Shihad take a look back

BRIDGET JONES

Shihad talk about their 24 years in the music business.

Shihad broke up once. It was for three hours, they were in New Orleans and Jon Toogood had had enough of everything. Apparently it was the food that bought him back from the airport.

With a documentary about their 24-year career set to premiere tonight, the legendary Kiwi band are slowly getting used to looking backwards.

Of course, when you sit down with Shihad it's never straight forward - whether Toogood is wearing earmuffs and safety glasses or they are debating what constitutes New Zealand outrage, these guys like to make things interesting. 

This time around, their game du jour was forcing the normally very, very quiet guitarist Phil Knight to be chief question answerer.

Knight, like the rest of the band, has seen Beautiful Machine in a rough edit. He says it was an eye-opening watch, even as the subjects of the documentary.

"I tend to forget a lot of stuff and there was footage of me back when I was an idiot and I hadn't seen that at all.  I couldn't see it at the time.

"There's some amazing old footage of the first big tour we did of New Zealand back in '91. Just stuff I hadn't seen for years.  There was footage of our old manager who passed away in '96 and I hadn't seen anything of him for years, so that was a really big thing for me, seeing him on the screen was quite full on."

Beautiful Machine is an in-depth look at Shihad's road to becoming arguable New Zealand's most iconic rock band of recent years.

Award-wining director Sam Peacocke has called upon not only the band, but also their friends and family to paint a picture of who they are, where they have come from and what the past 20-years has meant to them.

"But here's plenty of mediocre band docos out there where it's just live footage and interviews and blah, blah, blah.  But when the director Sam Peacocke came on and the direction he took it, that's when we thought "woah, this is something special".  Not just a rockumentary, but a piece of work about four guys going through life and having to deal with stuff everyone has to deal with - loss, loosing loved ones, career.  It just happens to be in the context of a band that people seem to enjoy listening to."

From the band's emergence from the metal scene of the early 1990s, the death of their manager Gerald Dwyer, and the now-infamous American name-change, Shihad has battled, and won. Occasionally though, they have lost.

Knight, who has battled with booze over the years, says revisiting some of the footage was difficult to watch.

"Some of the stuff about me and how close it came to me actually getting booted out of the band, I guess that was sort of surprising.

"And the whole name change thing is still pretty hard to stomach.  But if we had it all over again, the film alludes to our personalities, these four guys, we'd make the same decisions again.  And it shows you why - it gives an insight into us, our childhoods."

Kids no more, there is something of a brotherhood within the four of them.  And even as Knight describes their longevity as "pretty weird", it's hard to imagine it any other way.

Shihad: Beautiful Machine opens in cinemas tomorrow.

- © Fairfax NZ News