On 25 August 2026, Hachette will release Home Again: My life and times in a band called Shihad, a new memoir from Shihad frontman Jon Toogood, written with Karl Puschmann. While walking his regular Heron Park circuit, Toogood reflects on Shihad, family, grief, mental health, music and the quieter thrill of finding home in the unknown.
Tim: There's a bit towards the end where you're talking about you were playing at a Mānuka Phuel Full Metal Orchestra and there's Phil Judd is drumming away at that gig. And then afterwards asks if you want to go for a smoke? And you are, like
Jon: Yeah, man!
Tim: And then his daughter…
Jon: She just comes over and just goes ‘You look familiar’. And he was like, “you know, don't be so rude, you know, Shihad’s the best rock band to come out in New Zealand for year, bro! Nice one.”
Tim: And then you text Tom afterwards, which is where it all started when he gave you Highway to Hell and you say: Life goals complete, bro!
Jon Toogood is walking the talk. Not metaphorically, though there is plenty of that in his new memoir Home Again — published by Hachette and written with journalist and ghost writer Karl Puschmann — but literally, moving through the tracks around Heron Park near his home in Waterview, Auckland. “I just do sort of six to seven K’s walking around,” he says. “It’s got hills, it’s got all sorts of bits to look at and stuff. Just nice to be out in nature.”
Walking has become one of Toogood’s anchor points — a place to think, regulate, and get outside himself. “That’s always been my safe space to sort of think and try and make sense of things,” he says. “Nature, it’s always been my inspiration… wherever you look, you’re always reminded that it’s not about you, which is really healthy for me.”
Jon: I'm so fortunate. And really, writing this book and thinking about what had happened to me from the moment I saw the Beatles Hard Day's Night record spinning around on my parents all in one turntable to, you know, you know, making all these albums with this amazing, incredible rock'n'roll band, traveling the world, playing on stages and, you know, you know, playing in front of thousands of people, playing in front of no people.
Home Again reads like Toogood speaking directly at you: funny, restless, generous, vulnerable, and sometimes brutally honest. He credits a lot of that intimacy to Karl Puschmann, who helped shape the book from “months and months of conversations. They are all my words, worked into these short, punchy chapters.”
Toogood first noticed Puschmann at the Taite Music Awards, when Shihad were being honoured for Killjoy [1995]. Puschmann was up for the 2025 Taite music journalism award against his friend Charles Shultz. “Carl lost to Charles and then did this amazing acceptance speech on behalf of Charles (who was absent that night),” Toogood laughs. “It was the funniest thing of the night for me. I was like, okay, cool, I want to talk to him.”
The process was extensive. “Carl and me basically went, okay, we need to cover all this,” Toogood says. “I want to go right back into my first memories as a kid with music.”
They worked through structured interviews over months, sometimes by theme rather than chronology: childhood, family history, recording The General Electric [1999], the name change, grief, family, touring, and everything in between. “It was just days, literally months of talking, just talking and talking and talking.”
Puschmann then turned those conversations into narrative while keeping Toogood’s language intact. “He put that into a narrative, but he used all my words,” Toogood says. Reading the audiobook confirmed it. “It was like just talking to somebody because it was everything that I’d said anyway.”
Toogood says honesty has always been part of his work. “Shihad’s music, like in my lyrics, that’s always been my place to be honest,” he says. “If I’ve been given an opportunity by (publishers) Hachette to write my story, I didn’t want it to be anything but that same sort of way I’ve lived the rest of my life.”
That meant confronting his mental health, tinnitus, the “crazy name change” (when Shihad fatally adopted the moniker ‘Pacifier’ to appeal to post 9 11 America), his parents’ deaths, and the years when fear, people-pleasing and pressure drove him.
“I wasn't going to shy away
from, you know, my battles with mental health. I wasn't going to shy away from
my, you know, that crazy name change and everything that was going on in there…how
much of a privilege that was, and an honour it was, even though it was like
sticking your hand in a fire every day you woke up. But those are the moments
that make the life, you know? And I thought: “This is my way to tell my story.”
So, I'm going to give it a good a good crack.
I'm a creature of the moment. I love doing what I'm doing at the moment. I get
self, I get totally absorbed and I'm always thinking about what's next. I'm
never thinking about what happened. So, this was an opportunity for me (to look
back on it all).”
 |
| Photo: Lottie Hedley |
COVID, for Toogood, was not just a global rupture. It was a personal pause button. “COVID was an opportunity to get off the rat race for a second and look at what I actually had in my life and what I was missing out on,” he says. From the moment his son Yahia was born in 2015, he had gone into what he calls “protective dad overdrive”: “hustle, work, work, travel, work, home for a second, work — Shihad, solo, theatre show.”
Then, suddenly, nine months of work disappeared in two weeks. After the initial panic, he found himself at home with his wife Dana and children (Yasmin and Yahia), realising the contradiction at the centre of his life. “I was working so hard to make sure that these guys have got a roof over their head that I’m away all the time and I’m actually missing them,” he says. Looking through photos from their early years, he realised that “80 to 90%” of the images of him with his kids were FaceTime screenshots from hotel rooms.
Home now means school lunches, music in the lounge, family routines and coaching his son’s under-10 Grafton cricket team. “I don’t know what it feels like to take a bunch of 10-year-olds to the end of a cricket season and watch them improve and go, oh cool, I helped with that process,” he says. “That’s interesting to me. It’s new. I’ve never done it.”
[Toogood married Dana Salih in Khartoum, Sudan, in 2014 after converting to Islam; together they have two children, Yahio and Yasmin. The Sudanese wedding also opened a door into Aghani-Al-Banat music, and completing a Masters Degree, all which later fed into Haja, his 2018 album with The Adults.]
That newness matters. “Kids change every day,” he says. “They come up with some crazy bit of truth that just, you just go, thank God I was there for that.”
He is also still writing hard. “I’m writing so much because of just how crazy the world is,” he says. “The way I’ve always processed it is through music — whether it was consuming music and hearing other people’s thoughts about love and loss and life and injustice or writing my own music to try and see where that fits in with me, or where I fit in with that.”
At home, music is not a museum piece. “Our life is permeated with music,” he says. “We’ve got the record player set up in the living room. My kids, I’ve taught my kids how to use it, so they can just go to the record collection — and they do.”
What they choose still surprises him: Michael Jackson, Beastie Boys, The Cure’s Standing on a Beach, Aldous Harding. “It’s so beautiful to me,” he says. “Out of my record collection, what do they gravitate towards? Oh, The Cure — my son loves that record, loves it. Absolutely loves it.”
For all the mythology around Shihad, Toogood talks about the band less as a miracle and more as a craft, a discipline and a democracy. He still sounds astonished by the chemistry he found with Tom Larkin. “The universe put those two people together,” he says. Tom was the son of the New Zealand ambassador to Japan and had spent early years overseas; Toogood was a first-generation Kiwi with family roots stretching back to London. When they met, Larkin had records, drive, and the line that changed everything: “You know how to play guitar. Listen to these records and let’s start a band.”
“He was probably the best drummer that’s ever come out of the Southern Hemisphere as far as rock’n’roll goes,” Toogood says. “And I didn’t know that. I just thought all drummers were like human metronomes. That was the first drummer the universe paired me with.”
Throughout Home Again, Toogood speaks warmly of the creative force Shihad became: Tom Larkin on drums, Phil Knight on guitar, Karl Kippenberger on bass, and the earlier musicians who helped shape the band’s beginnings, including Geoff Duncan, Geoff Daniels and Hamish Laing. He also acknowledges the long, productive relationship with their manager and the tensions that came with keeping a band together for decades.
“We argued like these were matters of life and death to us,” he says. “But we were always like a four-way democracy. Everything got put to the vote. Sometimes you’d win, sometimes you’d lose. But you have to learn how to argue your point in a way that’s constructive.”
The work ethic came from curiosity. Shihad wanted to know what it felt like to be “inside a band that sounded that big”. They watched AC/DC, Fugazi, Rage Against the Machine and Midnight Oil, asking questions about sound, volume, audience connection and tightness. Supporting AC/DC at Athletic Park was a turning point. “We had the gain turned up,” he says. “Whereas they had the gain down, but the main volume up. So, it’s a very clean guitar played extremely loud. We had to relearn how to play after seeing them.”
Even at the end, the band were still editing themselves. “For the last gig, Shihad were still, all right, you could probably do that a little bit better. Probably tighten that up at the edge there. Probably not spend so much time chatting nervously— just go straight into the next song!”
For Toogood, the band’s method was never mystical. It was work. “It’s songwriting craft, performing live is a craft, recordings are a craft,” he says. “We were just keen as, so keen to know how all this works. How do you do that, man?”
He talks about his guitars the way his father, a cabinet maker, treated tools. “My tool happens to be a guitar,” he says, naming his Fender Telecaster Deluxe, his Martin D18 and D28 acoustics. “I treat those like I watched my dad growing up as a cabinet maker and a very good one, the way he dealt with his tools.”
That curiosity also meant turning up early and watching everyone. “We’d always watch the band we were supporting or when they were supporting us. We’d always turn up early,” he says. “And ask lots of questions: how do you get that sound better? How do you get that riff tighter? How do you talk to an audience?”
Shihad’s reputation as a fearsome live band came partly from discipline and partly, Toogood says, from fear. “Everyone would see me on stage with my teeth gritted and my eyes clenched shut and my hair going everywhere, and I’d stage dive,” he says. “But a lot of it was fear. A lot of it was not wanting to open my eyes to see that one person in the crowd saying, I hate you, man, you don’t fool me.”
That self-doubt, he says, is common to artists. “Is this good? You try your best. Everyone’s got self-doubt.” Over time, he learned a different relationship with performance: “Later on in the years, I got to that point where, well, I love this, I don’t give a damn. But that took years to work out how to do.”
The peak years were punishing. Around The General Electric [1999], Shihad were saying yes to everything because, after years of hearing no, they did not know how long the opportunity would last. “I was on that trip, thinking: I’ve got to make sure every show we play is like the last show we’ll ever play,” he says. “Everyone who walks out of this show has got to think that was the best live show they’ve ever seen.” That was the driver.
That meant smashing himself on “the altar of rock’n’roll”: leaping from PA stacks, throwing guitars, catching them with his face, chipping teeth, splitting lips, playing until his fingers bled, waking up bruised and swollen, then heading to another radio session, TV spot or industry obligation. “You’re always on, always on, always on,” he says. “And it catches up with you.”
Underneath the physicality was the pressure of being “always on”. “There’s always someone who you’ve got to go and meet and shake your hands with,” he says. “You’ve got to make sure you’re on your best behaviour. You’ve got to make sure you’re looking good. Make sure you’ve got the right T-shirt. Make sure you say the right thing.”
The paradox is that he still loves playing live. What he no longer loves is the machinery around it. “I love playing live,” he says. “But I hate travelling and being away from my family. I hate it. I’ve done it for 37 years. I’ve got no interest in doing that. There is a new adventure here that I’m not prepared to give up.”
He says the constant performance of being in the industry could feel like schoolyard pressure all over again. “You’re always on guard,” he says. “It’s almost like going back to high school… make sure you’ve got the right T-shirt, make sure you say the right thing.”
Grief sits close to the surface in Home Again, and in Toogood’s recent music. Love Is Forever [2024], dedicated to his mother Yvonne, is one of the most direct examples. “It’s a heavy song,” he says, “but it feels good to sing that one because it helps me understand that grief.”
Losing his father was painful but tangible. He was there. With his mother, COVID made the loss feel abstract. He was locked down in Melbourne and had to say goodbye by phone. “It just didn’t seem real to me because I wasn’t there,” he says. “With Dad, I saw him pass away. It was easy for my body and mind and soul to accept because I was there. But with Mum, it was a bit abstract.”
Grief counselling gave him one of the insights that stayed. “I said to the counsellor, I just wanted to hold her hand one last time,” he says. “And she said, hey, you’re 50% in her DNA, just hold your own hand.” It sounded strange, he admits, but it helped. “That’s right. Fifty percent of me is her.”
That song became a way of continuing the relationship. “Nothing lasts forever, but also it sort of does as well,” he says, thinking about his mother, his daughter and the way family echoes through generations. “We’re all a continuum.”
Last of the Lonely Gods [2024] came from that same terrcitory: the realisation that his parents were gone, that he was now the adult, and that he was “the last line of defence” for his own children. “I had to follow my muse,” he says. “I’m proud of every song on that record because I managed what it felt like to be a 55-year-old guy who’d just lost his parents and was looking at his own life.”
He knows some Shihad fans may have wanted another heavy record, but says that was not where his life was. “You have to follow your muse, man,” he says. “You have to write what is actually on your mind. Otherwise, it’s not real. It’s just not real.”
The Shihad/Pacifier name change has been picked over before, but Toogood still talks about it with a mix of discomfort, compassion and hard-earned acceptance. “It was far more important to us to own our name, to be proud of who we were, and to write music that was uncompromising,” he says of finally returning to Shihad. “That comes at a cost. It came at a cost of, well, probably won’t be able to get released in America.”
For years, he could not listen to the Pacifier album [2002] without feeling the baggage: the Viper Room show (“where I told that bad joke”), the awkward industry encounters, the haircuts, the clothes, being told what to play, being introduced to Leonardo DiCaprio, and feeling pushed outside the reason he joined a rock’n’roll band in the first place. “Every time that record came up, it reminded me of all those awkward, uncomfortable things I hated about the industry and all the compromises made.”
But the final Shihad tour changed something. In Brisbane, at The Zoo, they played the whole Pacifier album from front to back. “It was awesome,” he says. “The biggest problem it’s got is that it sounds like three different bands on one record.” Yet songs he had dreaded revisiting suddenly felt alive. “We should have been playing this for years,” he says now. “It’s such a good song.”
He can now look at that period differently. “I finally can look at that album with a lot more compassion and love,” he says. “It’s got some good songs on it.”
He can also see how the name change pushed Shihad back into underdog mode. “Whenever we were the underdogs, that’s when we play the best,” he says. “What a way to kneecap yourself and be the underdog is to change your name in the middle of a career when you’d built up this huge following.”
Toogood was once, by his own description, a book nerd. He travelled with books, filled devices with them, and still reaches for writing that opens something up. Recently he has been reading Elif Shafak’s There Are Rivers in the Sky. “Every page has got a pearl of wisdom or just a poetic way to describe something where you just go, oh man, I wish I’d written that.”
But he also admits that devices have eroded his attention. “The only way I can do the long attention span at the moment is to play,” he says. “To make music. That’s the way I can stay in that nice realm.”
Music remains his mental health practice. He plays guitar for one to two hours a day, writes, tests words, and keeps guitars in the living room, bedroom and office so he can pick one up wherever he is.
Is it possible to be an old rock god and a soccer dad at the same time now?
Jon: I'm writing so much because of just how ******* crazy the world is. I hope it comes through in the book that the way I've learned how to process those difficult feelings of being a human being on this crazy planet. The way I've always processed it is through music. Whether it was consuming music and hearing other people's thoughts about love and loss and life and injustice or writing my own music to try and see where that fits in with me or where I fit in with that. That hasn't slowed down. In fact, if anything, I'm more disciplined with the craft of songwriting nowadays. Like, I spend at least an hour to two hours a day playing my guitar, writing, playing with the words. And I do that as just a general mental health practice. (As a detail obsessive) the great thing about music is if you ever want to bypass that little monkey brain in your head chattering away and get to what your heart's thinking or heart's feeling, music's the way to do it. (It) bypasses that logical, pragmatic part of you and goes straight to what you're actually feeling. And that's great for me.
He is also increasingly interested in passing on what he has learned. He has guest lectured at the University of Auckland’s music department, mentored music students at Birkenhead College, and worked with young songwriters. “I’m in a season where it’s about trying to share a little bit of the knowledge that maybe I’ve garnered over the years,” he says, “that may or may not help a young, talented artist to maybe miss a few potholes along the way.”
Working with young songwriters energises him rather than simply making him feel like an elder statesman. “It’s choice,” he says. “It’s like, oh right, are they using those chords, but in that way? That’s choice. I find it inspiring as well. I’m learning.”
There have been many ‘pinch me’ moments in his career. Like watching Black Sabbath’s Tommy Iommi tune up backstage, when the band supported Black Sabbath. From early days, it was British rock that blazed the trail for him.
I was brought up in a British household with a, you know, older brother and sister who, very luckily for me, loved music. Didn't play so much, but they loved music. So I had all their record collections to go through. And because of the British background. I love Michael Jackson's Thriller album, you know, and I was still open to American music, but there was a real following in in our household (for Brit pop and rock). There was lots of Stiff Little Fingers, early U2, Boomtown Rats, Clash, Sex Pistols, Public Image Limited. And even, my brother's collection, Queen, Led Zeppelin and stuff like that. There was a lot of British influence.
You know it's weird that all of a sudden, I'm at a hotel in Los Angeles and having pancakes with Steve Jones, the guitarist from the Sex Pistols, and giving him a copy of The General Electric and going: check this **** out. And then being able to ask if he'd do another tour with Sex Pistols and stuff like that. I mean, and then meeting Joe Strummer, on one of the Big Day Outs when our backstage room was next to his for the whole tour. He'd come over and ask if we wanted to go a see a particular band. And we'd be like, **** yeah, man! I want to go and see that band with Joe Strummer from The Clash!
I don't care who the band is! I just want to go and hang out with you!
But like also they're also so familiar to me, these characters, because they reminded me of all my people I called ‘Uncle’ and ‘Auntie’, the people that came over on the boats in the 50s to Aotearoa from England with my parents. Together, all these people are familiar to me, but it just so weird to me that, you know.
He is happy to talk about mental health now, noting that younger artists often have a better language for it than his generation did. “I come from a generation of men that predated acceptance of speaking about it,” he says. “Pull your socks up and get on with it, mate.” But that old thinking does not help when someone is hurting. “If you feel what you feel, it’s still just as painful, whether it’s a perceived reality or a real reality. Mental health is complex and deep.”
Jon: Artists
tend to be very sensitive. That's why they're artists. But they're attracted to
an art form because they feel things intensely. But up until maybe, you know,
the last of 10 years when awareness of mental health is way more prevalent. So,
people can see when someone may be walking down a path that's not good for
them. In the past it was more like, I just ******* throw him out there, he'll
be all right! Go and play that gig, you're cool.
I think the book really illuminated it for me around that General Electric
time. It's like we'd fought so hard and for so long to be in a situation where we
said ‘yes to everything’: Rolling Stone Australia was calling us to do a photo
shoot - we've got to go and do it. Or a live to air at Triple M, the big main
commercial rock station in Australia. And yes, you've signed. You've got a gold
record, cool, and you've got a platinum record out, cool. So, get out there and
do more, and more. So, you're saying ‘yes’ to everything because you don't know
how long that ******* is going to last for you.
That sensitivity, he says, cuts both ways. “Your heart’s outside your chest,” he says. “And that’s how you get to write a song that works. But at the same time, that also hurts a lot. It’s also really hard to be inside at times.”
Near the end of the conversation, Tim returns to a line from Home Again that feels like a key to the whole book: “One thing I’ve learnt is that the place I feel most at home is the fuzzy uncertainty of the unknown.” Toogood pauses on it. “I do like that bit,” he says. “That’ll be whether it’s the first time on stage at the Clarendon Tavern in front of a bunch of punk dudes at the age of 15, or playing my first solo show for a party in Melbourne, where there’s no band behind me, or writing Pacifier [2002] and going, wow, those notes with those words? Yes.”
The unknown now includes coaching the Grafton under-10 cricket team, making lunches, listening to what his children pull from the family record collection, and picking up guitars scattered through the house. “All those moments where you don’t quite know what you’re doing, but you’re just trying your best,” he says. “It’s new and it’s exciting and it makes you feel alive.”
By then, Toogood has almost completed the loop. “I’ve done 6.3 K’s while I’ve been talking to you,” he says, sounding pleased. “Walking’s good for me. If I can walk it, I’ll do it.” The interview began with him out in Heron Park, moving through the morning, and closes with him circling back — home again, in every sense.
Home Again: My Life and Times in a Band Called Shihad is released Tuesday 25 August 2026.
There will also be a number of book tour dates, with more to be announced over the coming weeks.
Auckland Event
·
Off The Record with Jon Toogood, Q Theatre, Tuesday
25 August 2026
(Hosted by Charlotte Ryan)
WORD Christchurch Events
·
Home Again at The Piano, Saturday 5 September
2026
(In conversation with Booker Prize-winning author Shehan Karunatilaka)
·
I Wish I Wrote That at The Piano, Saturday 5
September 2026
(With Grant Robertson, Elizabeth Knox, pip adam and Shehan Karunatilaka)
Wellington Event - Verb Readers and Writers Festival
·
Jon Toogood: Home Again, The Hannah, Saturday 26
September 2026
(In conversation with Nick Bollinger, includes songs, storytelling and book
signing.
Tauranga Arts Festival Event
·
Jon Toogood: Home Again: Te Ao Mārama, Tauranga
Library, Saturday 31 October 2026
(In conversation with Karl Puschmann)
No comments:
Post a Comment