Shi's Electric

Waiting for Enter Shikari in a hotel lobby after being given the run-around by their manager, I strike up conversation with the receptionist. She has, it transpires, already met the band – without actually recognising them. The revelation prompts a shriek and a story about a friend who gained a black eye and lost a tooth at one of their gigs. So far, so rock and roll.

It's not long after bassist Chris Batten and drummer Rob Rolfe appear, however, that this hardcore image takes a thorough battering. Settling down to a cup of tea, Batten reveals his love for a brew: “I get really pissed off when we go to other parts of Europe or to America and they only have shitty Lipton tea – it really frustrates me.”

Fortunately, Rolfe, with one half of his head shaved, manages a little better. He holds off deflating my wild-child expectations for a good minute – right up until the moment I notice the stick man tattoo on his left arm. He's clearly happy I asked: “Do you like it? It is a birthmark. His name’s Harold. For years now I’ve been drawing him on with biro, but I thought he should be his own person, so now he’s there forever and I can’t get rid of him. Let’s hope he doesn’t get a drug habit!”

Decorated skin pigmentation aside, Enter Shikari came to prominence in 2007 with debut album Take to the Skies. Their fusion of genres captured the attention of the music media and they were soon hailed as "the next big thing," with newcomer accolades and awards in tow. But despite the oft-rehearsed transitoriness of early hype, Batten seems distinctly optimistic. “I certainly don’t think we’ve come to the height of our career yet," he says. "It’s still building – and the buzz thing that went on when we first started being noticed by the press was weird, because we’d been around for years before that anyway.”

Enter Shikari do have something of a defence against becoming yesterday's hippest rock stars – namely that those who would consign them to the music press chip papers haven't yet worked out whether they are, indeed, rock stars. Or pop stars; or electro kids, for that matter.

“The media often try to lock us into a genre," explains Rolfe. "They hate it when they can’t label a band so they make up stupid names like 'Nintendo new rave'."

 “That was always the way with us in the early days," adds Batten. "A lot of people just didn’t get it at all. We had a mate who used to call it 'electrock' - that was pretty bad.”

Indeed, because few record labels were scrambling to sign such an ill-defined—or indefinable—act at the time, the band opted to release their first album themselves. Quite a step up, then, is their new deal with Atlantic, in which the foursome have found themselves in a position to negotiate their own terms. “We’ve managed to wheel our way through a major label system without actually signing our lives away," boasts Rolfe, "which is pretty funky. It’s a weight off our shoulders; but at the same time we get to be the independent band we were.”

And it would appear that their unconventional route to fame has served them well, smoothing out a fairly pleasant path towards solid reviews from both fans and critics: “We never really felt any pressure," muses Rolfe. "Not from a label, because we didn’t have one, and never from the fans because they’ve always been on our side.”

Of course, that's not to say the journey has been entirely plain sailing. It's rumoured that the new album, Common Dreads, was recorded in the less-than salubrious setting of a garden shed. “It’s not exactly a shed!" Rolfe protests. "It’s a rehearsal studio built in Chris’s dad’s back garden.”

Batten interjects: "Funnily enough I got an email yesterday – my dad forwarded it on to me from Best Sheds or something like that. They’ve got a website and they wanted to put it up there. But it’s not a shed!”

Lacking a subscription to the aforementioned publication, I'm unable to verify this. Perhaps easier to confirm, though, are the scores of positive reviews Enter Shikari have been receiving for their energetic live shows. "It’s what we do, it’s what we love and it’s what we’ve grown up doing,” says Rolfe. "We’ve been touring since we started and sure, we play the same songs every night, but every venue, audience and gig is different. We’ve never played the same show twice."

It's this enthusiasm for live performance that the four look set to bring to Edinburgh's HMV Picture House this August. Indeed, it's not the size of the venue that's worrying the pair, but the seating arrangements. "Balconies are always really annoying," complains Rolfe, "because everyone sits down at the top. There’s no sitting down at our gigs!”

“I’m sure we’ll enjoy it though. We do every time we come to Scotland.” Provided, one suspects, that there's a nice cuppa waiting backstage.

Enter Shikari play the HMV Picturehouse on August 27th