On German Vinyls, Working In Sudan And NZ Radio Shows

Just days prior to taking The Music’s call, Jon Toogood, vocalist/guitarist for Australasian hard rock veterans Shihad began presenting a weekly music show, Planet Of Sound, on New Zealand’s Radio Hauraki. Considering his earnest on-stage presence and likeable demeanour, he seems a logical choice to helm his own program.

Taking a break from organising playlists, Toogood revels in having carte blanche to play “whatever the fuck I want”. “I think if I’d been in a situation where I had to be playing a format or anything like that, I don’t think I’d be interested.” 

"I like the fact that life’s pretty surprising. It keeps me interested."

Not that he ever envisioned himself in such a role. “I never saw myself as a radio show host,” he chuckles. “Seriously, I never even saw myself as someone who’d still be in a band 25 years later, after starting with the same guys at Wellington High School, wanting to do Metallica covers. But here I am. I like the fact that life’s pretty surprising. It keeps me interested. On top of that, I just got back from Khartoum in northern Sudan, ‘cause my wife’s Sudanese, where I’ve been working with traditional female vocal and drum groups, and I’ve been incorporating that into contemporary music. I would never have thought when I was a little metal-head in Wellington that I’d be doing that either,” he laughs. 

Another source of fulfilment is celebrating the 20th anniversary of breakthrough Killjoy record. Shihad previously played the entire album at select shows, and recently did so again in Auckland. 

Killjoy was also afforded the remaster treatment, which Toogood is audibly ecstatic about. “It was like, ‘Let’s make this the monster that it should be.’ I’m always dubious about remastering, but this thing sounds like a fucking new record to me. All of a sudden you’ve got all this bottom end, which was there when we were in the studio, and then for some reason we always went, ‘Yeah, sounds sorta good,’ but it never sounds as good as what it sounded like when we were recording it. But thanks to modern technology we took it into a guy called [Tony] ‘Jack The Bear’ [Mantz] in Melbourne. He went, ‘Fuck, check out the bottom end on this,’ and we were, ‘Yeah, that’s pretty much what we wanted it to sound like.’ 

“We released it once on vinyl before, and that was through Noise Records in Germany… The only way to get the vinyl was this German pressing of it, and the problem was it was mastered by a guy in Berlin, and he thought that the bass feedback at the start of Get Up was a mistake, so he EQ-ed that whole frequency out of the whole record,” the main-man chuckles. “Finally, we’re getting a chance to present it like it is.”