Shihad in the early days. File photo / Supplied by Wildside Records
Murray Cammick already had a decade’s music journalism and a hip-hop label under his belt by the time he launched Wildside Records in 1991. Ahead of their The Meanest tour next month, he recalls how he met a leatherjacketed, longhaired, take-no-prisoners and impossibly young Wellington group by the name of Shihad.
I saw Shihad for the first time at either the Powerstation in July 1991, playing as part of the tour for their first EP, Devolve. I remember, I was watching them from the backstage and Johnny Toogood was playing a white guitar. As he went on, one of his fingers
started bleeding onto the white guitar, which I thought was very showbiz. White is generally a flamboyant colour - blood, of course, more so.
At that stage I had no idea that Shihad would become available for signing - at that time I was working with Head Like A Hole, who Shihad given their break. HLAH were sharing an practice space in a half-abandoned warehouse with Shihad in Hopper Street in Wellington, and they'd managed to work their way both into playing support of the tour for Devolve, the first EP, and managing to get Gerald Dwyer, who had picked up on Shihad first, to manage them as well. The first time I actually met the group was at the Aseana restaurant in Auckland.
For the record, it was Gerald that put Shihad together with Jaz Coleman to record the debut - John Dix's book Stranded in Paradise wrongly says that I did, but that's not true. I had nothing to do with Shihad at the time that came together. However, when the Churn album was completed - Shihad had problems paying the studio bill. The band urged Gerald to approach all the major labels, to try and secure some sort of advance for its release. No one at EMI had even heard the band and the only major label people remotely interested were some of the guys at Sony. Wildside and Pagan (who put out Devolve) were interested as well. There was a listening party for the album - the Sony people did turn up, but it became pretty clear pretty fast that they weren't seriously interested.
To be honest, I couldn't hear a single on the record but we did go ahead and release I Only Said to lead things off. Gerald had some unique ideas to sell the single - one of which was to push it through the Wellington record stores two members worked at, which were incidentally also the same stores you could buy tickets for their shows from. It was no coincidence you could buy a ticket to the show and get a free EP at the same time.
