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Interview - Enter Shikari Frontman Rou Reynolds

 

Published: 12 January, 2012
by ROISIN GADELRAB

When Enter Shikari needed a venue to film recent single Snake Pit, they turned to Dingwalls.

As frontman Rou Reynolds says, Camden was one of the first areas to have accepted the band.

More than 300 fans responded to their call for extras to star in the shoot, which Rou described as “a really fun day but extremely long”.

Camden has been very much a staple in the St Albans band’s tour diary from its inception.

Rou said: “Camden and Kentish Town were the places to go from a very young age. I remember going to Electric Ballroom to see all sorts of punk, Ska and hardcore bands. I stage-dived there for the first time to some old-school Ska band.”

Anyone familiar with their genre-meshing sound – a mix of rock, electro, hardcore beats and drum ’n’ bass amongst others – will be aware of the propensity for a moshpit to spring up whenever Enter Shikari play – some reaching such legendary proportions they have been feted online, with much footage filmed from the privileged van­tage point of the stage.

“It looks just insane,” says Rou. “When you’re playing a festival and they’re doing a circle bit, it can look amazing, an incredible work of art. We’re elevated so get a nice angle.

“One that will always stick in my mind was playing the main stage at Reading Festival. We encouraged everyone to crowd-surf. There’s a lot of footage on YouTube. From the stage it looks absolutely incredible, a sea of people crowd-surfing to the stage.”

Enter Shikari launch new album A Flash Flood of Colour at a special signing and gig at the Borderline on January 16.

They were one of the unlucky bands whose stock was damaged in the PIAS warehouse fire during last August’s riots, but Rou insists they were the lucky ones. He says: “A few hundred of our DVDs were destroyed. The real horrible story was all the niche independent labels that rely on continuous cashflow had a lot of their stock destroyed as well. Some are finding it really hard to survive after that. It didn’t really have anything to do with this album apart from it being a dent in the pockets waiting for insurance.”

He says he saw the riots as “a reflection of society”, adding: “When you make a whole group hopeless they’ll lose all connection and eventually respect for their community and surrounding and that’s what we saw.

“It was really sad to see, but what was worse was how it was dealt with. We still see them trawling through hours of CCTV just trying to pick people out like they’re the bad apples, get them off the streets and in jail and everything will be fine again. It won’t. There will always be people geared up and willing to do things like this, because of how the system has treated them.”

Rou, who spent part of New Year DJing at Occupy London outside St Paul’s Cathedral, said the new album “is supposed to be a kind of injection of positivity and empowerment. A lot of music, especially mainstream, is extremely mind numbing and soulless. We’re trying to rebalance that awful imbalance of art.

“Hopefully we’ll get people to start thinking, and if they want to take the lyrics further and get involved in things, that’s great. If they just enjoy the music, that’s more than enough.”

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