Shake A Fist

"One of the only places that I actually listen to music is in a car,” Shihad main man Jon Toogood enthuses from Melbourne, apologising for being slightly late for our scheduled interview due to being held up in transit. “I don’t mind being stuck in traffic; it’s a good chance to listen to records!”

Such affability is typical of the vocalist/guitarist. However, said joviality also belies the seemingly bleak world view (although Toogood’s quick to underline that “It’s a really hopeful record for us”) evident throughout the Kiwi outfit’s new album FVEY (pronounced ‘five eyes’). The new material echoes Shihad’s formative, industrialised rock leanings, bristling with a pseudo-conspiracy lyrical bent.  

“I walk out of my hotel down the road to the studio. I passed this queue of people, thinking it must be for Rolling Stones tickets,” he laughs while explaining the album’s genesis. “Then I got closer – it was a queue that went down the street, middle of Auckland, then around the corner. It was actually people lining up for food. It was the Auckland City Mission. I couldn’t believe it; I had never in 42 years on this planet seen anything like that in New Zealand. So this is the other side of free market capitalism, without any constraints. It works if you’re already fucking sorted, but if you’re not, fuck you, you are fucking history. I don’t want to live in that world, and I think that informed what we’re talking about.”

Recent significant life events also infiltrated the record; the death of Toogood’s father and getting married in Sudan, where he witnessed “some real fucking poverty”. On the musical front there were vital landmarks. One was rekindling their working union with Killing Joke’s shamanistic Jaz Coleman, who produced 1993 debut Churn but had long since fallen out with the respective band members.

FVEY was all laid down live, Toogood revealing they were “hammered” into making “brutal music” by their once-estranged collaborator. “It was actually like a lovers’ tiff that lasted for about 15 years, with a mate that you didn’t speak to for 15 years, but as soon as you see them it’s like, ‘Yeah, that’s all good.’ The big difference was he’s not drinking anymore, so it’s not so… mean-spirited,” the singer chuckles. “He’s always intense: really passionate, really intelligent, fucking genius musically. But he likes to throw a cat amongst the pigeons; he likes to stir things up. In the past when he was drinking, he’d do that internally in the band and do it personally with other people, and it could be really nasty.

“But with this one, he’s still like an angry hippie, and where he was throwing the cat amongst the pigeons was, he saw early on that I’d written down what I wanted to write about: injustice, inequality, divide between the rich and the poor, greed. He just went, ‘Great. Have you seen this book? Do you know what the fuck the New Zealand government’s doing with this? Do you know what the Australian government is doing with that?’ And would just feed me shit, so that was his way of throwing the cat amongst the pigeons. He’s still got that edgy thing about him, but because he’s straight it’s more considered and he’s more present. It was good having him push us. We need to be pushed, man.”

Affording additional inspiration was another connection to their origins – opening for Black Sabbath last year, more than two decades after covering Ozzy and co on their first EP. Toogood readily admits these shows played a significant role in FVEY’s more abrasive tone, while subsequently reaffirming career decisions. “Not only did we design a set which was basically all our heavy shit, because we were supporting Sabbath. But it was also because we had just toured our greatest hits and realised that was the music we liked more than anything else, stuff off Churn, [1995’s] Killjoy and [1999’s] The General Electric. So doing that every night we reminded ourselves about how good it felt to be inside that really tight, rhythmic rock.

“On top of that, we would finish and we would watch this band play, and it was like… ‘Wow, I love heavy music,’” he laughs. “‘Listen to that fucking riff.’ On top of it you’ve got [Sabbath guitarist] Tony Iommi coming in three hours before every show and warming up, because he’s fucking Tony Iommi, he plays in Black Sabbath and he’s got a reputation to uphold. I love that, ‘cause he’s 20 years older than me. It’s the thing I’ve chosen to do with my life, and I take that fucking seriously. I loved seeing the fact that he still took that seriously. So it was like, ‘Ok, let’s write a record.’”