Fast, furious and finished: Legendary rock band farewells fans

Ask Shihad frontman Jon Toogood to describe the feeling onstage when the New
Zealand band play live and his eyes widen.

“It’s like riding a f---ing dragon,” starts the 53-year-old, his long hair swaying enthusiastically around his face.

Shihad: Time to call it a day.

“It’s like jumping out of an aeroplane. It’s like tightrope walking between two buildings, and you know you’re not going to fall, but you’re getting the thrill at the same time.”

In short, it sounds like a feeling that would be hard to walk away from. And yet, that is the decision legendary band, Shihad, have made, ending their 37-year career with a series of farewell shows around Australia and New Zealand in February and March.

Shihad will leave behind a reputation as one of the most ferocious live bands ever to
come out of New Zealand.

They’re also one of the most successful, with 18 Aotearoa Music Awards and four ARIA nominations to their name, while nine of their 10 albums were Top 10 hits in their homeland.

Toogood and drummer Tom Larkin insist they’re not calling time because the band
can no longer cut it live, nor because they’re creatively a spent force (both regard
their latest records, 2014’s FVEY and 2021’s Old Gods, as some of their finest
work).

But for more than three decades each member (including bassist Karl
Kippenberger and guitarist Phil Knight) has made the band their number one priority, bending the rest of their lives around this musical juggernaut to ensure it never stops moving forward or improving.

That they’ve reached a stage where they can no longer maintain that focus means Shihad must come to an end.

“We wanted to draw a line underneath it and put it to rest in a way that maintained its integrity, and leave it in the same kind of place we always imagined it,” says Larkin, 53. “Not just something that frittered away and slowly deteriorated and crumbled.”

The reasons for this shift in priorities are complex and varied. One is geographical,
with Larkin and Knight living in Melbourne and Kippenberger and Toogood in New
Zealand.

Another is family related: Toogood has two young children he’s reluctant
to leave for long periods. Other issues simply fall under the “time of life” category.

“You’ve got different people at different levels of responsibility, different stages of
life,” says Larkin. “The ability to sustain that [focus] between the four of us buckled
post Old Gods and after COVID.”

It’s a long way from Wellington High School, where 16-year-old friends Toogood and
Larkin co-founded the band in 1987 as a speed metal act.

Over the years, with albums such as 1996’s Shihad and 1999’s The General Electric, they evolved beyond the metal genre while nonetheless remaining relentlessly powerful and heavy.

As for highlights, Toogood recounts bonding with Black Sabbath guitarist, Tony Iommi and bassist Geezer Butler, when Shihad supported the Birmingham metal artists in 2013, and hanging out with former The Clash frontman, Joe Strummer, on the 2000 Big Day Out. Larkin recalls mixing The General Electric at the same studio in Vancouver where his heroes AC/DC were recording the Stiff Upper Lip album.

“I go back to that idea that you travel with a group of people for 37 years, and you live out of each other’s pockets, and you are brothers, and it’s an amazing way to see the world,” he adds. “It’s amazing to be part of something that in its best moments requires no conversation.”

It hasn’t, of course, all been smooth sailing. While trying to break the US in the wake
of 9/11 the band were advised to change their name due to its similarities to ‘jihad’, and reluctantly adopted the moniker, Pacifier.

They reverted to Shihad in 2004.

Lead singer Jon Toogood performing before the NRL grand final between the Storm and Dragons in 2006.Credit: Simon Alekna

While courting American record labels, they had industry advisers telling them what songs to play live and how they should dress. “We started second guessing ourselves,” says Toogood.

“That was the bit that hurt me the most – that I went, someone knows more about what I intend with my art than I do. That hurt me the most out of my whole career.”

While Toogood and Larkin claim not to be focusing on the emotion of these final
shows, the singer expects to feel the weight of the moment when they walk offstage
for the final time in Wellington on March 15, the city in which it all began.

“That’ll be tough, [not only because of] the people that are there, but the people who aren’t that were there at the start,” he says. “A lot of our parents are gone now; they used to come to every show. I think that’s going to be tough.”

Shihad play the UNSW Roundhouse on February 14, Corner Hotel, Melbourne on March 5 and Forum Melbourne on March 7.