Shihad “Home Again”
Ah, good old “Home Again”. It’s possibly the song most beloved of Shihad fans, and the video captures its feelgood spirit. It’s shot in one continuous take with a static camera. So it’s up to the band to do enough for three and a half minutes to keep viewers entertained. The video has also been...
Shihad “A Day Away”
“A Day Away” was another single from Shihad’s self-titled 1996 album. It’s such a beloved album, and I can’t help feel that it represents Shihad at their absolute peak. “A Day Away” begins with Jon sitting on the steps of a rickety old house in the city. Now it seems that Shihad videos are not...
Shihad “It’s A Go”
Shihad go underground. In dark black and white footage, we see the band clambering over rocks, as they approach a strange round building in the middle of nowhere. Where are they headed? We meet Jon in an underground bunker, shot in full colour. This might be in the old tunnels in Devonport, but they also...
Shihad “La La Land”
It is the future. A lone cyber warrior roams the barren wastelands. She puts on her virtual reality helmet. Text flashed up on her cyber screen, “Serial port: SHIHAD”. She has accessed La La Land. Hey, do you know what a serial port is? It’s a kind of plug on a computer. But obviously in...
Shihad “Deb’s Night Out”
And what a night out it is. Jon Shihad starts out sitting in the back of a car with a middle-aged couple. Those two are having a jolly old time, laughing and getting pissed on wine, while Jon sulks like a teen who’s being forced to attend his dumb uncle’s dumb 50th birthday. He doesn’t...
Shihad “Bitter”
The Big Day Out is a gift to bands. It lets them record a live video showing the band performing in front of a packed stadium. Shihad are always a massive crowd-pleaser at the Big Day Out, so it makes sense that they’d capture their 1995 performance in a music video. The video looks like...
Shihad “You Again”
This video reminds me of how much of a skinny-arse Jon Toogood used to be. The Fix street press had a cartoon about Jon disappearing when he took behind his microphone. But he had big hair which more than compensated. “You Again” is a really fat, grunty metal pie. The video is shot in black...
Shihad “Gimme Gimme”
Keeping on with a general run of surreal themes in this funding round, Shihad go for a partially animated video with all sorts of crazy digital effects. Despite this, it’s a much simpler video – there are no goats or goth brides, just the band. Jon’s mouth appears in strange places – usually taking the...
Shihad “Derail”
In the mid ’90s, I remember video maker Greg Page saying he’d made his own version of a video for “Derail”, which the band had declined in favour of this one with roller coasters in it that was not cut to the beat. The “Derail” video is fairly arty. It’s black and white and features...
Shihad “I Only Said”
Another music video that has a creative debt to the videos of bands like Nine Inch Nails and Tool. “I Only Said” is a messed up world of strange medical contraptions, blood flowing through tubes, mice, and housewives wearing paperbags on their head. It probably seemed really cutting edge at the time, but looking back...
Shihad “Stations”
What are the Shihads doing? It’s rock star 101 – the crucifiction of Christ. Yeah, that’ll offend the hardcore Christians and wake up the atheists and make people have a good think about the message of the music. You know what else did that? “Jesus Christ Superstar” is what. So I guess the ‘stations’ the...
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