It is, to be precise, 8.55 in the morning. I am talking to Jon Toogood. He’s a rocker, isn’t he? He’s Shihad’s lead singer. He’s a metal-head. He’s late night, boozy bars, head banging, greasy jeans, carpets sticky with spilt beer, bourbon and Coke out of cans. 8.55 in the morning is not very rock ‘n’ roll, I say, a bit grumpily. At least one of us should be in a boozy bar, late at night, surely? He says, cheerfully, that he has been up since 6am. “I’ve got a 6-year-old and a 9-year-old, mate. I get up early.”
He has spent his morning as he always does: making school lunches; getting the kids off to school; making up songs about bums and farts because children find nothing funnier than songs about bums and farts. And sometimes they never grow out of thinking that a good bum joke is hilarious. Toogood is 53. “It’s never not funny. It’s great. I write them silly songs every morning when I make their sandwiches.”
The reason we are talking at precisely 8.55am is that there is a queue of other hacks stretching behind me, waiting to talk to him. This is because on October 11, his first solo album, Last of the Lonely Gods, will be released. And a first solo album from Toogood is what’s known in the record business as A Very Big Deal. He will tour the album throughout the country from the same date.
Another surprise, maybe – in addition to the 6am rising and the making of the kiddos’ sammies – is the quiet, tender songs he has written. They are songs about love, and longing and loss. Listening to the album is like being in a room: just you and him and his acoustic guitar. In other words, it is an intimate album.
Playing his acoustic guitar and performing solo shows is, he has said, where he feels “most human”. What did he mean? “Okay, with Shihad, it’s basically like riding a dragon. It’s almost like being in a high blockbuster movie, you know, where it’s all larger than life. There’s 1000 people or whatever in front of you and they know every word. And I’m literally a master of ceremonies. I’m going, ‘Okay, now is the time to jump. Now is the time to sing. Now move your hand like this.’
“It’s about the whole thing. And we’ve got this sort of Ramones-like quality to the way we play our sets. Which is as soon as that song’s finished, you’re ‘1,2,3,4′ and you’re into the next song.”
He likes the quietness of playing solo. The stillness. “I turn up with my guitar. There’s nothing to hide behind. There’s no big PA. There’s no massive light show. It’s just me, my songs and the stories behind those songs. I allow space to tell a joke that might not work. I allow myself space to tell a story that might be pretty vulnerable and actually really quite revealing about myself.”
Here’s one such story, in song:
“You’re alive when I see my little girl
In her eyes the story of the world
And you should see how quick she runs
Love is forever.”
Here is the story of the song to his mum: She died during the Covid epidemic, although not of Covid. The songs, he says, “tend to be about not being able to hold my mum’s hand for the last time”. He was in Melbourne and couldn’t come home to say goodbye. He had a last phone call with her.
His parents were “ten pound Poms”, the term for British assisted migrants under a scheme to bring Brits to New Zealand to populate the colonies after World War II. He loved his parents. They were good and decent and kind. They were poor but happy. His father was a carpenter. He was always going off to fix other people’s houses, which “caused no end of grief with my mum”.
Love is forever
His was a blissfully happy childhood. “We knew we were loved. I never felt like I couldn’t be anything I wanted to be.” And what he wanted to be was a hard rocker. “They were a little bit disappointed. I was captain of the Wellington primary schools cricket team. So, I think they were sort of harbouring dreams of me playing for the Black Caps, you know. I used to play against Chris Cairns, who was captain of the Canterbury schools team.”
Then, at Wellington High School, he met a fellow called Tom Larkin, who would become Shihad’s drummer. They were suspended from the school for writing “AC/DC Rules” on a wall in the boys’ loo. They formed the band in 1988. And that is the origin story of the long and chemically fuelled rock career of a boy who was never going to be a Black Cap.
Luckily, love is forever. His parents never stopped loving him. He never stopped loving them. He still misses them. Writing songs about loss makes him feel, he says, “less alone”.
He believes in love. He met his wife Dana, at the time a student at the NZ College of Chiropractic, at a do. She didn’t have a clue who he was, but she thought he looked interesting. What he thought was, “There you are.” And that was it. They married in the Sudan – she is a Sudanese Muslim – in 2014. His mum went to the wedding. He wore a red and white jalabiya and snakeskin shoes. Which might be regarded as a sartorial step-up from that plastic vest thing in an ancient video clip online. He was married once before when he was being a Shihad-head. Now, he is a teetotal, drug-free convert to Islam, living in West Auckland and besotted with his wife, who he says is the most beautiful woman he has ever seen. She might be better-looking than him. He thinks this is pretty funny. “I’m punching well above my weight.”
And all grown-up. To a point. Those bum and fart jokes … How strange it is to remember that he is from the band that once got smashed on acid in the Wellington Botanic Garden before recording. He says they took “every substance known to man”.
You might describe the taking of every substance known to man as a weird experiment. Here is the weird experiment: Shihad would take a particular drug and then video their performances. They “quickly figured out that the best performances we played were the ones where we hadn’t had anything and we were straight”. They didn’t need to be tripping to perform. Performing is trippy. “Because it’s already a surreal situation, being on stage in front of people.”
That sleeveless vinyl vest he’s wearing in a surreal video clip on the internet must have been very sweaty. It was for what many would say was Shihad’s best song, Pacifier. He looks hot. In both senses of the word. He was a bit sexy. Being a bit sexy is more or less obligatory for frontmen of bands. He says now that the vinyl get-up was like performing in a sauna “fully clothed”. And this is why he “probably stayed skinny”.
Music critic Nick Bollinger once wrote about Shihad that they were “hard rockers without the machismo”. And that the frontman, Toogood, was “skinny and sensitive”. We might put the skinny bit down to the synthetic singlet, and the drugs. He says of the observation of him as being a sensitive hard rocker: “I am. I am sensitive to the point where life can get pretty tough. And I think, like a lot of artists I know, we’re attracted to the arts and to play a song live … It sounds counterintuitive that if you’re nervous around humans, or feel insecure around humans, you’d want to stand on a stage and have people look at you. But it’s not actually about that. It’s about the forced mindfulness of being very much in the present moment. Because you can’t be thinking about the bills you have to pay next week. You can’t be thinking about the stupid thing you said that’s super embarrassing a year ago that you still haven’t got over.”
Does he ever look at those early videos? “Why would I do that to myself?” Good answer. Who would want to look at themselves at 17 wearing a sleeveless, sweaty plastic vest and off his nut on god knows what. “I mean, gig clothes are hideous.” But they were rockers, man. “I can love that shit.”
Battling injustice
Now, he has long, scruffy hair and a beard and looks like an Old Testament prophet. An Old Testament prophet who Talks A Lot. This has been noted before. This is not a complaint. People who talk a lot in interviews make for easy interviews.
With Toogood, you just sit back and let him wander where he chooses – which is down labyrinthine alleys. You can also sit back and just enjoy him. He is easy to enjoy, because he is endlessly enthusiastic. He is also erudite and clever and most amusing. One thing he is endlessly enthusiastic about is swearing. Is he, as a devout Muslim, allowed to swear? “Oh, I think I just get a bit enthusiastic sometimes. Yeah, I’m allowed to do whatever I want.” Does Dana swear? “Yeah, when I get annoying, for sure.” He says he can be annoying all right. “Multiple times a day.”
You can kind of imagine this. Get him started on injustice: “I’ve been brought up by two working-class Londoners who always helped out the neighbours, you know, and that’s always given me the sense of battling against injustice. I hate seeing powerful people prey on less-powerful people. I hate it. And I think there’s something about my upbringing that wouldn’t allow me to lose myself in that too much, you know? Yeah, so I realise what I’m doing is just a job.”
He has embraced Islam enthusiastically. Of course he has. A simple but truthful interpretation of what he loves about being a Muslim is that it’s not all about him. And it not being about him is a sort of freedom. You can see that it might be.
He was being groomed for stardom. Shihad were meant to make it big in the States. Then there was 9/11. The name of the band. It sounded like “Jihad”. Their record company said they had to change it.
They changed it to Pacifier. This was a joke. Not everybody appreciated their sense of humour. It went down with their fans about as well as a baby choking on a dummy.
Did he want to be a star? “I think, like any sensitive artist, you want to know that you’ve pleased people. You want to know that people have enjoyed what you’re doing. But that way demons lie.”
Demons lurk for rock stars in the most predictable of places. If he had become, or been manufactured to become, a US star, “I think I would probably be dead. And, you know, the universe has its ways of taking you down paths you don’t expect. And that are actually better for you. So, yeah, I’m pretty confident that where I’ve ended up is where I’m supposed to be.”
He was a committed atheist for most of his life. “I talked a good game.” He didn’t need a god to be, like his parents, good and decent and kind.
And you could be all of those things while taking drugs and pissing it up enthusi-astically. Such is life as the stereotypical hardcore metal-head. It must have been exhausting. And, eventually, boring.
Here he is, then, contented in his kitchen making school lunches, making up songs about bums and farts. It’s not the ending to his story that you might have predicted. It is, though, a much happier one? “I’m happy,” he says. “Everyone’s happy.” He’s so likeable that you can’t help but be happy for him.
