Shihad - best foot forward

After two decades as frontman of New Zealand's biggest rock band, Shihad's Jon Toogood reckons he knows a thing or two about putting on a good performance.
After all, the band has played at festivals around the globe and warmed up for its annual Big Day Out spot with a series of Australian shows supporting Guns N' Roses, and Korn.
So to say Toogood was shocked by the performance put on by GnR frontman Axl Rose is putting it mildly. Toogood learned a lot from Rose about how not to perform on stage.
Rose was widely criticised for his Australian performances, including turning up two hours late on stage in Townsville and miming along to his big hits.
Toogood said Rose was lacklustre when he turned up on stage and treated the crowd with total disdain by fronting up so late, and it's certainly not something he would ever contemplate.
"No way, man. I get sick in the stomach if I'm a couple of minutes late getting on stage."
He said it was a shame the concert ended in such a debacle as the crowd had been really good until the Axl Rose late show, and he had expected far more from him.
"When we went on, by the third song the crowd had their hands in the air and it was full-on stadium rock. It was great," Toogood said.
"Beforehand I thought the Korn guys would be scary people, but they were absolutely lovely people, totally nice guys, and they did a great show too. But by the time they had been waiting for Guns N' Roses to show up they were getting rather restless. And I think it's not a good idea to make a crowd like that a bit snarly."
In fact some of the audience walked out, outraged at the late showing and the miming.
"Yeah, some of them got pretty pissed off. In fact I was so exhausted by the time they did turn up I was a little pissed off just like the crowd.
"With Shihad it's important how the crowd feels, that's more important than how we feel. If you lose that goodwill from the crowd it's hard to get it back. With Axl you could hear the resentment from the crowd. People were shouting '**** off back to America, you wanker.'
"That doesn't do any good for Guns N' Roses, but I don't really think he sees it that way.
"I was really looking forward to seeing Guns N' Roses and was not that fussed about Korn. But the Korn guys put on a wonderful show and really got the crowd on side."
But the experience hasn't put him off the big festival scene and he reckons Shihad's warm-ups have put them in a "ballistic" frame of mind for the Big Day Out.
"We've loaded the ammo and are ready to play it all live."
Shihad warm up for the BDO with gigs at Riwaka Hotel on December 29, Brewer's Field, Mt Maunganui on January 2 and Waihi Beach Hotel on January 3 with The Naked and Famous and Cairo Knife Fight.
Toogood says what's helping Shihad's blistering performances is the material on latest album Ignite - the band's fourth number on a New Zealand album.
I had to confess that Shihad lost me a for a few years there - particularly after the Pacifier incident when the band changed its name from Shihad to Pacifier after 9/11 to appease United States sensibilities. But I found Ignite a real return to form after the promise of 2008's Beautiful Machine.
"It's been going really really well with Ignite and people really like the record. So do we, and that album happened really naturally for us.
"We'd had a really good break from each other and went off and did our own things. The time was then right when we got back together and played some powerful rock'n'roll. Everybody was refreshed and really up for it.
"We were amped, man, and it makes it so much better if everybody is that enthusiastic."
And it shows, with Ignite a bit of a tour de force as this Kiwi rock band heads towards its quarter century.
"It's also the first album we've produced ourselves and having that much control meant it sounded like we wanted it to sound," Toogood says.
"It was great, Tom [Larkin, Shihad drummer] set up a studio in Brunswick studios and we went for it.
"We've been doing this for 22 years now and having that much control over what we were doing was so liberating and we finally got it sounding like it does in our heads."
So how do the lads still get on so well together after being in the band for 22 years?
"It's hard not to annoy each other after a while and we've really pared back on the time we spend together," Toogood says.
"But when we do get together it's really intense.
"We're like brothers and can be really protective of each other, but we can also have the odd fight. But it's exciting though, rather than a drudge. We've got a solid 22-year-relationship going on and like any relationship you've got to work at it. We've been through lots of crap together but that makes us stronger and tighter."
If you can't check out that strength on the three-date mini-tour you can catch Shihad in all its glory at the Big Day Out, Mt Smart, Auckland, on January 21.