Shihad's break-up is a royal screw-up.

Legacy acts are enjoying boom times in their golden years. So why kill Shihad now?

At a fundraising show for bFM near the end of last year, Shihad promised to play their debut album Churn in full. To practice, they booked three days in Roundhead Studios. Those sessions didn’t go well. “There wasn’t one time we made it through that record without fucking it up,” Jon Toogood told me during promotions for his recent solo album. “An amp would break, or we’d forget a bit.”

That night, in front of a packed Auckland Town Hall crowd, it didn’t matter. There were no mistakes. The amps didn’t break. They didn’t forget anything. They killed it. Shihad seemed to be the loudest and happiest band on that bill. “That was brutal,” a smiling Toogood agreed afterwards. “That was actually the best we’d ever played that record.” At that time, Churn was 30 years old.

Shihad weren’t getting paid for that show. All proceeds went towards the struggling student radio station. The quartet didn’t need to go that hard. They could have phoned it in and no one would have minded. But they didn’t. They refused to. And so, it became another unmissable Shihad performance, one of the many they’ve delivered over the years.

That night, I snapped a quick photo. It summed things up nicely: steam covers the stage, fans have their devil horns in the air, Toogood has a goofy grin spread across his face, and, next to him, a beaming Karl Kippenberger gives the crowd a thumbs up.

Shihad at Save the b!: All smiles. Photo: Chris Schulz

At the time, I remember thinking how great it was that Shihad were still doing this, still cranking it out, just like they always have. Whether it was a sweaty afternoon at the Big Day Out, cracking the concrete in Aotea Square, opening for AC/DC, or delivering a bruising festival set, you could always rely on Shihad for staring you in the eyes and daring you to look away.

Which makes yesterday’s announcement all the more perplexing.