Live Review: Enter Shikari - OVO Wembley Arena, London 17/02/2024
2023 was a pretty good year for Enter Shikari. A sold out string of intimate shows, a first UK No.1 album, being the headliner for the first fully sold-out iteration of Slam Dunk Festival, a Heavy Music Award for Best Single… even for a band often lauded as one of the best UK and best live bands in the world, from the likes of Kerrang, Rock Sound and NME, 2023 was a year of accolades and firsts. Following it up with a headline show at the 12,000 capacity OVO Arena Wembley, then, was a no-brainer — and the fact that it resulted in an early gig of the year contender was just icing on the cake.
First up came Noahfinnce. Watching him go from a YouTuber posting covers, to signing a record deal post-Covid, and, finally, playing arenas, is inspiring to behold; combine that with his being somewhat of a transgender icon, particularly in the music industry — even spending a few minutes of his limited time on stage playing snippets of anti-gender political rhetoric, before calling out Rishi Sunak — and Noahfinnce is very much a name to keep an eye on. And, with his debut album out on 8th March 2024, his rise isn’t set to plateau any time soon.
With a litany of tunes, whether in the spirit of legends like Green Day — referenced prior to ‘LIFE’S A BIT’ — or the fantastically rocky, unreleased track ‘Lovely Ladies’, Noahfinnce really seems to have grown into his own — and this tour will surely just be one of many milestones to come.
Up next, Wembley was finally graced by the fricatively frightening Fever 333. With these Enter Shikari shows the UK’s first chance to see the band — bar a one-off main stage set at Download 2023 — for way too long, expectations were high. And, from the second that frontman Jason Aalon Butler raced on stage, his acerbic, incendiary vocals blasting over the excited crowd and giving the Shikari swathes the heavenly heavy, hardcore counterpoint to Noah’s comparatively softer pop punk, Fever 333’s set was very much a win. From the explosive opener of ‘Burn it’ or the blisteringly brutal ‘BITE BACK’, crowd surfers and head bangers galore, to the roiling new single, ‘READY ROCK’, or backflipping from the seated galleries onto the crowd before during finale ‘Hunting Season’, it was a hell of a set; the band might not have strayed too far from their style of hardcore hip hop, but doing just one thing isn’t a bad thing when you do it as well as Fever 333.
Not to mention, Butler is possibly the only frontman more politically outspoken than Shikari’s Reynolds; his first reprieve from headbanging and on-stage acerbic antics was spent less catching his breath and more decrying the deplorable events going on in the world, and dedicating ‘Made In America’ to our ‘oppressed brothers and sisters in Palestine’, and using ‘One Of Us’ to call out the need for safety and care for women in the primarily male-dominated rock music scene. A hell of a set, and a hell of a high bar for Shikari to live up to.
Not that they had much trouble doing so. If there’s one thing that Enter Shikari know how to do, it’s put on a master class of a show while performing a study in defying expectations. In this case, Rou, the ever-faithful narrator, decided to change it up once more. Instead of opening the show up with a crazed entrance, or a kaleidoscopic light show — don’t worry, there were still plenty of those about — Wembley was greeted by a simple story, one simultaneously full of betrayal, deceit, and hope. Standing alone on the stage, he began regaling Wembley with the deceptively unassuming ‘System…’, each word echoed by the countless thousands in the room and illustrated by a shadow puppetry-esque backdrop behind him. The spoken-word-turned-haunting-fable quickly evolved, however, into the corresponding chaos of ‘… Meltdown’, complete with sound-system-abusing bass, before ending with the usual closer of the triumphant anthem ‘Live Outside’ — and suddenly it was on. It’s not just countries that are lines drawn in the sand, apparently, but genres too: Enter Shikari routinely set out to systematically dismantle both political systems and listening habits, and as ever, they succeeded with a vengeance. A bone-shaking airing of ‘Anaesthetist’, to “test the sound system”, reflected a rave in an earthquake; a seemingly interactive light show for ‘Jailbreak’ saw the spotlights of prison bars shattered by Rou’s outstretched palm before he dove into the crowd to celebrate his new-found freedom. There were blasts of confetti, there were toots of trumpet, and there were some special guests in the way of Fever 333’s Butler for ‘Losing My Grip’, and the magnificently maned, celestially piped Sam Ryder for the always poignant ‘Satellites’. There were even a few discographical deep cuts, by way of both ‘The Jester’ — possessing possibly the jauntiest breakdown-preceding bridge in music history— and ‘Gap In The Fence’, delivered as the final book-end of the beautiful acoustic section, which also saw ‘the pressure’s on’ and the normally rowdy ‘Juggernauts’, Rou sitting on top of a starlit metropolitan skyline.
Incredibly, the show at times seemed to become an excuse for a health kick — Reynolds’ now iconic banana early into the set eventually led into his using ‘The Sights’ and ‘Enter Shikari’ to race across the width of the arena’s balconies and get his steps in, all while drummer Rob Rolfe performed some topless calisthenics on-stage. ‘Christ on a Caribbean cruise, I’m knackered’, Rou chuckled, spent, mirroring the thousands of sweating and grinning fans arrayed in front of him.
It wasn’t all fun and games, of course. Even while displaying a giant and cartoonish — yet still somehow adorable — goldfish on the screen, Shikari still took the time to use their platform for good, decrying ‘a government and a country that has been completely lost in nationalistic and religious fervour’, and speaking out in support of the activists up and down the country targeting the Israeli weapon manufacturers and the investment banks that are ‘effectively bankrolling genocide’.
‘I just hope to God that there is still a Gaza and a Palestine left when this fucking nightmare ends’, he finishes, seemingly crippled by the atrocities he’s speaking up against.
There’s only so many words you can use to describe what transpired on Saturday. Celebratory, triumphant, beautifully mesmerising; heartbreaking, rebellious, cathartic. Whichever string of adjectives you use, there’s no denying that Enter Shikari’s ‘A Kiss For The Whole World’ tour has been nothing short of breathtaking; both metaphorically, from the stunning lights and incredible showmanship, and the triple hitter of ‘Enter Shikari’, ‘Mothership’ and ‘Solidarity’ literally snatching the air from the room.
As incredible as always, and then some.
Words by James O’Sullivan
Photography by Josh Russell
