Enter Shikari at Alexandra Palace

Enter Shikari came to Alexandra Palace on Saturday night as part of an extensive UK/European tour. It’s the band’s first headline run since the huge Stop the Clocks Tour, which ran from December 2018 until April 2019. Saturday’s concert had been rescheduled twice: initially it was planned for November 2020. So it’s been a long wait for fans.

More than a year late and without bassist Chris Batten, who tested positive for Covid, Enter Shikari took to the grand stage of North London’s biggest venue for this sold-out performance. Samples of Batten’s vocals and bass were used from the previous show on 27^th November, which cleverly smoothed over the lack his absence. After such a long wait, nothing was going to keep the rest of the band from giving the fans what they came for.

It was a huge show, with a setlist of nearly 20 songs and a highly sophisticated light display. They started with the opening track from their latest album (2020’s Nothing Is True and Everything Is Impossible), The Great Unknown. The song’s urgently firing synths are like a rock take on the Prodigy’s seminal Out of Space: they give a manic, high-energy feeling that is perfect for starting a long-awaited live show. From there, they continued with the raucous Destabilise and the drum’n’bass inflected Sssnakepit from 2012’s A Flash Flood of Colour.

Naturally, the majority of the set came from the most recent album, which is their most experimental to date, combining their hard vocals and rabble-rousing political mentality, with one track recorded by a full orchestra and generally more sonically adventurous songwriting. Lead singer Rou Reynolds played a blinder, going from raging anarcho-humanist to star-gazing romantic on an acoustic version of Constellations. The crowd loved every second of it. An encore of five songs rounded off the show, with the hard-boiled idealism of Tina and  The Dreamer’s Hotel leading into a love letter to unconventionality, Live Outside. It was definitely worth the wait.

Jessica Wall
Photos: Virginie Viche

For further information and future events visit Enter Shikari’s website here.

Watch the video for the single The Great Unknown here: