Jon Toogood spoke to Anika Moa about the carnage he's gone through since Covid. Photo: RNZ / Cole Eastham-Farrelly
After going through "personal carnage" in recent years, Shihad frontman Jon Toogood now wants to write music that will hold him and heal him.
At 53, the great New Zealand rock legend has decided to stop "riding the dragon" which is performing at a great, big, boisterous Shihad show, and instead talk to his fans.
"I needed music after the personal carnage we went through," Toogood tells Anika Moa in the latest episode of the RNZ video series, It's Personal.
Back when Covid struck, Toogood was living with his wife, Dana Salih, and their young children in Melbourne. His mother was dying in Wellington and he wasn't able to get back to her.
"Dana and I, when my father passed away like 12 years prior, we took my mum on because she was lost … she felt safe with us," Toogood said, explaining how tight he was with his mum.
"It was weird that my brother and sister could be at the bedside when she was passing, but I couldn't. And she held on for 12 days … in a coma.
"To the point where my brother and sister were like, 'Jon, you're gonna have to tell her to let go'.
"I'm the one who had to call, my sister held up a phone to her face, and I said 'Mum, you've done a great job, we're gonna be fine, you can let go'.
"It was intense and all I wanted to do was hold my mum's hand for the last time for f…'s sake.
"She relaxed after I said that, and she passed away the next day."
Toogood rocking out back in 2005. Photo:
His mother's memorial was postponed for three months to try and find a window for Jon to get to New Zealand and grieve with his whānau, but ongoing lockdowns meant he had to join that service virtually as well.
"This is brutal. It was traumatic… it was all very surreal.
"You need to be able to be with that person to let your body know that they're gone. So there's a lot of unresolved shit."
Finally, Toogood was able to get to Wellington, where his siblings had saved some ashes for him to scatter. While he was staying with his sister, her husband, Jon's brother-in-law, was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer.
"He was fading away in front of me," Jon said, and his brother-in-law died six months later.
After months kept locked away from Dana and his children, and his own long-term Covid experience which turned up his pre-existing tinnitus, the family decided to relocate permanently back to Aotearoa, where they now live in Auckland.
"I needed to be held, and music has always been there to hold me, but I didn't have an album that I could reach to that described what had just happened to me."
So, he wrote his first solo work, Last of the Lonely Gods, due for release on 11 October.
It will sound different to fans of the prominent musician who has been making crowds bounce for more than 30 years.
But Toogood, who converted to Islam to be with his wife, explains: "I get to be human".
Jon Toogood speaks to Anika Moa on the latest episode of, It's Personal. Photo: RNZ / Cole Eastham-Farrelly
Once a "staunch humanist atheist", Toogood met Sudanese Dana at an afterparty for a songwriting workshop.
"Her name was Dana. She had a headscarf on, so I thought she might be Muslim," he said in an interview with the ABC in 2020.
"And it was one of those moments in your life where you just go, 'oh, there you are'."
He told Moa that Dana had "a calmness and inner peace that I wanted".
"For three years we were at polar opposites … but at the same time I thought, 'she's the most generous, kind human being I've ever met and I need her in my life, I'm not going to lose her'.
"I even talked to my dad before he passed away - and I was like dad 'what am I going to do?'
"And he was like 'love will find a way, love always finds a way, you'll work it out'."
Toogood attended courses for converts while he was still in Melbourne and took a leap of faith.
"I can vibe with the idea that it's not all about and me and I'm just living with borrowed energy and that I've got to give it back when I pass away."