Interview: Shihad - Loud Forever The Final Tour

It's no overstatement to say that Shihad are one of the most definitive Aotearoa New Zealand groups of the late 20th Century / early 21st Century. Emerging from Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington in 1988 (they were managed in their early years by my cousin Gerald Dwyer, who passed away in 1996), and maintaining the same iconic lineup of Jon Toogood (The Adults), Karl Kippenberger, Phil Knight and Tom Larkin from 1991 onwards, Shihad are currently in the midst of Loud Forever - The Final Tour, capping off their multiple award-winning three and a half decade, ten studio album career with headline and festival dates nationwide.

Having recently wrapped up a launch tour for his debut solo album Last Of The Lonely Gods, Toogood chatted with fellow local legend of heavy music Nathan Hickey of Beastwars (playing at the capital's Underground Tavern on 31st January — tickets HERE) and End Boss, looking back at Shihad's mighty oeuvre, and unpacking feelings around wrapping up the band. Show Shihad your love and appreciation at the following dates, and read onwards...

Loud Forever - The Final Tour

Friday 31st January - Black Barn, Hawkes Bay w/ Jakob
Friday 7th February - Trafalgar, Nelson w/ Mim Jensen, Con Carne
Saturday 8th February - Kickdown, Coromandel
Saturday 1st March - Sector 7, Christchurch w/ The Volts, Mim Jensen, Con Carne
Friday 14th March - Spark Arena, Auckland w/ The D4, Dick Move
Saturday 15th March - Homegrown, Wellington

Tickets on sale from www.shihad.com

Nathan Hickey: Hey Jon, how are you?

Jon Toogood: Yeah I’m good. In a cafe waiting for breakfast.

What are you getting?

I think it’s a cheese toastie with a chilli fried egg.

Oh, that sounds pretty good, a bit bougie.

Doesn’t sound healthy but it does sound good.

First of all, I just wanted to thank you for taking Beastwars on tour back in 2018. I feel like it's a rite of passage for rock bands in New Zealand to go on tour with Shihad. And also for inviting us to play the Silver Scrolls when we were first starting out, that was a really big boost for us.

That's all good. We always liked you guys, so that was an easy choice.

And also for the shows that I saw you play at the Big Day Out and James Cabaret when I was getting into music and getting into bands, it was very inspirational.

That's awesome, bro. I remember the James Cabaret. It was always legendary, and my parents would be standing upstairs, but I just remember there was no fucking air conditioning in there, and I'd always end up stripping off to nothing.

I went to high school with Karl’s sister Petra, and I think when we were like 15 or 16, she took me to a James Cabaret show, and I met Karl. He took me backstage and I stood side of stage while you were playing, and I was just like, this is what I want to do.

Yeah, wicked, man. We were always driven, even when we were metal nerds at school. Why are international bands tighter than local bands? What are they doing that we're not doing? Ultimately, it ends up you've got more people to play to, and the more people you play to and the more shows you do, you get tighter and you get better. We quickly worked out, right, we have to go overseas to play to more people and learn our craft. That was it. We were just nerds on a mission to be as tight as any of those bands that came over from America or England.

For sure. I saw when you first moved to Australia, you had a huge amount of tour dates.

Totally, bro. And a lot of those were probably to two people and the local policeman. That's where you learn how to be good. If you can be good in front of that, if you can be an arena rock band in front of that, then if someone gives you the opportunity to play at the main stage of the Big Day Out in front of 20,000 people, you've already learned your bit. You just apply it to a bigger crowd. I think Shihad might have played maybe one gig where we phoned it in and then felt so awful afterwards. It doesn't matter if there was no one there.

That’s how we feel about playing shows. The main thing is to do it for yourself.

Absolutely, bro. And it's a great byproduct that people get their jollies while you're doing it.

What's the advice you would give to people to maintain a relationship for 37 years?

Well, I think relationships have their seasons. There's moments where we want to kill each other, just like any family in any relationship. There's bits where you're always going to have quirks and differences, and it's about learning to accept those and also learning about yourself that you're not perfect.

A bit of self-awareness?

Well, a bit of self-awareness. Age gives you that. We were young, and we're artists, ultimately. Even though we're playing metal, we're still sensitive dudes. We're very driven, get out of our way sort of thing, and sometimes that's burnt bridges. But I think the biggest lesson I've learned, and that's what worked for Shihad, was don't be an arsehole. It's all about community, and it's all about making sure you're good to people around you that you're working with, whether that's people who are doing the PA, people at the venue, people at the industry award night. Just be a good, genuine, humble person.

 

But when you're on stage, slay and take no prisoners. That's your moment to really cane it. Then after you walk off, go “thank you very much” and go back to being a decent person. Personally, I think just getting older and going, right, I'm not perfect, and then everyone coming to that realisation that, yeah, they're not perfect either, so we're a lot more forgiving with each other. We know that we're all quirky, and we know that we're neurotic about certain things, and so just accepting each other.

Absolutely. Good words to live by. Be kind, be humble, then assert your authority on stage.

Yeah, absolutely. That's your time to turn into a godlike maniac. That's where you get to live out that craziness. Then when you get back off stage, you realise that your job's no more important than the guy that's driving the bus to the show or whatever. It's just a job, but it's a great job. Awesome job.

So it's a great job, and you've been in the same job for 37 years. Have you ever thought about what you would have done otherwise?

I wouldn't have minded going to culinary school and actually learning how to cook properly. I like cooking. I like food. I would have done that maybe, but then I've got a lot of friends who are chefs and they party harder and punish themselves harder than us rock and roll stars, so maybe I'd be dead if I went down that trip.

I listened through all your albums in the last few days. I know that AC/DC is a big influence on you and they stuck to their sound for their whole career, but every one of your albums has changed stylistically. Apart from the last two, FVEY and Old Gods, it felt like they were the most stylistically similar.

Yeah, absolutely.

Do you think that was the band finally arriving at what you thought Shihad should be?

Yeah, man. We had a word around just before we were writing for FVEY. It's like, well, what do we do good? We do heavy good, but we need to find a way to make heavy music that's relevant and that doesn't make us go, “ick”.

So how do we do that? Well, we'd been a fan of the Mint Chicks' where they're doing this crazy low tuning, which made them sound heavy but not metal. And I think we stole that and then ran with it. And it basically took us a while to learn how to play that low. But making that heavy sound as a 50-year-old dude, or at that time I suppose mid to late 40s, it didn't give me that sort of, oh, heavy metal's a young teen boy's music. It was like, oh, this is heavy, but real heavy, rather than Fantasyland heavy.

It's a fine line being heavy but not cheesy.

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I think we supported Black Sabbath around that time too. And it was like, all right, it's all about the riff. It's all about the riff. And what is a riff? A riff is basically an amazing bass line.

If you get a catchy bass line, you're away running, and with a groove that can move a crowd. And then it makes a big sound, and it means I can write about all the things I'm worried about, in a bigger, larger scale than personal stuff. Things like the rise of fascism, things like taking into our colonial history into account and trying, how do we rectify those mistakes? Bigger sort of issues rather than personal issues. Shihad makes a big sound, which is great. It's fun to write over.

Speaking of lyrics, I was listening to 'Feel The Fire', which is obviously a departure from the “heavy” on Old Gods sound wise. The lyrics made me think, is this you writing about you falling out of love with being in the band or contemplating what the band is?

Man, all I remember about writing that one was me, Tom and Phil were living in Melbourne and going through lockdown. And, like everybody, once you got off the rat race, you sort of went, well, what is this life we're living? What is the point of it? Then it just created that space of, oh, well, I can't hustle, so I'm going to spend some time with the family. It just made you re-evaluate what was important.

How's your cheese toastie?

Fuck, it's so good. They've given me like a chilli-fried egg on top of it, and then there's quince paste on the side. So it's like, it's the best of salty, sweet, and spicy. It's yummy as hell. Beautiful.

Here's something that you can think about while you finish your toastie.

What comes to mind when you think about Churn?

Churn I think was almost like a realisation or learning how to be heavy without metal.

Yeah, and with Churn you had Jaz Coleman involved.

That was like a dream come true, bro. It made the idea of being an international band a bit more of a reality, like, oh, right, he's giving us the inside goss.

And what about Killjoy?

Killjoy, I mean, I think it's like a high point in the band's career. I think it's inspired. It's a band that's done heaps of live shows that are really tight, but then experimenting in an age where music's actually really exploding, like creativity's exploding. Maybe I'm nostalgic about it because of the age I was in the '90s.

Yeah the '90s were definitely popping off. What about Fish Album (Shihad self-titled)?

Messy but necessary. Yeah, messy but necessary.

General Electric?

Focused and solid, focused and on fire.

Pacifier?

Messy but again, necessary. It's like our career does that. We were talking about it yesterday. It was like are we having to redefine ourselves, having to find ourselves? I mean, so it's like some songs work on that record, then other songs are like, oh, well, that sounds like three bands in one. What's going on there? Oh, that sounds like a totally different band, that track. You know, there's other songs like 'Walls' or something like that, which is actually quite realised, but it doesn't sound like Shihad.

It's like you're trying to fit into an American box.

Yeah, I just wanted to try and see if I can write a song like that. Okay, well, there you go. You did it.

What about Love Is The New Hate?

I mean, that's pretty focused. It's heavy, it's dark. I like the darkness of it. That was like the sound of disillusionment with the industry and the sound of regret, living with mistakes.

And then you totally flipped that on Beautiful Machine.

Absolutely. That record is really optimistic sounding, really pop. We worked with some people outside of the metal world. And I think I was listening to lots of Bowie, and wanted to try some different stuff. Even though we all met each other through heavy metal, we were all brought up on everything else.

So what about Ignite?

All I can say is thank God for 'Sleep Eater', because that's a good song. I think that was around the time I was doing The Adults, so my head was in that. When we came to do that, I think we spent way too much time on that record. Tom owned his own studio. So it lacks urgency, you know. And also, we didn't have an outsider producer. We were producing it ourselves. But it was, again, a necessary messy record that leads us to the next record, which is FVEY. You've got to make mistakes to work out what you don't want to do as much as what you do want to do.

Any band with a long career will always go down paths and go, I don't know how this is going to work, but at least you're trying it. There's seeds of good ideas there. I think the song 'Ignite' was my dad's favourite song before he passed away. So there's some resonance to it. That song's special to me because I knew how much it meant to my father.

FVEY?

Yeah, glorious. I love that record. Meeting up with Jaz Coleman again as a different person and we're different people and we're all straight and ready to go with a bunch of music that's really good and really heavy. Like I said, we had that realisation. It's like, well, what do we do best? We do heavy best. So let's find the best riffs and have fun with it and make sure that every song moves us. I'll never forget doing pre-production for that record in a shitty practice space in Melbourne with sweaty as hell Jaz Coleman just going again, again, again playing the same song 15 times.

What about Old Gods?

Old Gods, again, that took a long while to make but I remember when Adam Sparks sent through the mixes of that, I was like shit, that's the band I want to be in and that's the sound of, that's how I want my heavy bands to sound like. It was fully realised and I was singing about stuff that was important to me and still is important to me so when I sing those songs live, I mean it. So that feels good.

Was there a specific moment that you realised that you didn't want to carry on the band or was it just a slow, gradual thing?

No, it's slow and gradual. I mean when you make an album as solid as Old Gods and then you realise that there's no way I want to spend 12 months in a van travelling around America and Europe because I've got a 5-year-old and an 8-year-old at home that I want to watch grow. Also there's lots of other things going on and it was just like I don't want to do that. But that music, it deserves a band that's probably 20 years younger that doesn't have children and doesn't have things that people are relying on them for. It's just a different part of your life.

I totally feel you because I'm in a … what do we call it… a slightly older band and I kind of think if we were still in our 20s what could we have achieved.

Absolutely. When you don't have people that are relying on you that you're not responsible for other people, that's the time to get in the van. That's the time to travel the world live on two dollars a day and not know where you're going to sleep tonight and that's all good. But when you've got kids that are relying on you, a partner that's relying on you it just becomes a different proposition. It becomes a little bit more unrealistic. I just think we were going “okay if we can't do it on this record we're never going to do it on any other records” because our responsibilities aren’t going to become less.

So rather than peter out, let's fucking go out with a bang on, you know, with two records we're so proud of at the end, rather than making something half ass. Fuck that, let's go out on our own terms.

What do you feel when you think you're not going to do this anymore?

Just pride. It's fucking cool, man. It was choice. It's a really good band. We're just rehearsing at the moment. It's like the band's as tight as it ever was. Sometimes you've got to step away from it to actually appreciate it. I think I'll miss it. But not straight away, you know?

Thanks so much for your time. It was really good to chat to you.

It was a good talk, man, and I'm sorry for chewing a toasted sandwich through the whole thing.

Ha I didn't hear it at all. You must be well practiced at getting interviewed and eating at the same time.