“I never listen to an album after we’ve made it,” says frontman Jon Toogood. “I get a buzz when we’re creating new music. I scoff it down like a little child in a candy store and I listen to it way too much. Then, after we’re done, just thinking of it makes me feel sick – a bit like a kid would after too many lollies, to extend the metaphor. When it comes to these albums getting re-released, I’m revisiting them just like everyone else.”
For Toogood – who recently completed a solo tour and is also working on music education programs for young people – revisiting Shihad was not without surprises. “It hits me exactly what I was talking about or what I was thinking about when I wrote certain songs,” he says. “Things that you totally forgot come rushing back to you. I remember listening back to the fish album and being completely taken aback by the drums. I realised that was the way that we’d recorded them – Tom [Larkin] had recorded drums for every song to get mixed into the left-hand side, and then recorded them all again to get mixed into the right-hand side. I mean, it was probably a waste of time, but it was fucking cool.”
After releasing two albums – 1993’s Churn and 1995’s Killjoy – that primarily leaned on down tuned riffs and wandering progressions, many saw Shihad as a surprising shift in direction. According to Toogood, this stemmed from a change in their listening habits, which affected their approach to songwriting.
“The fish albumis a really unique Shihad record,” he says. “It was the first record where we consciously tried to write songs. There was melody and a bit of arrangement on Killjoy, but we were never thinking about radio or writing a pop song. Those songs went for like five, six minutes. Things started to change once we started touring a lot. We ended up in LA and we were listening to a lot of Spiritualized, Guided by Voices and even A Northern Soul by The Verve. It almost didn’t make sense, because we were still quite a heavy band at that point, but it made us want to write songs in a really different way. It doesn’t work for every song on that record, but it freed us up to be who we are now. We were allowed to be different.”
Several singles from Shihad have gone on to to become anthems among New Zealand music fans, including La La Land and Yr’ Head is a Rock. There’s one song, however, that stands out above the rest – and it began, somewhat unexpectedly, with a champagne supernova in the sky.
“I can remember seeing Oasis at Roskilde,” says Toogood. “I remember being completely blown away. Here was this band, as loud as AC/DC, but writing and playing these huge pop songs. Something clicked for me, where I realised that’s what I wanted to be doing. I think that you can hear that in a song like Home Again. These days, it’s a standard Shihad song – I think we play it every single time that we do a show. In New Zealand, kids get taught that song at school.”
The band are heading out on an Australian tour at the end of the month, starting out in Western Australia and then making their way across to the east coast for three headlining shows with Adelaide’s Grenadiers. The shows will primarily focus on Shihad, as well as selected cuts from the entire back catalogue – including their most recent album, 2014’s FVEY.
“I cannot believe that those songs are still so relevant,” says Toogood.“I mean, the Panama Papers just blew all of that shit wide open again. I’m watching Scott Morrison telling everyone they shouldn’t vote for Labor because they’re going to make you pay more tax – even though this prick could just tell his rich buddies to pay their fair share so we wouldn’t have this fucking problem. Everything that FVEY dealt with is even more intense now, so I’m going to have to get that shit off my chest in-between the nostalgia, I think.”
BY DAVID JAMES YOUNG
