On the evening of Friday, September 27th, I attended an Enter Shikari concert. Now, to a normal person reading this, you may be asking, "What does that sentence mean?" To me, that sentence means I got to see one of my favorite bands after a year and a half of not seeing them. That sentence means I remember when they announced the tour, and there was no show within a few hundred miles, then they decided to add a show in the area on their day off. That sentence means that I got to release all the energy that had been building up inside me for about three weeks, at that point.
The concert was Friday, September 27th, 2019 in Worcester. The venue they played was The Palladium. This venue has two stages - a big stage downstairs that can fit roughly about 2,300 concert-goers, and a small upstairs stage that can fit about 500 concert-goers. The upstairs stage also has no barrier, which means no security in front of the stage. This allows for more intimate experiences between fans and the musical artists playing the shows on this smaller stage. Enter Shikari played the smaller stage, and all I can say is - it was actual insanity. The last time I saw them play this stage back in 2016, the show was almost stopped because it had gotten too rowdy. That did not happen this time, but I'll walk you through what happened.
There was a local band that opened, In Good Nature. They were decent. Nothing too special about them. They also went on a half hour earlier than the online scheduled time for the show to start, so we missed a little bit of them. I went with my brother and our friend, and none of us were too concerned about missing part of their set. The second band, Can't Swim, was great. The three of us had seen them over the summer at a festival in New Jersey, but I had grown to like them a lot more after that show in the summer. I guess, at this show in Worcester, they had grown to like me as well. I was wearing a banana costume, and the vocalist, Chris LoPorto was interacting with me a bit, and it helped get the crowd energized and ready for Enter Shikari. They played a couple of my favorites like "My Queen" and "'sometimes you meet the right people at the wrong times,'" but it was right before they played "What's Your Big Idea?" that LoPorto shouted into the microphone, "Hey banana man, go start the circle pit. That's the shit I love to see." For those of you who don't know, a circle pit is when people in the crowd run around in a counter-clockwise circle. These are usually done for fast songs at punk, rock, hardcore, or metal concerts.
All right, onto Enter Shikari. I can't put into words how incredible their performance was. This was my fourth time seeing them, and possibly my favorite time seeing them, as well. They came on stage, and they opened with their song "Stop the Clock," which was just released in the middle of August. Amazingly, just about everyone in the crowd had learned the lyrics already, including myself, and we were all yelling the words right back at their vocalist, Rou Reynolds. Even on the first song, the mosh pit was already crazy and sweaty. Good thing they were only on stage for about an hour and a half! Yup, everyone in the crowd was exerting full energy for almost the entire time the band was on (or off) stage.
They played crowd favorites like "Destabilize" and "Juggernauts," but there were two songs in their set that really stood out to me. The first one was "The Paddington Frisk," which I will link a video to below. This is a song that is about a minute and a half long, but the amount of energy in this song is unmatched by just about any other song they have put out. For this song, the vocalist, Rou, and their bassist, Chris Batten, went down into the crowd and called for a circle pit around them. Rou ended up back on stage somehow, but Chris stayed in the crowd for the whole song, and that really got the crowd going.
For the next song they performed, "Tribalism," Rou came back into the crowd for the entirety of the song, and Chris returned to the stage. It is important to note that this show marked the first performance of this song in the United States (Enter Shikari is a band from the UK), as well as this song's third overall performance since its release in 2010. Rou was wandering around the crowd, rapping and screaming his verses along with just about everyone in the crowd. Towards the end of the song, he stood up on the bar and started dancing along to the song while he was still singing. He then wandered back to the stage, and the rest of the performance continued.
Another standout moment was when the band came out for their encore. A small sample of the song "Slipshod" had been played as they were walking back onto stage, but the samples stopped when a fan in the crowd handed $100 to Chris, the bassist. Chris said "I don't want your money. We already took enough of that." After talking to the fan for a minute, and after a group huddle the band had done, they did not play "Slipshod." The fan had apparently been asking the band to play "Mothership," which is another crowd favorite. I guess the guy was upset they did not include it earlier in the set, where it had been previous nights of the tour, so he requested they play it. They played the song, but they gave the guy his $100 back. Thank you to that guy who asked for that. "Mothership" is a crazy song, and I'm glad they played it that night.
Overall, this night was very unforgettable. I have several stories to tell about this show. There are a few videos someone uploaded to YouTube of the show, and there's a video the band uploaded to their Instagram TV page that I found myself in. As promised, here is that video of The Paddington Frisk. If you see a banana running around, that's me!
CAUTION: STRONG LANGUAGE
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