Enter Shikari, the making of A Flash Flood Of Colour, Kerrang! July 16, 2011
TO GET to Thailand’s Karma Sound Studios, you pull off a palm-fringed highway frantic with the buzz of mopeds and rumble of lorries. Down a long side road, you take a sharp left at the beach, gazing towards distant islands that dot the horizon. Past a ramshackle bar you turn left again onto a pockmarked, potholed track that seems to lead into a wall of jungle, humidity and sun-beaten heat.
Eventually, down that track and nestled seemingly in its own peaceful stretch of paradise, lies the studio in which Enter Shikari are making their third record. It is, it’s fair to say, stunning.
A security guard opens gates that lead to an open-plan villa. It’s here the band have been staying, recording and playing endless games on the ping pong table inside the front door. To the left are sofas and a TV, to the right a table and kitchen. Outside through the patio doors, is a pool, small gym, plush garden and sunlounger-filled patio.
Oddly, though, there is no sign of a band. No-one is sunbathing, no-one is swimming and no-one is lounging with a beer. In fact, somehow in this tropical heaven work is being done – hard work, as it turns out.
To the right of the house, nestled in the villa’s grounds, is the studio. Massive, state-of-the-art and impressive, it is currently awash with the sound of crashing cymbals and otherworldly synth noises as Enter Shikari’s drummer, Rob Rolfe, batters away to the electronic sounds his frontman, Rou Reynolds, has laid down. In the control room the rest of the band, guitarist Rory Cleland and bassist Chris Batten, watch on intently while their producer, former Sikth guitarist Dan Weller, and engineer Tim Morris twiddle various knobs.
As Kerrang! walks in, blinking from the sun outside, they pause and say hello. Before they resume, Rou takes in the view of the pool and palm trees outside then says, with considerable understatement, “We’ve probably landed on our feet a bit here…”
IF YOU were to bet on any band recording in the sort of luxury that Karma Sound provides, Enter Shikari would not be it. From day one, they have been the antithesis to the rock star game.
After touring their dance-punk-metal hybrid relentlessly around Britain after their 2003 formation, they built up their fanbase to a level that, still unsigned, they sold out London’s now sadly demolished 2000-capacity Astoria venue on the strength of word-of-mouth alone. This, clearly, was a band for whom DIY was a way of life, rather than the results of a trip to B&Q.
Their first album, Take To The Skies, continued that independence of spirit: not only was its content both subversive and pointed, its music was unique too. Bands have combined rock and dance before but in Enter Shikari’s hands there was something experimental and berserk about it: as though a hardcore band were trapped inside Tetris and were battling its soundtrack to escape. Meanwhile, from their live shows, it was obvious this was a band comfortable with the term incendiary.
Their second album, Common Dreads, was more political. Dance producer Andy Gray oversaw a record that was deeply musically explorative, blending dubstep with hardcore, trance with metal and electronica with punk. Its environmental fears and lyrical denunciation of global economics and politics put the views of the band – and, particularly, those of frontman Rou – to the forefront. This, it seemed, was a group who were honest, creative, real and of the people.
And then they flew to Thailand to record their third album in luxury. What a bunch of sell outs.
“Yeah, pretty much,” says bassist Chris, laughing. “Actually, we did have to think about coming here because people will definitely think that.”
In reality, the reasons for recording here were musical: away from home, away from distractions, they are entirely free to concentrate. With the studio on hand 24 hours a day, they can record both when and for how long they like. It certainly beats commuting from their St Albans base to a grimy London studio in Old Street as they initially planned (and, indeed, will do for the second half of the recording process).
In fact, ask the band what the best thing is about recording in Thailand, and they reply that it means they don’t have to commute. Any band who can wander around under this sun and grudgingly think, “at least we’re not on the Tube”, is a long way from selling out.
“We don’t have to think about anything other than the music,” says Rory. “I’ve found it easier to focus on the big picture here.”
But the curious thing is that, with such a beautiful place on hand, they’ve actually been working extremely hard. Kerrang! spends nearly a week with them and doesn’t spot them relaxing by the pool in the day once. Instead, there is admirable diligence. From 10am until nearly midnight they work, first laying down drums, then building sounds on top of the synths Rou recorded in England. How on earth do they concentrate when, for most, this would be a holiday?
“The studio is just more exciting for me, I’m buzzing,” says Rou. “Finally the little song embryos in our heads are taking form. I’d much rather be doing that than be in the pool.”
ENTER SHIKARI’S third album started, as with most things in this band, with Rou. He is – as both bandmates and producer Dan are quick to point out – stage one of the creative process. He’s so focussed on the album you wonder if he’s noticed he’s in Thailand at all. When not in the studio – where he haunts the control room sofa – he’s writing lyrics to the songs which started out as ideas he’d sing into his mobile phone.
It was from those mobile phone sketches that the album was born: pieced together by the band and incorporating a vast swathe of influences including rap, dubstep, drum ‘n’ bass, hardcore, metal… you name it.
“We’ve never worried whether what we’re doing is hardcore, or drum ‘n’ bass or whatever,” says Rory. “We just chuck in a bit of anything. We have one song that starts off very heavy but it moves into something with a funk guitar like a Michael Jackson track. We said, ‘Let’s not be afraid to experiment’.”
In fact Enter Shikari never seem to shy away from the edge. It’s why mad sounds will bubble up from nowhere, why songs structures can be unusual, why it’s still impossible to find a band who sound much like them.
“We want people to hear things they didn’t expect,” says Chris. “The aim is for them to say: ‘What the hell is this?’”
“Have we ever gone too far? Erm…” adds Rob, looking perplexed. “No. I don’t think we have. Ever.”
The reason, says Rou, is because they’d get bored otherwise. It’s why this album, too, is full of different angles.
“We’ve played with bands who are just continuously writing the same song over and over again,” he says. “Maybe we’ve got a short attention span but we can’t do that. We get so excited by different styles that there isn’t a reason to hold back.”
And so they never have.
AT THE time of Kerrang!’s visit to Karma Sound, Enter Shikari have been recording for 10 days. By coincidence, the songs that are most complete are the album’s angriest. There are, the band assure us, plenty of others that are less furious. But the track they’re working on today, tentatively titled Tyrannosaurus, is up there on the rage scale.
We join Rou as he stands in a vocal booth thoughtfully festooned in glittering mood lights by producer Dan. The singer is in the process of going bug-eyed crazy. He bounces on the spot between takes, approaching the microphone frenzied and out of breath, urgency seeping from every lyric. And exploding from his spoken-word verses, booming, tumbling drums clatter before experimental synths give way to heavy, jagged guitars. By the time Rou is finished, it feels as though we’ve been inside the apocalypse. And the song is still only half finished.
“I guess that is one of the really pissed off songs,” says Rou later. “It is influenced by everything going on in Egypt, Libya, North Africa and the Middle East – all those countries in the middle of revolutions. It’s about realising that democracies are often just polite dictatorships. Governments don’t work for the people.”
Again, there is political content on the album – although not exclusively so – and it’s clear from the books scattered around the place that Enter Shikari are a thoughtful bunch. Rou is reading philosopher Bertrand Russell’s Religion And Science, Chris is reading John Fowles’ The Collector, a book about wealth ending up with those least intellectually able to deal with it. It suggests there is more than political posturing at play: Enter Shikari research their ideals.
“Personally, I don’t believe in politics,” says Rou. “Politicians don’t do anything anymore – they don’t know how to solve poverty, world hunger and climate change. It’s the people at the height of science and technology that should be directing humanity.”
It’s a topic he addresses on this album.
“If you analyse where society’s going,” he says, “then it’s clear it’s heading to collapse. There are very few fossil fuels and hydro-carbons left, so one of the songs, Arguing With Thermometers, is about how we’ll be going to the Arctic next to rape that of the last remaining oil on earth. A lot of the album is about people’s blindness.”
Normally quiet and thoughtful – in fact he’s by far the quietest member of the band, next to ebullient Rob, urbane Chris and friendly Rory – Rou gets more and more forthright as he talks. Then he pauses for a second and checks himself.
“When I try to write personal songs about my life, I just can’t feel it,” he says. “I can’t be honest. If everything was fine, if society was a lot better, I’d be lost – I’d have to approach music in a whole different way. I can’t write about anything else. And I’ve tried, I’ve definitely tried.”
IT’S BEEN nearly a week since Enter Shikari had a day off out here. They went, then, on a deep sea fishing trip in which several eventful things happened. The first was that they caught a shark – a small one, but a shark nonetheless. The second was that their producer stepped on a sea urchin, whose poison would wait until he was on the flight home to act, requiring the pilot to utter the fateful words “Is there a doctor on board?” (After a nervy, heart-racing, sweat-drenched flight, he was fine in the end.)
Given the intensity of work, though, it’s felt a night on the tiles might be in order. Fortunately, a few miles from the studio is the city of Pattaya – notorious as Thailand’s sex tourist capital, and home to a bewildering array of gogo bars, knocking shops, massage parlours, saunas, prostitutes, transsexuals, transvestites and overweight Europeans getting grubby kicks with young girls. It’s a sight, quite rightly, Enter Shikari want to see as curious bystanders.
We go first for a meal, then delve into Walking Street, the epicentre of the sex trade. It’s a neon-lit, red-light splattered, booze-swilling, chaos of tourist crowds, hookers and pimps. From every bar girls scream for our business. From every window, doorway or balcony, someone offers sex. It is, in equal parts, confusing, dazzling, hilarious and desperately sad and the band react accordingly – laughing, recoiling, then retreating.
So it is that, in the midst of all this carnal carnage, Enter Shikari can be found playing Connect 4 (badly) with the staff at the only bar at which sex is not for sale.
“This isn’t exactly the place for a romantic dinner with your girlfriend,” says Rob, nail-on-headishly. “It’s a spectacle but I don’t know how long I could stay here. This is hardly the real Thai experience. Most towns and villages aren’t full of ladyboy hookers in gogo bars. Thank fuck.”
Still, the booze flows here. A series of bars follows as the night grows bleary. In one, a toilet attendant offers unsolicited massages. Rob has just enough time to say, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ before he realises the surprise masseur has the hands of a wizard. Shortly, the entire party is queuing up to have their backs and necks clicked by a complete stranger in the bogs. It’s that sort of evening
Another, the latest in a long list, features a roof that opens at 2am and a half-naked girl, visible only from the neck down, swimming in a tiny tank. When we discover a zebra-print sex pool too, we make a hasty exit to the calm of the studio.
Well, the relative calm. Because, after a raucous cab ride, the night ends with Enter Shikari wondering how possible it might be to jump from the villa balcony into the pool below. Naked.
As both Chris and Rory prove – hurling themselves nude from on high and yelling, for unknown reasons, “Skinnenzie Dippenzie!” – it turns out to be quite possible indeed.
THE NEXT morning the band all appear irritatingly fresh and hangover-free. In fact, they start work in the studio early. But last night lingers.
“It’s a mixture of desperately lonely men and really poor, pretty Thai girls,” says Rory. “One side want sex, and the other need money. It’s a strange uneven relationship.”
“I hate seeing places get exploited,” adds Rob. “The English are so bad for that – they go abroad, get really pissed and abuse the place for their seedy good times.”
It’s refreshing then, when later, we wander around the local town that lies a mile’s stroll down the beach. It’s enjoyably free of ladyboys, hookers, pimps and, indeed, gogo bars. In fact, it’s an ordinary fishing town and Enter Shikari are much more at home here, looking at the temple, soaking in the atmosphere and, bizarrely, stumbling across a baby elephant and her handler.
“We do try to make an effort to look at the culture wherever we go,” says Rou. “We want to find out what people think, what they believe in, what they think about us. It gives you perspective.”
And then it’s back to work. In the studio, Rob is finishing his drum parts, playing to a track called System Meltdown that’s full of blazing synths, build-ups and end-of-the-world guitars. The studio’s Thai in-house engineer, Bobo Ekrangsi, pokes his head round the door and grins wildly at the squelching noises erupting from the speakers.
Elsewhere on the album – only half completed when Kerrang! hears it – there are dubstep influences as before, symphonic electronics, fluttering dance beats, drum ‘n’ bass and heavy guitars. It’s hard to know how these songs will sound when finished but, judging them from just guitars, drums and synths, they appear direct, experimental and provocative. There are times the tracks appear so layered with electronic bleeps and bloops that they’re fiendishly hard to follow – only when Chris’s bass, or Rob’s beats are added do they, like a Magic Eye picture, emerge thrillingly into sight.
And they sound so urban, these songs, so ingrained in city dirt, political ire, club-room sweat and lyrical grit, that it’s hard to tally them with the sunshine and palm trees outside.
“I was worried about that when we first got here,” admits Rory. “I thought, ‘How are we going to make a grimy album in paradise? How are we going to resist the temptation to make a reggae album?’”
Then Rob adds: “But some of the stuff we’ve been doing here is so filthy, dirty and heavy as fuck that I don’t think we’ve lost it.”
It’s because, as Rou says, the songs were written back in the UK and so still have that edge to them.
“We’re still angry at the same things, even if we are lucky enough to be able to record in a really nice place,” says the frontman. “There’s not going to be a lilo influence on the record.”
He is worried, though, that we might leave with the wrong impression of the record.
“It’s not an angry album on the whole; it’s very varied,” he says. “There’s another track that’s the most epic, soundscapey thing we’ve done. It’s the furthest from angry it could be.”
Shortly before we leave we hear it as Rou records its acoustic opening. Called Stalemate, it builds from his intimate guitar and voice into sweeping electronic washes: a song full of atmosphere and wide-open spaces. “It really tugs at the heartstrings,” says Rou, “hopefully…”
“The lyrics are really special – it’s going to be very meaningful,” says Chris. “There won’t be any screaming in that song.”
And, listening to the demos the band made before they came out here, there are others too which are more considered than the angry tracks we’ve heard. Some will be live stormers, some put a political and global message at their heart, some are among the best songs Enter Shikari have written. And all of them, every last one, sound like nobody else on earth.
AS WE leave, Enter Shikari are as we found them. The palms sway in the breeze and the strawberry margaritas flow in the five star hotel along the beach, but the band are in the studio working. Their tans suggest they have spent some time relaxing, but it can’t have been for long.
In fact, being here has focussed them. Kerrang! heads to the airport with the rattling beats and clanging synths of a dirty urban record, punctuated by beauty and harmony, ringing in our heads. Throughout, geo-political, environmental and social concerns bellow from within its electronic hardcore.
Yet all of the above was recorded in a paradise where it would be easy to ignore such things. For Enter Shikari to have made such inventive music and important thoughts resonate in a place others use for holidays, means something.
It means they are doing something special.
© Tom Bryant 2012
Eventually, down that track and nestled seemingly in its own peaceful stretch of paradise, lies the studio in which Enter Shikari are making their third record. It is, it’s fair to say, stunning.
A security guard opens gates that lead to an open-plan villa. It’s here the band have been staying, recording and playing endless games on the ping pong table inside the front door. To the left are sofas and a TV, to the right a table and kitchen. Outside through the patio doors, is a pool, small gym, plush garden and sunlounger-filled patio.
Oddly, though, there is no sign of a band. No-one is sunbathing, no-one is swimming and no-one is lounging with a beer. In fact, somehow in this tropical heaven work is being done – hard work, as it turns out.
To the right of the house, nestled in the villa’s grounds, is the studio. Massive, state-of-the-art and impressive, it is currently awash with the sound of crashing cymbals and otherworldly synth noises as Enter Shikari’s drummer, Rob Rolfe, batters away to the electronic sounds his frontman, Rou Reynolds, has laid down. In the control room the rest of the band, guitarist Rory Cleland and bassist Chris Batten, watch on intently while their producer, former Sikth guitarist Dan Weller, and engineer Tim Morris twiddle various knobs.
As Kerrang! walks in, blinking from the sun outside, they pause and say hello. Before they resume, Rou takes in the view of the pool and palm trees outside then says, with considerable understatement, “We’ve probably landed on our feet a bit here…”
IF YOU were to bet on any band recording in the sort of luxury that Karma Sound provides, Enter Shikari would not be it. From day one, they have been the antithesis to the rock star game.
After touring their dance-punk-metal hybrid relentlessly around Britain after their 2003 formation, they built up their fanbase to a level that, still unsigned, they sold out London’s now sadly demolished 2000-capacity Astoria venue on the strength of word-of-mouth alone. This, clearly, was a band for whom DIY was a way of life, rather than the results of a trip to B&Q.
Their first album, Take To The Skies, continued that independence of spirit: not only was its content both subversive and pointed, its music was unique too. Bands have combined rock and dance before but in Enter Shikari’s hands there was something experimental and berserk about it: as though a hardcore band were trapped inside Tetris and were battling its soundtrack to escape. Meanwhile, from their live shows, it was obvious this was a band comfortable with the term incendiary.
Their second album, Common Dreads, was more political. Dance producer Andy Gray oversaw a record that was deeply musically explorative, blending dubstep with hardcore, trance with metal and electronica with punk. Its environmental fears and lyrical denunciation of global economics and politics put the views of the band – and, particularly, those of frontman Rou – to the forefront. This, it seemed, was a group who were honest, creative, real and of the people.
And then they flew to Thailand to record their third album in luxury. What a bunch of sell outs.
“Yeah, pretty much,” says bassist Chris, laughing. “Actually, we did have to think about coming here because people will definitely think that.”
In reality, the reasons for recording here were musical: away from home, away from distractions, they are entirely free to concentrate. With the studio on hand 24 hours a day, they can record both when and for how long they like. It certainly beats commuting from their St Albans base to a grimy London studio in Old Street as they initially planned (and, indeed, will do for the second half of the recording process).
In fact, ask the band what the best thing is about recording in Thailand, and they reply that it means they don’t have to commute. Any band who can wander around under this sun and grudgingly think, “at least we’re not on the Tube”, is a long way from selling out.
“We don’t have to think about anything other than the music,” says Rory. “I’ve found it easier to focus on the big picture here.”
But the curious thing is that, with such a beautiful place on hand, they’ve actually been working extremely hard. Kerrang! spends nearly a week with them and doesn’t spot them relaxing by the pool in the day once. Instead, there is admirable diligence. From 10am until nearly midnight they work, first laying down drums, then building sounds on top of the synths Rou recorded in England. How on earth do they concentrate when, for most, this would be a holiday?
“The studio is just more exciting for me, I’m buzzing,” says Rou. “Finally the little song embryos in our heads are taking form. I’d much rather be doing that than be in the pool.”
ENTER SHIKARI’S third album started, as with most things in this band, with Rou. He is – as both bandmates and producer Dan are quick to point out – stage one of the creative process. He’s so focussed on the album you wonder if he’s noticed he’s in Thailand at all. When not in the studio – where he haunts the control room sofa – he’s writing lyrics to the songs which started out as ideas he’d sing into his mobile phone.
It was from those mobile phone sketches that the album was born: pieced together by the band and incorporating a vast swathe of influences including rap, dubstep, drum ‘n’ bass, hardcore, metal… you name it.
“We’ve never worried whether what we’re doing is hardcore, or drum ‘n’ bass or whatever,” says Rory. “We just chuck in a bit of anything. We have one song that starts off very heavy but it moves into something with a funk guitar like a Michael Jackson track. We said, ‘Let’s not be afraid to experiment’.”
In fact Enter Shikari never seem to shy away from the edge. It’s why mad sounds will bubble up from nowhere, why songs structures can be unusual, why it’s still impossible to find a band who sound much like them.
“We want people to hear things they didn’t expect,” says Chris. “The aim is for them to say: ‘What the hell is this?’”
“Have we ever gone too far? Erm…” adds Rob, looking perplexed. “No. I don’t think we have. Ever.”
The reason, says Rou, is because they’d get bored otherwise. It’s why this album, too, is full of different angles.
“We’ve played with bands who are just continuously writing the same song over and over again,” he says. “Maybe we’ve got a short attention span but we can’t do that. We get so excited by different styles that there isn’t a reason to hold back.”
And so they never have.
AT THE time of Kerrang!’s visit to Karma Sound, Enter Shikari have been recording for 10 days. By coincidence, the songs that are most complete are the album’s angriest. There are, the band assure us, plenty of others that are less furious. But the track they’re working on today, tentatively titled Tyrannosaurus, is up there on the rage scale.
We join Rou as he stands in a vocal booth thoughtfully festooned in glittering mood lights by producer Dan. The singer is in the process of going bug-eyed crazy. He bounces on the spot between takes, approaching the microphone frenzied and out of breath, urgency seeping from every lyric. And exploding from his spoken-word verses, booming, tumbling drums clatter before experimental synths give way to heavy, jagged guitars. By the time Rou is finished, it feels as though we’ve been inside the apocalypse. And the song is still only half finished.
“I guess that is one of the really pissed off songs,” says Rou later. “It is influenced by everything going on in Egypt, Libya, North Africa and the Middle East – all those countries in the middle of revolutions. It’s about realising that democracies are often just polite dictatorships. Governments don’t work for the people.”
Again, there is political content on the album – although not exclusively so – and it’s clear from the books scattered around the place that Enter Shikari are a thoughtful bunch. Rou is reading philosopher Bertrand Russell’s Religion And Science, Chris is reading John Fowles’ The Collector, a book about wealth ending up with those least intellectually able to deal with it. It suggests there is more than political posturing at play: Enter Shikari research their ideals.
“Personally, I don’t believe in politics,” says Rou. “Politicians don’t do anything anymore – they don’t know how to solve poverty, world hunger and climate change. It’s the people at the height of science and technology that should be directing humanity.”
It’s a topic he addresses on this album.
“If you analyse where society’s going,” he says, “then it’s clear it’s heading to collapse. There are very few fossil fuels and hydro-carbons left, so one of the songs, Arguing With Thermometers, is about how we’ll be going to the Arctic next to rape that of the last remaining oil on earth. A lot of the album is about people’s blindness.”
Normally quiet and thoughtful – in fact he’s by far the quietest member of the band, next to ebullient Rob, urbane Chris and friendly Rory – Rou gets more and more forthright as he talks. Then he pauses for a second and checks himself.
“When I try to write personal songs about my life, I just can’t feel it,” he says. “I can’t be honest. If everything was fine, if society was a lot better, I’d be lost – I’d have to approach music in a whole different way. I can’t write about anything else. And I’ve tried, I’ve definitely tried.”
IT’S BEEN nearly a week since Enter Shikari had a day off out here. They went, then, on a deep sea fishing trip in which several eventful things happened. The first was that they caught a shark – a small one, but a shark nonetheless. The second was that their producer stepped on a sea urchin, whose poison would wait until he was on the flight home to act, requiring the pilot to utter the fateful words “Is there a doctor on board?” (After a nervy, heart-racing, sweat-drenched flight, he was fine in the end.)
Given the intensity of work, though, it’s felt a night on the tiles might be in order. Fortunately, a few miles from the studio is the city of Pattaya – notorious as Thailand’s sex tourist capital, and home to a bewildering array of gogo bars, knocking shops, massage parlours, saunas, prostitutes, transsexuals, transvestites and overweight Europeans getting grubby kicks with young girls. It’s a sight, quite rightly, Enter Shikari want to see as curious bystanders.
We go first for a meal, then delve into Walking Street, the epicentre of the sex trade. It’s a neon-lit, red-light splattered, booze-swilling, chaos of tourist crowds, hookers and pimps. From every bar girls scream for our business. From every window, doorway or balcony, someone offers sex. It is, in equal parts, confusing, dazzling, hilarious and desperately sad and the band react accordingly – laughing, recoiling, then retreating.
So it is that, in the midst of all this carnal carnage, Enter Shikari can be found playing Connect 4 (badly) with the staff at the only bar at which sex is not for sale.
“This isn’t exactly the place for a romantic dinner with your girlfriend,” says Rob, nail-on-headishly. “It’s a spectacle but I don’t know how long I could stay here. This is hardly the real Thai experience. Most towns and villages aren’t full of ladyboy hookers in gogo bars. Thank fuck.”
Still, the booze flows here. A series of bars follows as the night grows bleary. In one, a toilet attendant offers unsolicited massages. Rob has just enough time to say, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ before he realises the surprise masseur has the hands of a wizard. Shortly, the entire party is queuing up to have their backs and necks clicked by a complete stranger in the bogs. It’s that sort of evening
Another, the latest in a long list, features a roof that opens at 2am and a half-naked girl, visible only from the neck down, swimming in a tiny tank. When we discover a zebra-print sex pool too, we make a hasty exit to the calm of the studio.
Well, the relative calm. Because, after a raucous cab ride, the night ends with Enter Shikari wondering how possible it might be to jump from the villa balcony into the pool below. Naked.
As both Chris and Rory prove – hurling themselves nude from on high and yelling, for unknown reasons, “Skinnenzie Dippenzie!” – it turns out to be quite possible indeed.
THE NEXT morning the band all appear irritatingly fresh and hangover-free. In fact, they start work in the studio early. But last night lingers.
“It’s a mixture of desperately lonely men and really poor, pretty Thai girls,” says Rory. “One side want sex, and the other need money. It’s a strange uneven relationship.”
“I hate seeing places get exploited,” adds Rob. “The English are so bad for that – they go abroad, get really pissed and abuse the place for their seedy good times.”
It’s refreshing then, when later, we wander around the local town that lies a mile’s stroll down the beach. It’s enjoyably free of ladyboys, hookers, pimps and, indeed, gogo bars. In fact, it’s an ordinary fishing town and Enter Shikari are much more at home here, looking at the temple, soaking in the atmosphere and, bizarrely, stumbling across a baby elephant and her handler.
“We do try to make an effort to look at the culture wherever we go,” says Rou. “We want to find out what people think, what they believe in, what they think about us. It gives you perspective.”
And then it’s back to work. In the studio, Rob is finishing his drum parts, playing to a track called System Meltdown that’s full of blazing synths, build-ups and end-of-the-world guitars. The studio’s Thai in-house engineer, Bobo Ekrangsi, pokes his head round the door and grins wildly at the squelching noises erupting from the speakers.
Elsewhere on the album – only half completed when Kerrang! hears it – there are dubstep influences as before, symphonic electronics, fluttering dance beats, drum ‘n’ bass and heavy guitars. It’s hard to know how these songs will sound when finished but, judging them from just guitars, drums and synths, they appear direct, experimental and provocative. There are times the tracks appear so layered with electronic bleeps and bloops that they’re fiendishly hard to follow – only when Chris’s bass, or Rob’s beats are added do they, like a Magic Eye picture, emerge thrillingly into sight.
And they sound so urban, these songs, so ingrained in city dirt, political ire, club-room sweat and lyrical grit, that it’s hard to tally them with the sunshine and palm trees outside.
“I was worried about that when we first got here,” admits Rory. “I thought, ‘How are we going to make a grimy album in paradise? How are we going to resist the temptation to make a reggae album?’”
Then Rob adds: “But some of the stuff we’ve been doing here is so filthy, dirty and heavy as fuck that I don’t think we’ve lost it.”
It’s because, as Rou says, the songs were written back in the UK and so still have that edge to them.
“We’re still angry at the same things, even if we are lucky enough to be able to record in a really nice place,” says the frontman. “There’s not going to be a lilo influence on the record.”
He is worried, though, that we might leave with the wrong impression of the record.
“It’s not an angry album on the whole; it’s very varied,” he says. “There’s another track that’s the most epic, soundscapey thing we’ve done. It’s the furthest from angry it could be.”
Shortly before we leave we hear it as Rou records its acoustic opening. Called Stalemate, it builds from his intimate guitar and voice into sweeping electronic washes: a song full of atmosphere and wide-open spaces. “It really tugs at the heartstrings,” says Rou, “hopefully…”
“The lyrics are really special – it’s going to be very meaningful,” says Chris. “There won’t be any screaming in that song.”
And, listening to the demos the band made before they came out here, there are others too which are more considered than the angry tracks we’ve heard. Some will be live stormers, some put a political and global message at their heart, some are among the best songs Enter Shikari have written. And all of them, every last one, sound like nobody else on earth.
AS WE leave, Enter Shikari are as we found them. The palms sway in the breeze and the strawberry margaritas flow in the five star hotel along the beach, but the band are in the studio working. Their tans suggest they have spent some time relaxing, but it can’t have been for long.
In fact, being here has focussed them. Kerrang! heads to the airport with the rattling beats and clanging synths of a dirty urban record, punctuated by beauty and harmony, ringing in our heads. Throughout, geo-political, environmental and social concerns bellow from within its electronic hardcore.
Yet all of the above was recorded in a paradise where it would be easy to ignore such things. For Enter Shikari to have made such inventive music and important thoughts resonate in a place others use for holidays, means something.
It means they are doing something special.
© Tom Bryant 2012
