Enter Shikari
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Enter Shikari

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“The first thing that popped into my head was Melbourne Sushi, Sydney and seeing cousins,” says Clewlow. “I’ve got quite a lot of family over there in Australia. I lived out there for a couple of years when I was a kid; I had family that moved over there.

 

“Redshift is just a single by itself,” says Clewlow, speaking of the band’s latest effort. “Personally it’s way too long between the album. We release an album every three years and we have so much more material that we can record, but obviously we have so many places we want to play. So we send off on the road for three years before we go back into the studio and record another one. Basically, we like to go into the studio and record new ideas and get stuff out; it’s good to have something new to play and it’s good for our fans as well.”

 

Carving their own lane and quickly building a rapport with audiences in America and in Europe, the band made their highly anticipated appearance in Australia after the release of 2009’s Common Dreads. Gaining a reputation for their highly energetic performances and ability to bring audiences together, such a dynamic left many astounded and wanting more. Now after touring Australia relentlessly in 2012 and the release of their highly praised fourth album Mindsweep in 2015, I couldn’t help but imagine how the band would plan for such a tour and how adjustments and changes are situational to their tour cycle.


 

“We definitely leave a lot of it up to the night,” Clewlow tells me. “Our set has developed a lot since the last time we were there and we have made a lot of adjustments to songs. Some of the older tracks whenever we get bored
 of them, we change a section and splice a few songs together to make something more interesting. We’re constantly developing the set as we go along. We haven’t played ‘Juggernauts’ in ages now, but they’ll be plenty of new things to come for any show.”


 

Joining Enter Shikari on their upcoming tour is Buckinghamshire’s Rap-Metal group Hacktivist. Attesting to their nu-metal grime influence, Rory accredits the band on their continuing rise and talent for live performances. Being long-time friends and tour buddies of Enter Shikari, it seems almost an instinctive and effortless intention that the two UK based bands will be gracing us with their eclectic music in mid-September.

 


“Hacktivist are on the same management as we are,”
 says Clewlow. “We’ve toured with them more than we have with pretty much any other band in the past; any tour with them is great. They’re really good friends and they’re the type of band you can just go out and watch every night and they never get boring. With the management group, we didn’t make it; it sort of existed because of us. We met this guy, and we asked him to be our manager, even though he wasn’t a band manager at the time. Then there was this other guy who used to basically be a fan and he’d been to like 60 shows or something and he ended up on our management group as well. So it’s pretty much those two guys and they’re called 30 Century Management.”

 

The quartet commemorated their decade long career on The Mindsweep Arena Tour of the UK. Placing a firm spot in their memories, the tour saw the band perform in massive arenas, which were the biggest shows to date. They concluded the tour at the famous Alexander Palace in London, where Enter Shikari played a sold-out show to 9,000 animated fans.

 

“That was the biggest show we’ve ever headlined,” Clewlow reflects. “It was a night that I’m never going 
to forget. It’s not just another show or tour for us; the tour was one of the best tours ever. There definitely was this feeling of satisfaction for us, and a ‘we did it’ sort of thing. Like an ending to a movie like Mighty Ducks, there was a bit of that feeling going on [laughs].”

The Mindsweep is out now via [PIAS] Australia. Enter Shikari will be touring later this month alongside Hacktivist and Stories, for more information visit livenation.com.au.