erin_broadley

Listening to Enter Shikari's aggressive mixture of hardcore punk and club-inspired electronica doesn't prepare you for their puzzling lack of ego. We've come to expect that two #1 singles in the UK and over eight million plays on MySpace might go to rockers' heads. How to explain Enter Shikari, then, except to say that they haven't yet realized just how big they've become. Initially spurned by major record companies, the band released the album, Take To The Skies, on its own Ambush Reality label. Now the tables have turned, and the band has rejected offers from the labels that passed them by. But gloating about it scarcely seems to have crossed their minds. They're too busy taking their legendary live show, named the best in the UK, on the road in America. It's been a long and unexpected journey for Enter Shikari, as I found out from bassist Chris Batten, on the phone from the Troubadour in L.A. Jay Hathaway: So, is this your first time in the US? Chris Batten: No, we've been two or three times, actually. We've done West Coast tour, and we've been to the East Coast a couple of times, as well. This is our second West Coast tour. JH: So what do you think of playing here, versus playing dates in the UK, where you have a much bigger reputation? CB: Well, obviously the venues are a lot smaller. It's kind of like going back to our first shows in the UK, where people don't really know about us, people don't really know what to expect. But that's what we like about it, you know. When you come to a different country, you get to make that first impression all over again. This is what we did for years in England. Being able to get close to the audience is what we're about. JH: Yeah. I noticed that you were awarded "best live show" by Kerrang!, which is amazing, and I wanted to know what you think sets you apart from other bands in terms of live performances? CB: We're not the type of band that goes out and tries to play a note-for-note perfect set and tries to make it exactly like our album. We're really not like that. There's a lot of movement going on, there's a lot of crowd involvement. I think it's kind of fun, I think it makes it more of a show than us just playing our music. We've never been one of those bands at all. We like getting down and getting into the audience's faces, give them more of an experience. They can go home and listen to the album and how it's meant to sound. When we're playing live, we try to give them a little bit extra, you know, something different. JH: Is that part of why you decided not to go with a major label, initially? To build that kind of audience connection from the ground up? CB: Well, the first reason we started doing that was because there weren't any labels interested. We were playing shows to about two or three hundred people and selling them out, and we kind of figured we were ready to start releasing music. We found no one was interested in doing it for us, so we thought, well, we've never been ones to hold back, so we'll do it for ourselves. We had help from our manager; he'd already been running a label before. We started releasing a couple of singles, then the majors really got interested. But by that point we already had it set up and had things running smoothly, so why fix it if it ain't broke? JH: Was it satisfying to be able to turn away the labels that initially weren't interested in you? CB: It's kind of funny. You know, I don't know. I guess a little bit, but they were all really nice to us. Not that they wouldn't do a good job for us, it was just at the time, this is what we wanted. It wasn't a ... at the industry or anything like that, as people sometimes disguise it, but it was right for us. JH: What do you think about the model of the music industry now, though? Would you think about doing something like the recent Radiohead album -- have people pay what they want and then make all your money touring? CB: Well, I guess we've always been a live band anyway. Back in the day we had a choice between recording or spending our money on a van to tour more and we bought the van, you know? Everyone knows CDs aren't selling as well as they used to; we're definitely thinking that it's all about the live show. We're really looking forward to recording some music, but we're not realistically thinking we're going to be selling millions of albums, you know? We're interested in getting into the studio and writing something different. We haven't done that in a while now. JH: Talking about how you started out buying a van and going on tour -- you guys have been together for a long time now. CB: Yeah, well, we've been together for about five years now. We bought the van about three and a half, four years ago, and we've pretty much been on the road since then. And that was including while we were still in high school. We went to uni, but we took off from uni after one year [because] we were touring all the time. It was about four or five gigs a week, whilst trying to hold down university and get to lectures, and we only lasted one year before we had to defer, pack it in. That's when we signed our publishing deal and we took it up properly. JH: What were you guys like in school? Troublemakers? CB: Yeah, in primary school. That was one of the main reasons we started playing music. We'd always be in the playground, fighting over the game of football rather than doing anything productive. We had this teacher say to us, well, rather than doing this, you're going to have to find something productive, and music was the way. Me and Rou -- Rou, the singer -- and Rob, our drummer, all went to primary school together, so we've been friends and playing music together for years now. Playing music was a way out of the trouble we used to get into. And then in secondary school it all kind of calmed down a little bit. I mean, we didn't really work too hard, never really went much, to be honest -- well, I didn't. We all went to the not-so-good school. There was a private school in our town, and the public school. We used to clean the private school. So we had all four of us cleaning, and we used to have rehearsal an hour a day, every day after work. We got used to playing every day and getting really tight, so working at the private school was actually quite good for us. JH: What were you listening to back then? CB: Well, our parents had us brought up on the Beatles, Led Zeppelin and then we got a bit into the likes of Oasis and the Brit scene. But then we started getting more into hardcore and punk, and from there once we got older and started going out around London going to clubs. That's where the electronic side of things came into it; we started getting interested in that. JH: So is all of this anything like you imagined it when you first started out? CB: Not really! We've sort of surpassed everything we ever thought we could achieve. I always remember thinking, "Oh, it would be great if we could get to this point," but now we're past that point, we're playing bigger venues in England. And no one really expected us to get outside of England, but here we are playing in front of 10,000 people in Japan, going over to America, Australia in a couple of months. It's completely over what we expected, and more than we really dreamed of. JH: Are you still keeping your label while you're on tour? Are you planning on signing any other bands? CB: Well, as far as signing other bands, we'll have to wait until we have the finances to do that. At the moment we're struggling to keep it all afloat. We've been saying that we're not going to run before we can walk. Before we start signing other bands, we want to be in the position to do that properly. We won't be doing it any time soon, like in the next year or so, but we've talked about it and it's something we'd like to do. JH: Is there a group of other bands that you guys feel like you fit in with, a genre or movement? CB: We've never really been heavily involved in a scene. There's lots of bands we've toured with, and we get on great, but even their stuff, you wouldn't call them all the same sort of genre of music. That's the thing with us, we've never met anybody who sounds a lot like us. But that means we can fit on a lot of bills, as well. We've never really been part of a scene of such, but we've got a lot of friends, and we like touring with other bands. JH: I've heard a lot of different labels applied to Enter Shikari: post-hardcore, hardcore, emo... how would you guys describe yourselves? CB: Umm... [laughs] that's something that we always get asked, and we never really know what to say to it. There are so many influences. We are really sort of a hardcore punk band, with electronics and synths. That's the way I'd describe it, but we're forever changing. Our next album might sound completely different. JH: Does it bother you to be labeled like that? CB: We're quite used to the fact that people were doing it from an early stage, "What genre are you guys?" "Oh, well, I dunno." I mean, we don't care, we'll leave that to other people to decide. JH: Are you reading your reviews at all? CB: Reviews? Yeah, I do read the reviews actually. I've been reading the live reviews. And we've always been told by our manager that if you read the good press, you've got to read the bad press. That's kind of what we do. Not everyone likes us -- a lot of people hate us, in fact -- and it keeps our feet on the ground to read that stuff. And there are the good reviews, and its nice to see you're doing something right, as well. JH: What's the strangest thing you've seen so far on tour in America so far? Anything really bizarre? CB: Hmm, let's see. [Laughs] There are two or three. These stories all come out when you've had a few drinks, but as soon as you're on the spot, you can never seem to remember any of it. I remember seeing a guy dressed in a Spider-Man outfit, searching through bins, looking for food and whatnot. And we've had some great times just being out at parties in the States, we had a great night out in Kansas City, and when we were touring Texas we had a great time as well. Lots and lots of tequila involved, but nothing too stupid. JH: Do you still get a chance to go out and see shows and go to clubs? CB: Yeah, we do, but not as much as we'd like to or as much as we feel we should. Like I said earlier, that's where we've gotten a lot of our influences from, where we get a lot of our ideas. It's hard with such a heavy touring schedule, but we do try. JH: What kind of influence did going to shows have on your own live act? CB: It wasn't all completely copied and pasted from other performances, we had our own ideas and then we'd see other shows and see what works. There are parts of our show that are inspired by other bands. Take the movement of Dillinger Escape Plan, we were always very inspired by the way they played so tight, and yet they were so crazy on stage. And there are other bands that basically just get the crowd going, we've learned little bits from each band. We try and put as much as we can into our live show. JH: Where were you when you first heard one of your songs on the radio? CB: I remember one time, we were sitting up -- we heard it was going to be played on Radio One, and it was on the rock show, which is on from midnight to 2 a.m. So we sat up in the car waiting for that to get played. And what it was, actually, we had just recorded a new demo, and we wanted them to play one of those songs, but they ended up playing a really old version of one of our songs that was really badly recorded, bad quality -- actually, Return to Energizer. Well, they had to cut it off after 30 seconds 'cause it sounded too bad, wasn't good enough quality. So we waited up for ages to hear a 30-second clip of a really bad-quality song we'd recorded. It was kind of an anti-climax, really. But eventually we finished the album and the singles got sent out and we got to hear it on the radio properly, which was great. JH: Do you want to start any rumors before we go? CB: [Laughs] Oh, I think there's a few of them going. We started doing that in Japan, when we had a grueling press schedule, just two days straight of interview after interview. They sat us in a room and brought in people one after another. So then we started making up stories about how we got our name, and why the album's called what it is. But then it kind of came back and bit us in the ass, because we'd forgotten about all these rumors we'd started. "Well, it says here in your other interview..." Ah, crap, whoops. We've started telling the truth a bit more now, but we still stick the occasional rumor in there. JH: How did you actually get your name? CB: [Laughs] Well! The real story is that Roughton's uncle had a boat, and it was named Shikari. And Shikari means "the hunter" in Punjabi. So basically we heard the name there, and thought it was a really cool name. And at the time we were working along the lines of our stage show being a lot more theatrical, so we'd written a script, and Shikari was one of the characters. So on the script, it read "Enter Shikari." At the time it really suited us, because we were going through an atmospheric stage, with all the electronics. And the word Shikari, well, what does that mean? It's quite mysterious. So it really suited our sound at the time. That was kind of where it came from. JH: Any really great rejected band names that you ended up throwing out? CB: Well, it took us ages to figure it out. We went all around, 'cause there was a band called Shikari, and we originally wanted it to be just Shikari, but after a while we came up with the "Enter." And then I think the other band broke up like a month after that, anyway! JH: Any plans yet for your next album? CB: We've got a lot of ideas. We're actually really itching to get into the studio, but at the moment the touring schedule's just been a bit too tough. The plan is that after we do a tour of Japan, Australia and come back to the States in February, after we get done from there, that's the time when we're going to get back to working on new songs and hearing how they sound on a record. There's a lot of ideas, though, so we're not too worried about it. JH: That second album's always a challenge, when you're trying to follow up something really successful. CB: Yeah, well, you've got your whole life to write your first album, and a month to write your second. So it's a massive challenge, but it's one we're looking forward to.

For more information go to www.entershikari.com and www.myspace.com/entershikari