On 1 October Enter Shikari said that from 31 December 2027 they will “fall dormant as a recording and performing entity”, and that they have no idea whether that ends “with an eruption back into activity” or with extinction. There won’t be a farewell world tour. The November arena tour, with two nights at Alexandra Palace on 20 and 21 November, is the only UK run announced so far.
For anyone who can’t get to one of those shows, the band have filmed a lot of their concerts over the years. These five sets, in chronological order, give a fair picture of how the live show changed.
1. Hatfield Forum, December 2010
A Christmas show at the Forum in Hatfield, a few miles from the band’s home town of St Albans, filmed for the DVD and book set Live From Planet Earth. It comes from the gap between Common Dreads in 2009 and A Flash Flood of Colour in 2012, five years before the band’s first arena tour, and it is the earliest show on this list. The band put it on their YouTube channel in 2016, and it runs to just over an hour.
2. Alexandra Palace, 25 November 2017
Enter Shikari first headlined Ally Pally in February 2016 and meant to release that show on DVD, but problems with the video left it audio-only. They tried again at the end of the first UK leg for The Spark, in front of around 10,000 people, and this time the filming worked. Frontman Rou Reynolds later told Kerrang! that during the intro to Arguing With Thermometers the quadraphonic PA put the sound of melting ice behind the crowd and fire to their right. For Airfield, he and drummer Rob Rolfe ran round the side of the building and through the ice rink to a second stage by the sound desk, where a piano was set up. Reynolds dropped his gin on the way. Later on, the “Quickfire Round” crammed four songs into seven or eight minutes at 174 bpm, the classic drum and bass tempo, an idea Reynolds traced back to the band DJing drum and bass themselves. During the last chorus of the closing Live Outside, he took his in-ear monitors out so he could hear the crowd. The band put the full film online in September 2020, in the middle of the pandemic.
3. Hope & Anchor, Islington, 19 June 2018
Seven months after Ally Pally, the band played to 60 competition winners in the basement of the Hope & Anchor, the pub where The Clash and X-Ray Spex played in the 1970s and The Damned shot the video for New Rose. The show was part of Kerrang!’s Week of Rock, and the magazine filmed it and posted it on its own channel, introducing the video by setting it against the 10,000-strong night at Ally Pally. It runs to about an hour.
4. Slam Dunk, Hatfield Park, 27 May 2023
Back in Hatfield, thirteen years after the Forum show. Enter Shikari co-headlined Slam Dunk with The Offspring, their second time at the top of the bill after a Take to the Skies anniversary set in 2017, and the southern day was held at Hatfield Park. When the line-up was announced, Reynolds said the band could cycle there and called it their biggest “hometown” show ever. The festival came a month after A Kiss for the Whole World became their first UK number one album. The band’s film of the set is in 4K.
5. Wembley Arena, 17 February 2024
The last night of the A Kiss for the Whole World UK arena tour was the band’s first show at Wembley Arena and the biggest headline show they had played. Looking back on it, Reynolds told Kerrang! that the band had always worried about selling seats, “which is probably why we stuck to Ally Pally for so long”. He called Wembley “our most ambitious show ever”, with the band designing “every flash, every bang” themselves. He remembered walking round the seated area during one song and seeing how many people had brought their kids, and said the band’s audience now runs from seven-year-olds who know the words to fans over 50. The film came out in 2025 alongside the Live at Wembley album. It runs to an hour and three quarters and includes footage from a drone flown inside the arena during the show.
The other twelve
All five sit on one page at OnlyLiveConcert, together with twelve more Enter Shikari live sets. They include an intimate 2011 show at the Electric Ballroom in Camden, the band’s headline sets on Download’s second stage in 2013 and 2015 and on Glastonbury’s John Peel Stage in 2015, the Take to the Skies anniversary show in Moscow in 2017, festival broadcasts from Germany, Belgium and Hungary, and half an hour at Warped Tour in Long Beach in 2025. Beyond Enter Shikari, OnlyLiveConcert holds more than 4,800 concerts by over 600 artists, and it only takes professionally filmed recordings at 720p or higher with decent sound, so phone footage from the crowd never makes it in. The catalogue is free, with no registration or ads, and some of the recordings come with timestamped setlists that skip straight to a chosen song.