Jon Toogood has been in the public eye since he was in high school. He’s followed his musical interests from thrash metal to Aghani-Al-Banat, he’s worn his heart openly, and he’s always been generous with an interview. So his new book, which the publisher predictably named Home Again, isn’t exactly crammed with secret surprises or bridge-burning invective. Still, it’s a good read. Pacey enough to not bore fans who already know the storyline, with a more than satisfactory amount of new colour and insights. The chapters are short and further divided by plentiful section breaks, so you can easily dip in and out.
Introspection adds depth to Toogood’s stories. It’s interesting enough that he was taught by King Kapisi’s mum, or that he captained a regional rep cricket team that contained future All Black Marc Ellis. It’s properly memorable to learn how the son of English immigrants found more in common with other new arrivals than with the pakeha kids he resembled, or how the switch away from cricket affected his relationship with his father.
It’s these windows into Toogood’s thinking that make Home Again worthwhile. He explains why drugs could never play a massive part in his creative endeavours, despite Shihad’s closeness with the permanently munted boys from Head Like A Hole. A perfectionist by nature, he digs into lessons learned from touring with bands like AC/DC, Faith No More and Grinspoon. Amongst smaller tidbits this reviewer finally discovered how The General Electric got its name. For gearheads there are comparisons of different microphones, guitars, and amps; for wannabe insiders there are interesting descriptions of what it’s like to work with producers like Jaz Coleman and Magoo.
Being one man’s memoir, this book skips over the aspects of bandlife that don’t interest him so much. Management was never his thing so he only gives a few sentences to seminal events like Shihad’s first meeting with Murray Cammick, who would release their early albums on Wildside Records and help establish their name as editor of Rip It Up magazine. He is similarly brief with an early international record deal that all but locked Shihad out of the USA in the 1990s. This seems like a pretty important bit of background to the Pacifier years, when access to America nearly ate them up whole. But if it didn’t grip Toogood at the time, it’s not in the book.
On the flipside the best thing about Home Again is that it takes full advantage of being one guy’s story, wherever that story takes us. The first half of the book treads the usual rock memoir path: the band works incredibly hard in recording studios and on tour, famous names are lightly dropped, inspiration hits and favourite songs are written. These 200 pages get us up to 1999’s The General Electric which is a peak, if not the peak, of Toogood’s entire career.
Then the fall. The second act opens with a mental breakdown and then tumbles into that darkest period, the Pacifier years. Shorn of his usual energy and confidence before he and the band even arrive, Toogood is thrown into the teeth-whitened pits of LA. It’s awful but, man, it’s compelling reading. Shihad’s attempt to make it big in America would have been a moonshot in the best of times but the ensuing cocktail of bad advice, confused decision-making and geopolitical fuckery makes it darkly comical. The punchline is a personal act of tonedeaf stupidity which he’s almost brave to remember.
The Pacifier sessions introduce a host of new characters—a hotshot producer, label representatives with weighty demands, celebrity guest stars. It’s never clear exactly how and why these people suddenly cared about, and presumably hoped to make a lot of money off, a quartet of Wellingtonians without any pre-existing American fanbase. The band is losing control, but who to? Maybe even the ultimate insider never really knew.
Other acts of omission make it clear when Toogood’s attention was wandering. Beautiful Machine and Ignite, two very different number one albums that confirmed Shihad as the most bankable, flexible band in the nation, get about five pages of coverage. From Toogood’s point of view they were mostly distractions from throwing together Adults jam sessions with a who’s-who of New Zealand music, or from slowly extricating himself from an unhappy marriage. How did his bandmates feel about all this? There is still space on the nation’s bookshelf for a full history of Shihad.
Enjoyably, Jon Toogood writes like he speaks. There’s no pretension in his voice, and no editorial fingerprints left behind by Karl Puschmann, the journo who is thanked for “help[ing] put together this beautiful book”. The author isn’t always the hero—he confesses shitty behaviour and includes a direct apology or two—but he can be overly tough on himself (and on the self-titled ‘Fish’ album of 1996). Either way, better to regret something you did rather than something you didn’t do. After 50-odd years of energetically throwing himself wholeheartedly into everything he’s ever taken on, the same was true of writing Home Again.
