JON TOOGOOD ON SHIHAD

Rip It Up, Issue 230, 1 October 1996, Page 23

JON TOOGOOD ON SHIHAD

“I can only write things once and if it sucks I’ve ruined a song, that’s the rules with lyrics. Sometimes you hit and sometimes you miss, but a lot of the times on this record I think I got it right, and I got across what I was feeling at the time. I’m really proud of the lyrics more than ever before.” HOME AGAIN “It’s about coming home after being away for a long time, and also about the times when we’ve got no money and we’re lying in our bunks in a crazy, shitty room thinking, ‘l’ll be home again at some stage’. It’s coming from my girlfriend’s perspective in the way that I’m saying I can appreciate how fucked it is being away from me, and me being away from her. And I’m just saying, ‘No matter how far away we are from each other, I still fucking love you, and I’ll see you sooner or later.’” GHOST FROM THE PAST “‘Ghost From the Past’ is about an old school chum that I used to spend a lot of time with, who went off the rails mentally. We slowly grew apart as you do with friends in the past, then catching up with him later on and he was a totally different person, but not in a good way. This person is basically a schizophrenic, and it’s quite a bummer seeing this person in that much pain and confusion, and not being able to say, ‘Dude, remember how it was.’ It probably asks more questions than it answers.” HATE BOYS “That’s my favourite song lyrically by far. You really notice the beer and rugby culture of New

Zealand when you get back from being away. It really frustrates me having to keep your head down and not saying anything back to people, when you walk into a group of rugby players who you know are going to hassle you, and they do. This song is my song to say what I’d really like to say when I’m outnumbered by 10 rednecks to one.” IT’S A GO “It’s just a get-up-and-go song. That song is inspired by our stops on the way to and from Auckland when we’re on tour. We stop at this place called Bully Point in Taupo and it’s a song about me standing on this rock that I stand on every fucking time. I sit there and shiver my balls off before I dive into the water, while everyone else has just jumped in. It’s talking about that feeling, wishing that I didn’t stand there for ages before diving in, and then realising that it’s actually really nice and really good. That’s what inspired the song, it’s not actually about that situation particularly, it’s an anti-procrastination song, just doing things and going for it.” LA LA LAND “It’s about our time spent in Los Angeles, and enjoying it to a certain degree, but also realising how superficial it was in comparison to my hometown of Wellington. The first verse is about hopping into a cab in LA and having the guy ask me if I was new here, and telling me about his wife who had been put in prison, and then saying, ‘This town is terrible, it’s the land of everything and nothing at all.’ And I thought, 'Yeah, there’s a song in there.’ The second verse is about a party I went to and met this girl who was quite high up in a company, in a trade magazine in the music industry, and she was explaining how she found these psycho-active pills, and she said, ‘Taking them, it was like coming into a clearing, it was the first time in my life when I felt really myself,’ and I was thinking, ‘How could you say that? That’s insane.’ A lot of people I met were taking uppers to get up in the morning, and downers to get down in the evening, it was just weird. It’s a fast pace in LA.” ATTACK “‘Attack’ is a little love song I think... a love song that’s also quite a realistic love song. The first lines are, ‘Look at you / You’re a mystery I Sometimes you’re just hell.’ When I played it to cont page 25