What matters is the music

Enter Shikari have survived the loss of their back catalogue in a warehouse fire in the London riots last summer, says Ed Power

SEVERAL months ago, as they were finishing their new album, art rockers Enter Shikari received bad news.

There was a fire at the London warehouse where their back catalogue was stored. Everything they’d accomplished had gone up in smoke.

“We lost a lot of material,” says singer Rou Reynolds. “We were lucky enough to be in a position where it didn’t derail our career. Many small independent record labels had all their stock in the same warehouse. It was a huge blow for them. Some had to call it quits. The whole affair was terrible, really.”

The blaze broke out as riots swept the British capital (three men were later arrested by the police). This is ironic, as the record Enter Shikari had been working on addressed the plight of downtrodden and disenfranchised young people. The album’s argument is that capitalism is broken and requires a radical re-imagining. Watching footage of a burning London, Reynolds realised how horribly prescient the band had been.

“We try to write on a global scale,” he says. “We’re not specifically talking about the UK. We believe that the problems we see today have a fundamental root in the system itself. It’s flawed.

“That is the case across the world. We’re not concerned specifically with the problems affecting Britain. We would like to think we are more international in our outlook.”

They’ve clocked up a lot of air miles this past year. While their previous two albums were recorded in dingy studios in London, the latest, A Flash Flood of Colour, was assembled in different circumstances. “We went to Thailand, if you can believe it,” says Reynolds. “We have a friend who has a state-of-the-art studio. He is keen to get Western bands out there. They offered a deal we couldn’t refuse. We booked our flights and off we went.” Enter Shikari’s sound is difficult to define. You will never mistake them for anybody else. Influenced by experimental rock, heavy metal, drum and bass and dub-step, their music veers all over the spectrum. One moment, Reynolds is singing in a wounded whisper, the next howling like a discommoded Viking. The effect can be disorientating.

“There never was a conscious effort to be lots of different things at once,” says Reynolds. “For us, it’s straightforward. Our music reflects our taste. Even as kids, we didn’t feel we had to belong to a particular ‘tribe’ — you know, the punks, the ravers. We liked it all. When we were growing up, we were big into the hardcore and dance scenes. And I was raised on Northern Soul. It all comes out in our songs. We don’t like to confine ourselves.”

It may have been recorded in tropical climes, but there’s precious little sunshine on A Flash Flood of Colour. It’s a rumination on all the things that have gone wrong with the world over the past three years. The band feel they are channelling the same outrage that informed the recent Occupy Wall Street/Dame Street protests. Though their music isn’t overtly political, it is coloured by dissatisfaction with the status quo.

“We were mixing the album when the Occupy thing kicked off. I thought, ‘finally, here’s a global movement that will grow and grow.’ Hopefully, it will lead to some fundamental changes. Things have been allowed to go on the way they are for too long,” he says.

You can’t hear Thailand on the record. That isn’t to say it wasn’t an influence. “They call it the land of smiles. Being there definitely rubbed off on us in the sense that things were incredibly relaxed. Everybody was so sweet and respectful. And when you are relaxed, you can concentrate. That was good for us. We were able to get on with the record without all these unnecessary distractions,” he says.

Critics have accused the group of bandwagon-jumping. On A Flash Flood of Colour they doff their cap to dub-step, the latest force in British dance music. Reynolds gives short shrift to the criticism, saying club culture has always been a vital element of what they do.

“We’ve been listening to drum-and-bass for as long as we can remember and we were aware of dub-step from early on. We used to go to places like Forward, in London, where the scene has its origins. It’s a definite influence on our sound. That isn’t an overnight thing. It’s been that way for a long time. We didn’t discover dub-step yesterday,” he says.

Enter Shikari are from St Albans, a commuter town north of London. In 2006, they became the toast of the British music press when they were the second unsigned band in history to sell out the now defunct London Astoria (The Darkness were the first). They were painted as overnight sensations — but their ‘instant’ fame was the result of years of thankless slog.

“We’d been at it for a long time,” he says. “Often, it was pretty dispiriting. You’d try to get the media interested. They didn’t want to know. You’d put people on the guest list and they wouldn’t show up at the concert. That hurt. God knows how many demos we sent out to labels. We heard nothing back.”

Having the spotlight turned on them was odd. Enter Shikari didn’t revel in their new celebrity. They worried their fanbase would be turned off by the hype. “It could have been very difficult for the people who had been into the band for a while. They might have grown sick of the whole thing. Thankfully, most of them didn’t and are still there for us. The attention is nice. At the end of the day, what matters is the music,” says Reynolds.

* A Flash Flood of Colour is released January 6