Enter Shikari's Notes From The Road: Stinking It Up In Worcester

Today’s show is wild. The crowd feels like a swarming mass of energy, made even more so by the fact that our haze machine breaks halfway through the gig. The whole venue begins to feel like Yoda’s swampy Dagobah dwelling.

For a few songs I can’t really make out individual faces, it’s just one buoyant cloud of humanity, a pluming clump of raging flesh and blood. It’s kind of beautiful.

At one point a geezer in the front row calls me over and tries to hand me a $100 note to play Mothership for his wife. I’ve never experienced being tipped (bribed?) to play a song before, and I am pretty flummoxed by it. I decide to proceed with the calm poise that you’ve come to expect from me, and I begin to gyrate seductively in front of him and beckon him to pop the note down my trousers. (I give it back, and we play Mothership FOR FREE seeing as we’re such amazing upstanding gents etc).

From city to city, we travel through the night on this tour. Our home on wheels is a vehicle called a ‘bandwagon’. It’s a pretty nifty and really comfortable bus for its relatively small size. It’s not as big as your standard double decker tour bus but it has a shower, which is a lifesaver. Especially as we’re playing small venues on this tour, which occasionally don’t have showers and no-one likes their rockstars hummin’ of the dried accumulated sweat from a thousand-odd humans.

The bunks are pretty damn claustrophobic, though. You often turn over in the night and bump your shoulder or head on the ceiling. And the roads can be pretty damn naff in America so you often get thrown about in there, bumping up and down big time. Imagine a big vibrator on its highest setting, in a shoebox - that’s me in my bunk on a nightly basis.

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