The brilliant Matt Warren was there photographing the night for YELO, so I gave myself permission to take a few weird blurry shots and be a fly on the wall. With a can of Coke Zero.

There are some gigs you go to because you love the band, and some gigs you go to because you need to remember you still exist outside the house, the laptop, the school emails and whatever admin pile is breeding on the kitchen bench.

Enter Shikari was both.

Somewhere between the car park and the door, I realised I may have dressed less for the gig and more like a flare gun in human clothing. Leopard jacket, black, red and yellow Bad Habit T-shirt. Yin-yang gig gremlin.

Polite black cat with a ticket (meow).

Inside the brewery shed, the space was smaller than the energy it was holding. One of those packed, high-voltage rooms where the whole thing landed somewhere between rave, emo maths problem and melodic chaos, with fat beats and a floor that seemed slightly unstable before the band even turned up the pressure.

The crowd had characters, because every good gig does.

There were the rail dwellers, already locked into position like they had signed a lease. The tall men who somehow always materialise directly in front of the shortest women. The girls with perfect eyeliner and dangerous shoes. The blokes holding beers like survival equipment. The old faithfuls. The new converts. The ones filming. The ones levitating.

There was also, allegedly, a premium Coke Zero somewhere in the building. Not post-mix. Top shelf. Naturally, it vanished into the crowd like a myth with average logistics.

That’s the thing about going to gigs alone. You become both invisible and completely alive. Nobody is waiting for you. Nobody is asking if you want to leave. Nobody is making you explain why this song matters, or why the room suddenly feels like oxygen.

You just stand there in the dark with strangers and let the noise rearrange something.

Enter Shikari are built for that kind of release. High-octane, wired, restless, all elbows and electricity. The kind of band that makes a room feel less like an audience and more like a system having a controlled breakdown.

For a couple of hours, nobody had to be useful. Nobody had to be reachable. Nobody had to reply to the message, finish the page, fix the banner, be normal, be easy, be less tired.

We just had to be there.

Honestly, that was enough.

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