Leader Of The Opposition

The journey of creating and touring fifth album THE SPARK has, over the course of the past few years, shaped ROU REYNOLDS into one of rock’s most vital voices. Those experiences and life lessons changed him forever. What follows next? It may just be ENTER SHIKARI’s defining moment…

Rou Reynolds first went to Reading Festival in 2002, aged 16. He doesn’t remember too much about his debut as a punter, aside from having to hightail it away from the shit-covered towel Dillinger Escape Plan frontman Greg Puciato threw into the crowd, having infamously evacuated his bowels on the main stage.

Seventeen years on, Rou is leading Enter Shikari through a set on that very spot that’s explosive for less grotesque reasons. The St Albans band, completed by guitarist Liam “Rory” Clewlow, bassist Chris Batten and drummer Rob Rolfe, haven’t played Reading & Leeds for five years, which might explain their decision to play an exhaustive five sets between both sites across the weekend.

The sky is cloudless and vibrantly blue for set number four, with temperatures reaching a scorching 32 degrees. This makes the suits the band are wearing seem ill-advised, especially with all the vast plumes of pyro shooting around them.

For all the pageantry and flashy touches, it’s the imagery on the screen behind the band – and, more importantly, what it signifies – that warrants most attention. The striking, colourful vertical lines that accompany the band’s set are ‘climate stripes’. Courtesy of research by the nearby University of Reading, they plot the average global temperature for every year since 1850. The lines to the left are thin and blue and represent the lower temperatures of the past, while those to the right are noticeably thicker and redder, providing a stark illustration of the degree to which human action has dangerously impacted climate change. Rou describes it as “one of the most defining, crucial images of our time” and encourages the tens of thousands of people that make up the crowd to “spread truth like this as far and as wide as we can”.