Enter Shikari

Sat 3 Nov 2007

Catching up with band on yet another tour

Danielle - How’s the tour going?

Chris - Excellent! We started off in Europe and those dates were really good, a lot better than we expected actually. We seem to be doing really well in Germany and Holland but France seems to be lacking behind a bit, they don’t seem to dig us too much over there. The UK side of things has been awesome, it’s the first time we’ve taken out our own production. We’re now carrying the whole of our PA with us, all of our lighting and a whole separate crew to come and set it all up, so it’s the first full production we’ve done ourselves.

Danielle - Craziest moment of the tour?

Chris - We had a complete power cut one night in Cardiff! The lighting system blew up in the last song so we had to play in the pitch black! It was quite exciting actually, it was fun playing in darkness.

Danielle - New bands to check out?

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Chris - Rory’s brother is doing some DJ’ing this tour. He’s called DJ Pdex and he does the DJ’ing in between each of the bands sets.

Danielle - What are your plans for the future?

Chris - In January we are off to tour Japan and Australia which we’re really looking forward to. We’ve been to Japan before but not Australia. Japan I think is one our favourite place we’ve ever played, its so different over there, it’s just absolutely mind-blowing. Japan is so clean and tidy, everyone just takes so much pride in keeping it like that. The people over there are so kind and polite. We go over there like right drunken heads and completely embarrass ourselves. Their culture is just so relaxed and you really notice it when you come back to the UK and you notice how many things are terrible compared to it.

Danielle - What's been the highlight so far?

Chris - This year’s been mental for us really. The festivals were great fun, Reading, Leeds and Download. Download was great as we got to play a massive, massive tent. The main highlight for us was actually getting our album released and actually seeing it in the shops! Seeing our album go in at number 4 next to the likes of Kaiser Chiefs and Take That was very weird.

Danielle - How about Videos?

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Chris - The most fun we’ve had making a video was probably this video we made ourselves. The video for and you can probably only see it on youtube. A load of us broke into this desolate old Milk Dairy. It was very D.IY. It was filmed on one camera. Everyone was pissed up. We had all these toy instruments and the place just got completely wrecked in the end. But that was a great day and it only took a couple of hours whereas the other videos were all day sessions out in the cold. Those videos are fun at first but then they drag on a bit because you have to do so many takes of the same thing again and again.

Danielle - Going far…

Chris - Ideally everything will keep going as it is. We’ve never really expected anything, it’s all just come as it has. We want to have a successful second album, so that’s the next thing in line. We’ve never really had a complete goal that we’re trying to get to, it’s always been more of a step by step process. We just keep hoping to play live shows because that’s what it’s all about really for us.

Danielle - New music in the pipeline?

Enter Shikari

Chris - Well at some point we’ve got to write a second album which we’re meant to be doing early next year after we come back from Japan. We’ve got a lot of ideas but nothing actually on record yet. The last time we went in the studio we had a lot of fun, so right now we’re feeling very creative. We are looking forward to the second album and we can’t wait to start writing it.

Interview by Danielle Heywood
Photos by Chris Williams