Destination beautiful
After 20 years together, Kiwi rockers Shihad are feeling more energised than ever.
By Dan Stapleton
A band like Shihad - originally a product of the late-80s alt. rock explosion, then a fixture on Antipodean radio in the 90s - could be forgiven for having fallen off the radar by this stage in their career. But these four Kiwis have done the opposite, producing a new album, Beautiful Machine, that has scaled the charts both here and in their homeland. It's even more remarkable considering the band has only recently changed its name back from Pacifier (the moniker they adopted in a failed attempt to ‘break America'). The Pacifier era was a period of poor sales and low self-esteem for Shihad and it's something that singer Jon Toogood is determined to leave behind.
"All we concentrated on for the last year and a half was, ‘Let's make a fucking record we can live with and that we're gonna be proud of playing live'," he says. "But we don't have any massive plan to go to America again, or to take over the world. After the last five years, I just don't care."
That's good news for local fans: with Shihad reaffirming their commitment to stepping up their local touring schedule. They're already mid-way through their second Australian run for 2008. "We've only ever made money from playing live shows and selling t-shirts at the gigs," says Toogood. "It works well for us because we're happiest on the road - but we realised a while ago that selling records was never going to put money in our pockets."
Despite this live focus, Shihad worked longer (18 months) and harder than ever on recording Beautiful Machine. "Tom [Larkin, drums] has a studio in Brunswick [Melbourne] now, and all our gear is there when we're writing. So we could actually do all those little details and things we've always wanted to do. We had it set up like a sort of play-land for musicians - there's a drum kit there, there's keyboards there, and everything's set up to play."
The other key difference to recording this time around was key songwriter Toogood's newfound modesty. "By now I've been slapped around enough to make sure I don't get too precious about shit," he says. "And [this album] just comes from the fact that a) everybody's at the top of their game after 20 years, which is the way it should be, and b) we've been playing together for so long that we're tight as."
Now that it's on shelves, Toogood says the album has exceeded all the band's expectations. "This is our 20th year of being a band," says Toogood, "which is quite bizarre. So what amazed me was that, by the end of this record, we were all sitting listening to it going, ‘Fucking awesome, we've managed to find another path to go down'. I'm just really pleased."
So will they still be around in another 20 years? "If we're still going [then], please shoot us."
Shihad headline the return of The Lair on MTV on Thu 19 and hits the Gaelic on Fri 20 June. Beautiful Machine is out now through Warners.
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