Gig: Enter Shikari @ UEA, Norwich
Enter Shikari by Jonathan Dadds
A tour taking in some of the "smaller, sweatier places" (their words) of the UK, Enter Shikari are visiting some spots they seldom visit, promising a more intimate opportunity to see the band live. My first experience of Enter Shikari may have been literally the sweatiest gig I've ever been to, over in Cambridge's Portland Arms so a tour billed as such was always going to be appealing.
Teenage Wrist
First up are Teenage Wrist, who've headed over from the states for this run of shows. Playing a lot of tracks from their most recent record, Still Love, they’re a nice, fuzzy, start to the evening. A combination of their sound and the sound guy on the evening, Teenage Wrist are bloody loud, waves of distorted guitars fill every corner of the venue (and some corners outside the venue). I wasn’t familiar with Teenage Wrist going into this gig but the stuff from the new record especially sounds good live – certainly worth digging into their back catalogue.
Enter Shikari
Enter Shikari haven't really scaled back for their smaller tour, with a huge amount of lighting and multiple led towers dotted around the stage. It doesn't take long for the sweatiness promise to be realised, the crowd going crazy from the second the band stepped on stage. A few songs in and a cry of "I want to see people on shoulders" leads to a wall of people up higher, screaming every word back.
Classic tracks like Anything Can Happen In The Next Half an Hour go down fantastically, a lot of movement in the UEA crowd, the occasional crowd surfer flying over the barrier. Sorry You're Not Winner gets the crowd going before dropping into the Pendulum Remix to really push the energy up. Partway through the set frontman Rou makes his way to the back of the crowd standing above the audience to deliver a couple of tracks before crowd-surfing his way back.
"Does anyone know how many times we've played here? Chat GPT says either more than 5 times or more than 10." They ask halfway through the set. Someone calls out "21 times", dismissed as "bullshit" by the band who claim that'd be a gig here every year (Answers on a postcard please!) but, as a location for a previous video shoot, it’s clearly a venue that feels at home to the band.
Personally, I’m impressed by the amount of energy the band gives their shows – they’ve been gigging fairly solidly for at least twenty years now but they still make their live shows feel as lively as they did back then. They’ve grown, musically and as people; they’re not afraid to wear their politics on their sleeves, more than happy to give songs meaning (and the collection for War Child for people on the guestlist was a nice touch) – but at the core they’re still the explosive band they always were. And more than capable of making a room like the LCR into a sweaty pit.
