory (Liam Clewlow) joined on guitar. Before that I was on guitar. We were playing kind of alternative rock, experimental stuff back then, kind of Muse/Radiohead sort of stuff. When we were about 17 we were starting to go out clubbing, getting into the dance/drum and bass scene, going into London but at the same time we were also putting on our own punk shows and getting into the whole underground hardcore punk scene. So I guess they were the two influences on our sound, we just decided that we enjoyed both these types of music and we want to splice them together, which is what we did. We started touring the UK and did that for about three years and then put out the album on our own label and the rest is history.”

With a style of music that is quite unique in the industry today, Enter Shikari mix a multitude of styles including rock, punk, trance and hardcore and try and involve the audience as much as they can in their live shows. Rou explains “One of the main influences for our live show is hardcore music, just getting that energy and that passion live and then also we like to take the feeling of passion and euphoria that you get when a massive tune drops in a club and you just wanna put your hands in the air and the out of body feeling. We just try and reproduce this epic sound live.”

The boys from the band not only play successfully in Enter Shikari but run their own record label called Ambush Reality. I asked Rou if there were plans to release other bands material on their label in the near future. “It’s always been our dream to help out bands that we think really deserve it and bands that we have played with in the past. At the moment it is just proving too hard with so much time getting taken up with Enter Shikari. When we are not on tour we are in and out of London, and even today we were at our lawyers office trying to catch up on all the latest stuff. We don’t want to run before we can walk and we have to make sure we have us sorted out before we can ruin a bands career.”

Speaking about visiting Australia for the first time for the Big Day Out Rou admits “I haven’t actually seen the line up yet, all I know is that Rage Against The Machine is playing. To a certain extent that is all anyone needs to know.”

Enter Shikari : Album “Take To The Skies” (Limited Edition CD/DVD) & Tour EP “The Zone” out now on [PIAS]/Liberator Music.

Big Day Out Show dates:
Auckland - Friday 18 January
Gold Coast - Sunday 20 January
Sydney - Friday 25 January
Melbourne - Monday 28 January
Adelaide - Friday 1 February
Perth - Sunday 3 February

Enter Shikari - Johnny Sniper video

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 15th, 2007 at 11:50 am and is filed under Big Day Out, Videos, Touring, Interviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.