Not four hours ago, I was enjoy­ing a beer with Enter Shi­kari back­stage at the Lead­mill in Shef­field. The band have gone from strength to strength, mov­ing from a rel­at­ively unheard of, unsigned band record­ing demos in a gar­age, to who they are now, play­ing to massive crowds across the coun­try. The lads from St. Albans are well spoken and friendly.

‘Enter Shi­kari’ is an unusual name for a band. Where does it come from?
Rob: Yeah, it is unusual!
Rory: Well, it means hunter in Indian and Pun­jab and a vari­ety of lan­guages.
Chris: Yeah, and the ‘Enter’ bit is like a char­ac­ter in a play, like the stage dir­ec­tions would say ‘Enter Shi­kari’. It’s a bit mys­ter­i­ous as well.

It’s hard to cat­egor­ise your music, put it into a genre. How would you describe yourselves?
Rory: We don’t like to put ourselves into a genre.
Chris: No, but a lot of the bands we play with are hard­core bands, and a lot of our influ­ences are hard­core. We’re all really into trance and drum and bass and stuff as well though.

You men­tioned influ­ences. Who would you con­sider your main influ­ences?
(at this point Roughton walks in)
Rob: You want to handle this one? Influ­ences?
Roughton: You given him the list?
Rob: Nah, not yet
Roughton: Ok, well our main influ­ences are obvi­ously like rock and trance and that kinda thing, but we’re also into a whole load of other stuff.
Chris: Reg­gae
Rob: Yeah, we love a bit of Marley.

‘Any­thing can hap­pen in the next half hour’… a Stin­gray quote?
Roughton: Haha, yeah.
So you’re into Stin­gray, Thun­der­birds, Cap­tain Scar­let, Joe 90…?
Roughton: Yeah.
Rory: Actu­ally, yeah, we missed out the sample.
Chris: Yeah, we’d done prat­ic­ally everything on the single and then we were like ‘Shit, we for­got the sample…’

Moth­er­ship shows the band tak­ing a more mature atti­tude towards music. Do you feel Enter Shi­kari has grown up with you?
Rob: Def­in­itely
Roughton: Well, if you type ‘Enter Shi­kari’ into LimeWire, you’ll hear our early stuff, demos, that kind of thing.
Chris: We recor­ded our three track demo in my garage!

So you con­done down­load­ing songs from LimeWire?
Roughton: I only down­load stuff that there’s no way I’d buy.
Rory: Yeah, down­load singles, buy albums. We’d love to say it’s bad, but every­one does it, don’t they?
Chris: I’ve stopped doing it so much now.

What are your songs about…?
Rob: Life!
Chris: Yeah, our lyr­ics are… what’s the word
Roughton: Ambigu­ous
Chris: Yeah, ambigu­ous, so they can mean all sorts of things to dif­fer­ent people.
Roughton: Yeah, they’re all about life, through meta­phors and stuff.

I’m guess­ing ‘Return to Ener­gizer’ isn’t about throw­ing away all your old Dur­a­cells then?
Chris: Actu­ally, that one was a one-off, it’s about Laser Quest.

When you’re not play­ing music, what do you like to do?
Rob: Drink excess­ively. We’re all drink­ers…
Rory: Swim. I went for a swim the other day…
Roughton: Why didn’t you give me a ring! He’s always swim­ming on the sly.
Rob: Watch films. We went to this second­hand shop before the Astoria gig, and they were selling videos for like 50p, so we stocked up…

The Astoria gig… you must be proud. [For those of you who don’t know, Enter Shi­kari are the second unsigned band ever to sell out the Astoria, the Dark­ness were the first]
Rob: Yeah, they gave us these two posters with the words ‘Com­pletely fuck­ing sold out’ on them in red.
Rory: We were very proud.
Rob: We’ve played to big­ger audi­ences, but that was our biggest gig so far.

What sort of films do you like?
Rory: I like all sorts. For­eign films are good, French cinema, that kind of thing
Roughton: Team Amer­ica!
Chris: Yeah, com­edy. Me, Myself and Irene…

How did you deal with set­ting up your own label? Was it hard? Expens­ive?
Roughton: Both!
Rory: Yeah, we were lucky though, our man­ager used to run a record label, so he knew what he was doing. Without him, we’d have failed.
Chris: Yeah, when we signed the pub­lish­ing deal, they gave us a bit extra, so we could set up our own label and do some mar­ket­ing, that kind of thing. That’s exactly what we did.

Do you have a celebrity crush?
Rory: Cameron Diaz
Roughton: I was going to say that!
Rob: Liz Hur­ley
Chris: Who was the girl in Aus­tin Powers 3?
Rob: Heather Gra­ham
Chris: Yeah… her.
Rob: Mmmm…

Any tips on up and com­ing bands?
Rory: The Archi­tects. I really like what they’re doing.
Chris: All the bands we’re play­ing with tonight. While She Sleeps, Ella, both great bands.
Rory: Colon Open Bracket. It’s a sad face, see… (points to a badge he’s wearing)

Ok, thanks for your time! Any­thing else you want to say? Any­thing you want to plug?
All: Album!
Rory: The new album’s com­ing out in March (2007). That’s all we really want to plug at the moment.

An hour or two later, they took to the stage, play­ing a wide ran­ging set, cov­er­ing their earlier stuff, and tracks from the new album. All of the songs were well per­formed, and the band’s stage pres­ence was immense. Their con­trol over the crowd was fant­astic, but they were out to have a good time, and get every­one in on the action.