The thing that you need to know about Wellington in the mid ’80s is that it was a mind-numbingly, soul-crushingly dull place.
No capital cool back then and certainly no entertainment precinct. Courtenay Pl only had a couple of bars and one of those was the Albion, an early opener for the fruit and veg porters who toiled in the markets where dozens of restaurants are now. Commuters had to dodge deros being chucked out at 8.30am or so.
The other was the Clarendon, a rare island of a live music venue in a sea of beige nightclubs where grey people bought drinks with umbrellas and fruit in them for other grey people. More on the Clarry later.
Growing up in Wellington’s suburbs it felt like live music scenes were something that happened elsewhere. From the hallowed pages of Rip It Up we knew that Auckland was the centre of what amounted to New Zealand’s music industry, that the Dunedin Sound was sweeping all before it thanks to Flying Nun and that even sleepy old Christchurch had a few bands on the rise.
What Wellington had was a solid blues scene, some limp covers bands and the endlessly fascinating and deeply excellent Four Volts (later the Six Volts), who would have been classed as "alternative jazz" had someone felt the need to invent such a label.
Finding the real edge, bands who were genuinely out there and exciting, was hard. The city had had an active punk scene but that was fading out just as teenage me started venturing out to those gigs — most of the shows I saw tended to end up with a fight, a police visit or both.
Flesh D-Vice were still keeping the scene’s flag flying high though and the band’s lead singer, Gerald Dwyer, may be just about the most important person in this story.
More by good luck than good management, as the 1990s began — after a university "career" which had mostly involved working in student radio and newspapers and being behind the varsity bar at every gig going rather than actually being at lectures or exams — I landed a job as a junior reporter at the Evening Post.
Soon after I arrived, English punk legends The Fall played in Auckland and I asked the entertainment page editor if anyone was interviewing them. No they were not — would I like to?
I should say so, and soon after my first piece of music journalism made it into print. A second followed the next week, a feature on US metallers Anthrax, who were coming to Wellington.
The support act at that Anthrax show was a local outfit called Shihad. I had seen them before at the Clarendon ... well, when I say "seen", the building had a pronounced bend in it so if you had talked your way past the deeply dubious bouncers that you were honest to God actually 20 years old, and then slipped safely upstairs past the gang members who drank on the lower floors, and got into the venue in one piece, you had to be in the front dozen rows or so to actually see the band.
But at the town hall they definitely got my attention. They still sounded like they were playing their way through their big brother’s record collections, and they were far too metal for my snobby alternative ears ... but damn it, you could tell from early on that they had an X factor. One to watch, I said.
And, it turned out, they were a band going places. They had, earlier and somewhat incongruously, supported trudging Aussie rock journeymen The Angels and been invited to record a song for the B-side of a single. They were also in the somewhat unlikely company of Wellington bands the Warratahs and Smokeshop in having been signed by Auckland label Pagan Records and had an EP on the way. Good ears that Trevor Reekie.
In an era when few Wellington bands, let alone Wellington bands of this musical ilk, were recording, this was a story waiting to be told.
Hence on a July afternoon Jon Toogood (vocals, guitar), Tom Larkin (drums), Phil Knight (lead guitar) and a highly nervous new bass player, Karl Kippenberger (who had just replaced Hamish Laing and whose second gig was going to be in front of 20,000 people at Athletic Park supporting AC/DC), crowded into the Evening Post’s far from salubrious smoking room for a chat about their first record, the Devolve EP.
They were funny, honest, eminently quotable and as ambitious as all get out. The editor walked in halfway through and goodness knows what he made of his sanctum being invaded by a bunch of metallers ... he did say afterwards though: "Keep an eye on them — they sound like they want to go places." Yes sir.
By this stage the aforementioned Gerald Dwyer had become Shihad’s manager. He invited me out to lunch, a faintly daunting prospect as Gerald — being Wellington punk royalty, with all the survival skills that entailed — could be intimidating.
This day he was all business though, and what a business mind. He had a plan to make Shihad New Zealand’s biggest band, before taking on the world, and I could be in at the ground floor covering the vehicle by which he was going to achieve this, the Outer Limits Club.
Based at Sean Murie’s venue The New Carpark, which had just shifted from under a multi-storey parking building on Plimmer Steps to an old pub in Willis St (hence the "new"), it was going to be a limited edition, Thursday night event, hosting the cream of New Zealand’s alternative scene — which, as the Seattle scene was conquering all worldwide, was bubbling along nicely thank you. Shihad were to be the stars, and their shows would be the main events of the club season.
I must confess to having been a bit sceptical about this, but Gerald had an advantage that I didn’t — he had heard Shihad’s new material. The demos for what would become their debut album Churn represented an astonishing change of direction (Gerald slipped me a cassette of Nick Roughan’s demo recordings, which still sound better than the eventual still mighty fine finished product, if you ask me), and Gerald was surer than he ever had been of anything in his life that Shihad were the right band at the right time.
He talked me into it — I was to learn as we became friends that Gerald could talk almost anyone into almost anything — and I had agreed to cover the hell out of the Outer Limits Club in our pages.
Under Gerald’s tutelage, and through their own natural musical curiosity, Shihad had been listening to a lot more punk, alternative and industrial music. Crucially, they had fallen in love with the debut album of Headless Chickens — the influence of that record is all over Churn, and all for the better.
I always seemed to be in front of Karl for some reason, and to this day he still smiles about my deep love of the latter song back in the day.
Shihad had to be good, and they had to get better, because the competition was snapping closely at their heels in the form of another Gerald Dwyer discovery, Head Like A Hole. An anarchic collective of nudists and slackers, early HLAH was the single most exciting musical thing I have ever seen — it was like I imagine seeing the Pistols in ’76 or the Beatles in ’62 would have been like, they were that good. The Shihad boys freely admit that they were floored as well, and that the experience of having HLAH along as their support act meant that they had to be goddam perfect every night or they would be blown off the stage.
By now, in no small part thanks to Gerald’s influence and the music of the bands he was championing, Wellington had started to become a happening place. And not just in the field of rock — the musicians who would eventually become Fat Freddy’s Drop (a band which learned plenty of lessons from the Shihad story on their way to conquering the world in their own right) were coalescing, Peter Jackson’s one-man movie industry was gathering steam and a plethora of talented actors, dancers and musicians were making the artistic reputation that the city has today, all fuelled by Eva Dixon’s coffee and cheap laksa.
It wasn’t all fun and games though. One night in 1992 I stopped for a brief chat outside The New Carpark with lighting tech Paul Anderson before heading off to dinner. Two minutes later he was dead, stabbed to death in front of a friend of mine by a moron called Graham Burton — our paths would cross again years later when, as a Herald reporter, I covered Burton’s second murder conviction.
The venue reopened a week later. Dunedin/Christchurch band The Bats, who would normally draw several hundred, played to 30, and it closed soon after. That meant Gerald had to find new and creative venues for Shihad and Head Like A Hole to play, but it did lend itself to his intention of making every such show an event.
One Friday night I was in the van with Gerald doing a story about his "day" job running Wellington’s biggest postering business. When he dropped me off at home we had a long talk, during which he confided his long-term plans for Shihad, saying he knew that in a few years time they would be too big for him to manage and that his job was to get them to that point and then let them go.
The rise of Wellington, and of Shihad, was thrilling to watch and exciting to cover, although more than a few times I had to defend doing "yet another story about that band" when pitching my next of what by now had been several Shihad profiles to my bosses.
The band settled that argument though: signing to a German label, touring Europe and snaring a tour support with stars Faith No More were yarns that even my most doubting superior had to concede were indisputably big news.
Making a great debut album is one thing, but following it up is quite another — they call it the difficult second album for a reason.
I was lucky enough to be one of the first to hear the much-anticipated new Shihad record in its entirety. I was invited to the band’s practice room at OMW and in that tiny space, with just a roadie for company, the band ran through what would become Killjoy.
One-two-three-four is the most primal count in rock’n’roll. Killjoy starts with You Again, a musical premise so astonishingly simple it is a wonder no-one else had done it. You Again is a one-two-three-four riff, repeated with brutal intensity, over and over with occasional lead breaks. Then comes a mesmeric bridge and a furious final verse before you are one-two-three-four flattened into submission again at its fiery end.
A few months ago I joked with Jon on facebook that this was the hour that gave me tinnitus. But what an hour, seeing your favourite band up that close and personal and hearing for the first time what I still rank as their finest album. One of the special moments in my life, let alone my career.
Because of days like that, each time I wrote about Shihad it was from a place of passion, and it was driven as much by them as by my own love for the boys and their music. They were balls out, giving their all for the band, so, damn it, my writing about them had to be that too.
Was it was good journalism? That’s up to the reader but I know I damn well meant it, and that the writing was all the better for it. It’s something I’ve tried to infuse all my writing with ever since, a lesson learned from Shihad ... if it means nothing to you, why should it mean anything to the person reading or hearing it?
As 1996 dawned, it promised to be the biggest year yet for Shihad, as the band had scored a main stage slot on the Australian Big Day Out tour. The Auckland show kicked the tour off in fine style, but the carnival soon came to a shuddering halt when Gerald was found dead in his hotel room. I had been planning on doing a profile on G for some months ... now I was writing his obituary.
The tangi passed like a blur but the show had to go on — Shihad were back on the road, just where Gerald would have wanted them to be. He hadn’t planned to let go just yet, but there they went.
In March they played the university, the first Shihad gig in Wellington since Gerald’s death. I used to have this (very loosely abided by) policy of trying to get some distance between myself and the bands that I was reviewing in an attempt to maintain something resembling objectivity. It went out the window that night as I watched the show from side of stage with the Shihad whānau, all of us with tears streaming down our faces as Jon dedicated You Again to Gerald.
Whānau is not just a loose descriptor. The band’s parents and siblings were loyal supporters and I met many of them — Tom’s avuncular and fascinating dad and I were in irregular contact for years. Also, the crew who worked with Shihad tended to seldom leave the fold and were always loyally back for the next show or tour.
Perhaps they were inspired to do it for Gerald, perhaps they were all the more determined to make it due to adversity, but Shihad threw themselves into the next record with a real passion. Shihad (also known as The Fish Album) came out later that year and it’s a curious beast. Their poppiest record to date (Home Again is right up there with anything Finn/Dobbyn et al have written as a sing along Kiwi classic) it also had plenty of venom with the likes of La La Land, Jon’s hot take on his first taste of the United States.
The US was always a dilemma for Shihad: it was the market that they had always wanted to break, but the more time they spent there — and in particular the more time they spent witnessing the machinations of the US music industry — the less sure some of them were about the whole thing.
They did have a much more pleasant experience north of the border in 1999 when they were paired with famed Canadian producer Garth Richardson to record what would become The General Electric. Although a hired gun he was soon to become more than that: the producer instinctively clicked with what the band wanted to do, and Shihad, having found a kindred spirit, delivered what I feel is the most completely realised vision of all their albums.
The song writing is incredibly strong, no more so than on Pacifier, written about the beautiful will of the wisp that was Weta lead singer Aaron Tokona. In turn, Richardson, perhaps more than any other producer, captured the immensity of the noise Shihad could make, and also the deep-seated groove which anchored it.
By this stage the band had relocated to Melbourne, which made hometown shows and catch-ups all the rarer ... and even more so when in 2001 they decided to take the plunge, engage US management and really take on the States. Star producer Josh Abraham was engaged and Shihad recorded what in any other circumstances would have been a ripper of a record.
However, the circumstances Shihad found themselves in were being a bunch of Kiwis with a name that resonated of "jihad", in heartland USA, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. They were persuaded — or perhaps they persuaded themselves that they had to — to change their name to Pacifier, a decision which seemed necessary at the time but which none of the band was happy about.
On the phone to them doing press for the album, the quality of the songs was only a brief topic of conversation: Shihad were in damage control mode in New Zealand due to the enormous backlash that the name change had caused, and as the journo who had known them the longest I was arguably best placed to let them explain it to their disgruntled fans. I did my best, and I really did understand that they had the best of motives, but I was far from happy about it either.
While the band might now officially be known as Pacifier, the crowds on the album release tour were adamant that was not who they had come to see. It was recorded for a live double album, and each night an insistent crowd demanded that they were there for "Shihad! Shihad! Shihad! Shihad!".
After a triumphant, rafter-rattling show in Wellington we all repaired back to the Good Luck bar, owned by former Weta drummer Clinton den Heyer, and separately, as the night moved on to late morning, each of them talked to me, unprompted, about the name change. You could sense each of them wanted to be Shihad again — in fact, had never really been anything other than Shihad — but to return to the allegedly unmarketable name would somehow be giving up on a dream.
My answer was do whatever you want but be true to yourselves, so it came as little surprise when Shihad returned in 2005 and returned under their old name with an abrasive, angry and heavy as hell album, Love Is the New Hate. Let Shihad be Shihad, and with Richardson back at the controls this was the sound of a band being true to itself.
I had moved to Christchurch by then where, unbeknownst to me, Aaron Tokona had also fetched up. Discovering each other at a Trinity Roots show we soon became gig buddies, and the Welly reunion at the Shihad show on that tour was a memorable night.
I had once hoped to write a book about the band but publisher indifference meant that I had moved on to other things, even though Shihad were still a total rock’n’roll machine. I remained a loyal fan though, enduring through the thin gruel of Beautiful Machine (their weakest album for me) and then somehow almost entirely missing the release of Ignite due to the rigours of having become both a parent and a full-time mature student. I found it for sale at Dunedin City Library and thrashed it as the welcome return to form that it was.
FVEY, which reunited Shihad with Churn producer (and alternative music legends Killing Joke’s lead singer Jaz Coleman), was even better. It was unmistakably the work of mature artists, but somehow recaptured Shihad’s youthful intensity, no doubt thanks to the steely gaze of their teenage muse.
That one came out in 2014 and was followed in 2018 by a 30th anniversary tour and greatest hits compilation.
That, many assumed — including me — might well have been the triumphant end of the Shihad story, but this was a band that still had things to say.
In mid 2021 news filtered through that another Shihad album was on the way and late that year — despite the best efforts of the pandemic to wreck everything — Old Gods hit the shelves and Shihad was back where they belonged at No.1.
The last time I saw Shihad was 2022 in Dunedin on the Old Gods tour, and they were as majestic as ever. I took my Scottish mates, who had never seen them before, and it was special seeing "my" band through fresh and awestruck eyes. Yes Colin and Carol, they really are as good as I said they were.
We caught up backstage afterwards and it was as special as ever. The conversations were about children and their lives, of parents and their deaths, of friends living and those no longer with us. It’s been a long time, it’s been a good time.
Despite those years, it’s amazing how little had changed; Jon was still effervescent, scattershot and passionate; Tom was still the wise and analytical anchor of it all; Phil was still the quiet one but he still had that tinder-dry sense of humour and everything he said counted; Karl still had the youthful enthusiasm he first brought to Shihad, and he remains one of the fundamentally nicest people I’ve ever met.
It was a beautiful night, but I had a premonition the end might be nearing for Shihad. While the four of them still enjoyed making music together and each other’s company, and there can be few buzzes like being part of a mighty machine like Shihad, Jon had his solo career, Karl had his business and Tom and Phil had their fingers in various musical pies.
Add in the demands of family and keeping the Shihad momentum was proving difficult. And if there is one band who was never half-hearted, it was Shihad. There will be tears again when I see them for the last time, but they will be tears of pride, not regret.
Looking back there are any number of moments when the end could have come: when Gerald died, the Pacifier saga, following Beautiful Machine or during the long wait between FVEY and Old Gods.
But now feels perfect. Shihad are going out, likely in a blaze of glory, and entirely on their own terms. They have achieved so much and they have earned that right .
And those of us who came along for the ride can only give thanks that we got to be a small part of it as well.
Dedicated to Paul Anderson, Gerald Dwyer, Aaron Tokona and the others who we lost along the way, the crew, the support bands, and the mighty Shihad whānau.
Shihad, by the numbers
• Six New Zealand No 1 albums.
• Most top 40 singles of any NZ artist.
• NZ Music Hall of Fame members.
Dream set-list
• You Again
• Pig Bop
• Tear Down Those Names
• Deb’s Night Out
• Toxic Shock
• Lead Or Follow
• A Day Away
• Screwtop
• Pacifier
• Brightest Star/My Mind’s Sedate
• All The Young Fascists
• Rule The World
• Semi Normal
• The General Electric
Encore:
• Gates Of Steel
• Flaming Soul
• Home Again
At least one track from each album; no Shihad show can be without the best one-two punch in music Brightest Star/My Mind’s Sedate; my two favourite Shihad covers to start the encore, followed by the always brilliant set closer, Home Again.
The gig
Shihad play Wānaka on January 4 as part of their final tour, Shihad: Loud Forever, at Robrosa Station, supported by Kora, Dick Move, and Fiona & The Glow.
