He’s been through hell, but is he out the other side? As he prepares for the launch of his first solo album, Jon Toogood takes Greg Bruce through the bad times.
Jon Toogood was standing at the front of the room holding his new record, which he’d started writing when all was dark and he wasn’t sure there was a way out.
Its creation had been his medication and its release was supposed to represent his recovery but this was its first play-through for an audience, and it was all going to hell.
He looked desperately over at Ollie who was spinning the vinyl in the studio.
“It’s distorting bro,” he told Ollie. “That speaker’s distorting”.
He groaned. Ollie stopped the music.
It was a sunny Tuesday afternoon in mid-September at Herne Bay’s Stebbing Recording Studios, an iconic and beautiful room that feels like distilled nostalgia, or, as Toogood himself described it, “like grandma’s old radio come to life”.
Some of New Zealand’s biggest bands once recorded here, including Split Enz, Hello Sailor, Dragon and Th’ Dudes, and the space appears not to have changed even a little bit since.
The vinyl version of Toogood’s record had been pressed here so there was a pleasing circularity to the occasion, but now that circle was beginning to warp.
Before him was a collection of 30 or so friends, family, collaborators, media and music industry figures and the warmth towards him was obvious, but so was the fact the speaker was f***ed.
It was clear how hard he was having to fight to control his emotions. He had spent years being loud, aggressive and tough as shit on stage in front of New Zealand’s greatest metal band, a classic untouchable DGAF rock god, but now he was a 53-year-old father of two small children, standing by himself in a nice jacket, holding a record full of tender songs he’d written to both express and deal with the enormous pain he’d been through in the past few years, and nobody could hear it.
In 2021, his mum, who had already been suffering with Parkinsons, developed pneumonia and went into a coma. When it became clear she wasn’t going to survive, two of her three children rushed to her bedside, but Toogood was stuck in lockdown in Melbourne, where he lived, with no way of getting home.
She wasn’t expected to last for more than a few days, but she held on and held on and after nearly two weeks, his brother and sister called and said: “Jon, you’re gonna have to f***ing talk to her because she’s not going and she’s waiting for you”.
He was the youngest of the three. He had always been mummy’s little boy.
“She totally adored me”, he says.
”So I literally had to be the guy. My sister held up her phone to mum’s face and I had to be the guy that went: ‘Mum, it’s Jon. And, hey, I just want to say you’ve done such a great job. We love you and we’re gonna be fine, and you can get let go’.
“And I saw her body relax, and the next day she passed away. It f***ing hurt like anything. You don’t wanna tell your mum she’s gonna die. But I did, because she wasn’t going to listen to anyone else.”
His brother called him the next day to tell him the news. His body’s response was vertigo.
He says he felt like there was “literally nothing between me and the universe anymore”. His dad had died 12 years earlier, and now with his mum gone, it was just him “and that big black void”.
The following year, he was touring New Zealand when the country went into lockdown during the omicron outbreak, leaving him stuck here for three months, unable to see his wife and their two small children. He isolated with his sister and brother-in-law in Wellington and, while there, his brother-in-law was diagnosed with terminal cancer.
They were extremely close. Toogood was 12 when his brother-in-law came into his life and he saw him as an older brother. He says watching his decline was brutal.
“It’s like, life was going, ‘Boom! Boom!’ But life does that, if you stick around long enough and don’t die.”
So the new album was a way of dealing with this: a way of giving himself a hug, of saying to himself “there there, it’s okay”.
“I was in pain, man. I was sad. I was so sad.”
And now, at what was supposed to be the emotional high point of his redemption story, he was standing before an expectant crowd, literally holding his baby, and the very first f***ing song on it wouldn’t play.
An album created specifically to alleviate its creator’s pain instead causing its creator pain: has irony ever been more ironic? As it turns out, yes.
When lockdown ended, he was reunited with his family. They decided to move back to New Zealand, eventually settling in Howick. Then he got Covid, and it was bad.
Two weeks after catching it, he was woken in the middle of the night by a noise so loud he felt like a car alarm was going off in his head. Not only could he not get back to sleep; he could barely think. He woke his wife Dana and said, “My ears are going f***ing crazy”.
The noise wouldn’t stop. It kept him awake for 36 hours. Eventually, he went to A&E, where he had a panic attack and was prescribed sedatives and anti-anxiety medication. The drugs put him to sleep but, when he woke, it was into a nightmare.
The sound wouldn’t go away. Over the coming days and weeks, doctors tried all sorts of things that didn’t work. Drugs f***ed him up; hearing aids playing white noise and random melodies made it worse and so did meditation. Acupuncture was agony.
He started having regular “full-blown” panic attacks. He didn’t know if he was going to be able to carry on.
“It was getting quite dark”, he says. “I was starting to project into the future, going ‘if this is what life is going to be like in two years’ time, I don’t know if I can do it’.
“I was really close to losing my shit.”
His band Shihad had been the defining band of its generation and he its defining figure, a bona fide rock god. He would stand on stage – show after show, hour upon hour – in front of drummer Tom Larkin’s china cymbal, with his shirt off, exposing his nearly meatless torso, belting the f*** out of songs like You Again and My Mind’s Sedate as the kids lost their shit in the mosh pit and the wall of sound slammed into him.
He never wore earplugs. He felt they diminished his connection to the audience. As a result, for many years now, he’s experienced low-level tinnitus and high-frequency hearing loss. It had always been manageable. And then he got Covid.
It simultaneously turned the tinnitus up and the overall volume of his hearing down. His already-diminished high-frequency hearing effectively disappeared. It was explained to him that his brain reacted to that by going, “oh, he’s lost all his top-end hearing, we don’t want him to get eaten by a lion out in the wild”, and decided the best way to help was to make a car alarm go off in his head, without remorse and apparently without end.
After every other treatment had failed, he decided to try therapy. He made an appointment with a psychologist specialising in cognitive behavioural therapy. She told him that he didn’t know what his future was going to look like, so he had to stop living in it.
“She said: ‘You’re not a f***ing fortune teller. None of us are. So get rid of that. Observe yourself thinking like that and go, ‘well, that’s not real, that’s not true’.’”
In other words, she advocated practising mindfulness. The problem was that the common route to mindfulness is through meditation and he’d tried meditation and it had made things worse.
“She said to me, ‘you can’t meditate, but what else is mindfulness?
She said: “Play your guitar, Jon’.”
So he did. And the anxiety began to ease, the noise in his head turned down, the songs started to come and eventually he had an album.
And now, at what was supposed to be the emotional high point of this particular redemption story, he was standing before an expectant crowd, literally holding his baby, and the very first f***ing song on it wouldn’t play.
An album created to alleviate anxiety, instead causing anxiety: has irony ever been etc etc.
Everything about Shihad was big. The sound, the shows, the success, the potential. Iggy Pop famously called them a f***ing great band. But Toogood always wanted them to be better. He wanted them to be the best f***ing band in the world. He says: “I just wanted to dominate.”
But, halfway through what he calls “The Shihad thing” he says he stopped feeling anything. He had turned into a machine. He says the band had become more important to him than anything else, including the people he loved, who loved him.
“There was no softness in me. And it was always going to fall apart because there is softness in me, you know? I’m sensitive, which is why I’m drawn to the arts. Because when I’m sad, I’m really f***ing sad. When I’m happy, I’m really happy. And when I’m angry, I’m viciously angry.”
He describes himself as having lost trust in the universe, of trying to bludgeon his way to world domination: “It was like, ‘just get out of my way.’ And it was always going to fall apart because it’s not a sustainable way to live.”
He was also in an unhappy relationship, and had been for years. He says he and his partner were lovers but they weren’t friends, and he was miserable. While he was still ripping shit up on stage with Shihad, “at home I was a mouse”.
He had a stepdaughter who he loved, so he stuck around until she was 18, then checked out. He says: “I basically went, ‘I’m gonna find out what it’s like to be a rock star.’ So I went off the f***ing deep end. It was like, ‘yeah, f*** this, I’m off the chain. I am gonna go hard.’.”
That went on for about two years, at which point something in him started to change. He says he got sick of hangovers and stupid conversations that didn’t mean anything. He started working on the first Adults album, with an “insanely talented” collection of New Zealand musicians including Shayne Carter, Julia Deans, Nick Roughan and Warren Maxwell.
One night, after giving a talk on song composition at Auckland Museum, he was at a party in Britomart. He had a massive hangover, but the talk had gone well and was followed by a great Q&A. He was feeling good. Then an uninvited guest walked in.
He remembers thinking: “I have never seen a human being that looks like that. What’s your story?”
Her name was Dana and she was the daughter of a UN diplomat from Sudan. She’d been born in Kuwait, schooled in Finland, Ethiopia, the United States and Saudi Arabia and was now living in Flatbush and studying at AUT.
“We just got on like a house on fire straight away,” he says. “It was not so much excitement – it was more like, ‘I can breathe out. I can be myself’.”
“I knew straight away,” he says. “I was like, ‘I’m not letting this one go’.”
On their second date, they went bowling in Newmarket.
He says everything in his body and his DNA was saying, “I have to have children with you”, but he was also thinking, “She’s my best mate straight away”.
On the way home, he asked if he would need to convert to Islam to marry her.
She said yes. He replied: “f*** that. Why don’t you convert to atheism?”
He describes what followed as “two years of her pointing at a tree, going, ‘how can you tell me there’s no God?’ and me pointing at the same tree, going, ‘how can you tell me there’s a God?’”.
“But all I knew was that she was more generous and more kind naturally than all my atheist pseudo buddies, and she was living the game we had been talking about. She just embodied it. And I was like, ‘I have to have that in my life’.”
There was a period of what he calls “well, I can’t believe in angels”, to which her response was, “can you get your head around reminding yourself five times a day that it’s not about you… that it’s essentially about us?”
He could. He converted to Islam and they were married in 2014. He still doesn’t believe in angels, but says he can definitely vibe with the idea that humans are not separate but are manifestations of the same energy.
“There’s a reason why I slept like a baby for the first time in f***ing 20 years after my then-girlfriend, now-wife, dragged me down to Flinders Street Station in Melbourne to feed homeless people.
“I went: ‘why is that? Ah, it’s because by helping those people you’re helping yourself, because they’re just manifestations of the same f***ing thing. It’s the same thing but you just happen to have a different story, different luck’.”
Asked where he stands now on God and the afterlife, he says: “I’m a convert so I’m never going to see it like someone who was born into it. But I do think after watching my son get born and watching my wife coaxing him into getting born and saying, ‘it’s ok, you can come’, I just think that we go back to that same place we came from. That’s sort of how I look at it. We came from somewhere, we’ve just got to go back to it.”
Ollie was doing his best, but it was becoming increasingly clear the speaker was not going to be unf***ed.
Toogood looked out at the audience and said: “Should I just play you some stuff?”
“Yeah!” they replied.
“Yeah!” he said. “F*** it! Plans change.”
It was decided that Ollie would disconnect the offending speaker and Toogood would play in mono through the remaining one. He introduced the first song, Love is Forever, which was, he said, about the pain he felt on learning his mum was going to die, and about the tempering of that pain by the traces of her he could see in his 6-year-old daughter.
But, as he began to play, it was clear both speakers were still connected. He turned again to Ollie in the studio and said, “it’s distorting bro”. This time, though, his tone was softer. He seemed more relaxed.
“Poor Ollie,” he said: “T’is life.”
Ollie gave him the signal and he began to play once more, but again the speaker crackled and spat.
“Wrong speaker,” he said. The audience laughed. He laughed. He started again. And from that moment on, everything was fine.
The second song was called Gravity. He’d written it towards the end of the album, when he was “coming out of my funk”, but it still contains many funk-adjacent lines such as: “You’re wondering if it’s all your life will ever be” and “Me and death, we used to fight it out, But we’re so much closer now”.
At the end of it, he said: “Have we fixed anything yet?” When it became clear we hadn’t, he said: “I’ll play the whole f***in’ record. I don’t care.”
But Ollie had come up with a possible solution. The speakers in the studio were working, so how about everyone go in there, where they could listen to the vinyl in stereo?
“Oh, f***in’ cool,” Toogood said, then turned to the audience and said, “is that cool?”
Everyone said it was.
“Oh f***in’ perfect,” he said. “Let’s f***in’ go into the studio.”
But the studio had been designed for roughly two people, and it was now being asked to accommodate about 30. Once everyone was in, there was literally no room to move. It was like being in the moshpit at a Shihad show, but with a greatly reduced risk of having your nose broken.
Toogood stood amid the throng, his wife alongside him, and introduced the first track. Ollie dropped the needle. The sound came off the vinyl rich and warm. There were no problems with the speakers.
He had chosen four tracks, covering a range of difficult subjects: his tinnitus and accompanying panic attacks, the things he wishes he’d said to his mum before she died, the existential crisis he experienced afterwards, and some other, equally heavy, shit. It was quite moving.
Then he said he wanted to play one last song. It was called Missing Paradise. He said it was about the three months he’d spent away from his wife and children during Covid lockdown, “and about how f***in’ painful that was”. He said: “It’s a bit different, but I really like it.”
It started slowly: just his voice and the occasional guitar strum. Standing there, listening to himself, he closed his eyes and began to sway. After a minute or so, the piano came in, followed by the drums, and everything was building, building, building, and then the chorus came in and the song lifted off and the whole room went with it.
It was immediately obvious it was a hit, but it was equally obvious it was not, as he had suggested, a song about pain. It was a song about love. More specifically, it was about the power of love to save us. More specifically, it was about the power of his wife’s love, which had saved him.
He sang:
“When the world seems cold you will make it new
She said sorrow’s just a tunnel that we travel through
When you ask for a love song that’s just for you, this is it,
This is it.”
It was a love letter to his wife and it was obvious now why he had saved it for last. His voice rose from the vinyl, filled the room, and settled on her like a spotlight, or a halo:
“You’re a light when I’m lost and I’m full of doubt
You’re the stars when the fire is fading out
When we talk about a love we will sing about, this is it,
This is it,
This is it,
This is it.”
He stood in the tiny space, not dancing so much as vibrating with energy, packed in alongside people he perceived as manifestations of the same f***ing thing. His eyes were closed, so he could not yet see – although surely he could feel – that his wife, next to him, was in tears, moved by the power and beauty of the song and by the pure and true expression of his love, and she was not the only one.
Jon Toogood’s solo album Last of the Lonely Gods is released in full on October 11. He will be touring the album from the same date, until November 9, at venues across New Zealand. See jontoogood.com for more details
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