Enter Shikari believe in the importance of smaller venues – and a lot of other bands would do well to follow their example.
Before they became an arena-level band, Enter Shikari honed their craft playing smaller venues across the UK – it wasn’t glamorous, but it was vital to their development.
In a new interview with Rolling Stone AU/NZ, Rou Reynolds and Chris Batten extolled the importance of continuing to play smaller venues in order to support local live music scenes.
“It’s something we do back home a lot more,” Batten said. “When we came up playing, we didn’t book gigs in the bigger cities. We learnt our craft by playing these venues, so it’s nice to bring that to other places we don’t normally get the opportunity to play in.”
Batten and Reynolds also revealed how the energy from their live shows is increasingly informing the recording sessions for new music.
“I think, more and more, the live experience informs the writing,” Reynolds told Rolling Stone AU/NZ. “That became very clear during COVID, when I stopped being able to write music because we weren’t playing.
“Since then, I’m more aware of it and just conscious of when it’s happening. We could be walking about a festival and I’m a subconscious sponge; I’m being influenced by little things, even if I don’t know that I am. I’m just more conscious of the whole process, even down to our own sets. There’ll be points in the set that I particularly enjoy and I’ll think, ‘Maybe I need to think about this when I’m writing.’”
Enter Shikari are Down Under for Knotfest Australia, with some sideshows thrown in for good measure.
“We’ve never been to these places before, it’s really exciting for us,” Batten said.
“It feels like it’s about time,” Reynolds added. “I’ve been saying for years that I’ve wanted to do a more extensive tour of Australia. I know this isn’t a super extensive run, but we’re starting to get a little out of the space of the major cities. It’s really exciting.”
More information about Knotfest Australia, and Enter Shikari’s sideshows, is available here.
