Bedford Esquires has been building up to this night for a long time. Tickets have been like gold dust and people have travelled from far and wide to make it here to night. Yet tonight’s headliners aren’t signed, only formed three years ago, and you can’t buy their E.P.s in any big record shops. Curious to know the secret of their success, I asked the Hertfordshire quartet Enter Shikari just how they do it…
‘Wow, I don’t know,’ smiles bass player Chris with a shake of his head, ‘we just play a lot of shows, I think; each time we go to a new place we go back two, or three times, and then the fans just seem to get better every time. But,’ he admits, ‘we’ve got a bit of commercial side to our sound as well I think, which pulls in a few people…’
Their sound – another big talking point. In a world we’re constantly encouraged to fit music into increasingly ridiculous categories and sub-genres (‘groovecore’ or ‘goth-abilly’, anyone?) Enter Shikari seem to go out of their way to avoid such pigeon-holing, with their eclectic mix of modern pop, rock, punk, metal, dance, trance and electronica. Which leads to another commonly asked question – where do they get their inspiration from?
Rou: This is always the question… we all listen to a complete range - a crazy range – of music.
Chris: Yeah, Dillinger, to Motown…
Rou: Yeah, the hardest sort of hardcore, like Dillinger Escape Plan, As I Lay Dying, to pop stuff, like old-school Motown, The Beatles, everything…
Chris: A lot of electronic stuff as well…
Rob: Yeah, a lot of dance, trance; but then also a lot of rock, guitar-based stuff
Chris: I don’t think we have any clear-cut influences that we’d say we sound like; it’s just purely a mixture of… I don’t know, all of us! At the moment I’m listening to a lot of Biffy Clyro and Fall of Troy.
Rou: A lot of the underground bands that we play with, you can’t help but be influenced by them; they’re of such good quality.
Rob: Yeah, especially when we tour with the bands; after spending a lot of time with them and really getting to know their set and what kind of guys they are, we sort of start to… not steal their stuff, but we pick up little tricks.
But as well as their original sound and their incessant live performances, being responsible for all their own promotion they’re quick to acknowledge the importance of the internet and MySpace to help whip up a frenzy of excitement. ‘Big time!’ asserts Rou, wide-eyed, ‘it’s impossible without that sort of stuff, because the press and big magazines don’t want to touch any small, unknown bands, so it’s your own promotion over the internet – that’s the only way you can do it really. It’s huge as well; we’ve got people who are interested in us from Australia, America… just through that.’ As if more proof was needed to emphasise the importance of MySpace for unsigned bands like Enter Shikari, their booking for this year’s Download Festival would do the trick, ‘yeah, it’s pretty crazy,’ Rou enthuses.
Chris: It all came about really quickly, actually, it was just one day this guy got in touch with us and said there’s a chance, because he’d been online and seen the MySpace page and yeah, one day it was a possibility, the next day it was done.’
Yet despite their big following, ‘why haven’t Enter Shikari been snapped up by a record company?’ you may ask. ‘We’ve never been offered anything properly,’ explains Rou, ‘but I think, this year will (hopefully) be our year. We’re going to bring something out, either a single or an E.P., hopefully in the summer.’
Enter Shikari certainly deserve for this to be their year; up until now, the commitment to playing live and their current eighteen day extended tour with Flood of Red has all been carefully scheduled around university degrees… but now, they mean business. ‘I just thought, “I’m going with the band!”’ explains drummer Rob, who has recently left a degree in photography, ‘it seems to have done me good so far!’ he laughs. The other three members also hope to take a year out from their courses to concentrate on more touring, but don’t all share Rob’s uncompromising optimism, ‘we figure that if we can get to the end of a year we can save the credits, we go back if things don’t work out,’ laughs Chris.
Joking apart though, when you’ve watched Enter Shikari play live, you won’t need much more convincing that this is a band capable and deserving of some big things.
‘I’d say we’re definitely a live band,’ says Rob emphatically, ‘I mean, I’ve heard loads of people say to me, “oh yeah, you’re really good on CD, but you’re a live band.” When you go and see the show it’s just so much more of an impact.’ To which Rou nods in agreement, ‘there’s an atmosphere as well we find, if it’s really packed out it gets us really up for it as well. And this [Bedford Esquires] is one of the places we played really early on as well, it’s so close to our hometown, it’s kind of like a hometown show.’
So, apart from finishing their current tour and an appearance at Download, what else is on the cards for Enter Shikari in 2006?
Rob: Recording really… that’s our goal for the summer, definitely. Get this single down, release it, build up as much excitement and hype around us as we can to try and get out into the media a bit before we go to sign anything with any kind of record label. We’ve been talking to some publishers and a few other people here and there that have been talking about helping us out, but… we’re really set on the idea of trying to build as much ourselves as we can before we sort of pass it on to a record label or something like that.
Chris: Our main aim is just to take another step upwards, just become more respected and actually seen as a proper big band.
Rob: We’ve never officially released anything, really. But we’ve made E.P.s and sold them at shows and we’ve done quite well doing that. The single that we’re going to be doing in the summer is going to be our first proper release.
Rou: Yeah, it’s definitely in the pipeline. We’ve got a lot of material that needs re-recording and re-vamping, we just can’t wait to get something out, really.
Chris: We’re buzzing to get in the studio, big time! We seem to have booked ourselves too many shows, I think, so trying to fit in some recording time around the shows so we don’t have to cancel any. We just want to sort of build a secure career where we can just continue to release things because we love doing it. We don’t want to be one of those sort of bands that kinda come on a wave and then just disappear.
Rob: I think that’s one of the reasons why we want to do everything ourselves, so we can build up a good solid base that we know isn’t just going to, you know… we’ve really been working hard on keeping a solid base of fans - that’ll hopefully keep us going.
Chris: Yeah, the fan base is really supportive at the moment. Some kids come to… I don’t know, ten, twenty shows a year, wherever they can – some people really travel around with us, which is nice. They’re really dedicated, which is cool.
And he’s not kidding; fans here don’t let them down tonight. Whatever the future has in store for Enter Shikari, you get the feeling that a sold-out Bedford Esquires can’t be wrong.
For more information on Enter Shikari check out their website www.entershikari.com or their MySpace page, www.myspace.com/entershikari