Tinnitus broke him. His guitar saved him.

How Shihad rocker Jon Toogood found his quiet place.

Oct 07, 2024

Hi. I just wanted to take a quick moment to thank everyone who contributed to Friday’s chat about all the new albums we’ve been listening to lately. It turns out you can fall in love in the age of streaming: you just need to turn off your phone, get yourself near a turntable (if you can), and commit to devouring an entire album in one sitting. It really is that simple.

So I had a great weekend listening to all your recommendations: Lola Young’s This Wasn’t Meant For You Anyway, The Last Dinner Party’s Prelude To Ecstasy and DRS’ Everything Must Go! have been on high rotate. You can find all of those suggestions, and many more, in the comments section. You’ve all got great taste, so thanks so much for contributing.

Today, I have a big read for you. It’s an interview with someone you’re probably familiar with and already know quite a lot about. But you may not know all of his story. He’s my new neighbour, Jon Toogood, and we met at a local Waterview coffee spot recently to unpack one of the most traumatic Covid stories I’ve heard. Careful: this one could be a little triggering.

Chris.

‘What the fuck is happening? I’m out of control’

Jon Toogood, the front man for rock act Shihad, who’s now going solo.

It first came to him in a dream. The noise was repetitive and shrill, a high-pitched siren that sounded a lot like a car alarm. Sleeping next to his wife in their Howick rental, the incessant noise woke Jon Toogood instantly. “It was so loud and so distressing,” he says. “It was like I’d gone to see Motorhead and stuck my head in the PA for two hours.”

As front man for the rock act Shihad, Toogood has suffered tinnitus for much of the past 30 years. That’s thanks to a life spent standing in front of a wall of noise created by his band mates. He’s exacerbated this problem by refusing to wear earplugs. “I found they separated me from the moment ... the experience of doing it,” he says.

That’s led to hearing damage at “the top end”. After noisy Shihad shows, or when attending a gig himself, Toogood often finds his tinnitus – a ringing in the ears – gets worse. Usually, it quickly calms down and returns to a manageable level. “I’d take the next day off [and] it would go back to a base level,” he says. “I can’t really hear it.”

This time, it was different. After waking from his dream, Toogood realised his tinnitus had escalated to become a piercing shriek. He tried to go back to sleep, but it was impossible. “I couldn't get away from it because it's coming from my brain,” he says. “No matter what I’m doing, I can't turn it off ... It's 24-7.”

If you were out walking the streets around this time, you might have encountered Toogood around 3am, stressed out of his mind while pacing the Cascades walkway near his home. Soon, he found himself in A&E trialing heavy drugs to try and stop the noise, to calm down, to help him sleep. It didn’t work. “I’m having full blown panic attacks because a car alarm’s going off in my head, going, ‘Run! Run! Run!’,” he says.

This went on for days, and then weeks, then months. He saw specialist after specialist. Nothing helped. That noise meant Toogood couldn’t process the trauma he’d just been through: saying goodbye to his mother over a Zoom call, being stuck away from his family for six months during Covid lockdowns, cancer taking his brother-in-law, then a stressful move home to Aotearoa with his wife and two young children.

Things kept spiraling. For the first time in his life, Toogood couldn’t think about music. Hearing it only made his tinnitus worse. “It was lonely and really painful,” he says. The only thought occupying Toogood’s brain was this: “What the fuck is happening? I'm out of control in my body.”

He visited tinnitus clinics, trialed hearing aids, and took medication so strong he could barely walk straight. After three months of “massive panic attacks and being really unhappy,” a friend suggested Toogood visit a cognitive behavioural therapist. He found someone who had success treating PTSD in soldiers after combat and made an appointment. She gave Toogood a diagnosis that stuck: “The sound isn't coming from your ears – it's coming from your brain.”

Suddenly, the past few years made sense. Looking back on this experience now, Toogood says it should have been obvious to him what was really going on. His mother Yvonne had died during after a long battle with Parkinson’s Disease. Unable to travel to Wellington, he’d said goodbye to her from Melbourne over the phone. Then he lost his brother-in-law to cancer, and became stuck in Aotearoa when a lengthy lockdown was announced, with his wife and children back in Melbourne.

Reunited, the family decided to move back. His days were spent finding new routines: a home to live in, schools for the kids. “I was so busy … There's all these things to think about,” Toogood says. His extreme tinnitus, he believes, was a reaction to all that. “It was a stressful time. I think my body was going, ‘Fuck me, you need to stop’.”

Then, just as he did stop, he caught Covid. The tinnitus started two weeks after he contracted coronavirus for the first time. He believes there’s a link: doctors told him recent research shows people already suffering tinnitus who then catch Covid have a 40% chance of making it much worse. (It’s true: here’s that research.)

Toogood describes it like this: because he’s already suffered hearing damage, having Covid sparked a survival response in his brain that turned the volume all the way up. “My brain goes, ‘He’s completely lost that part of his hearing [so] we need to attenuate that up so he doesn't get eaten by a lion’,” he says. Once he understood this, he figured out his triggers. “Silence is your enemy when you've got tinnitus. Screen time is really bad for your tinnitus. Fatigue is really bad for tinnitus.”

Next, Toogood needed a solution. It turns out it was sitting there right in front of him, something he’d stopped doing amidst all the chaos of the past few years: playing his guitar.

The songs came slowly at first. Toogood could only play for short amounts of time or tinnitus would hit him hard. Sitting on his own, the songs came slowly at first, “in little chunks”. He set a timer. When it went off, he walked outside to look at some trees. “I kept it gentle because I needed gentle music,” he says. “It was, ‘I’m feeling fucking fragile. I’m going to write music that goes, ‘there, there,’ that holds me.’”

Soon, songs began to form, one, then another, all based on what he’d just been through. The first was, ‘Love is Forever,’ written after watching his daughter run around the house and realising the resemblance she had to his own mother. Then came, ‘Last of the Lonely Gods,’ about his friend Marty, who’d also been through a tough time. He played them for his family, and his kids would sing them too.

Toogood wasn’t writing songs with any intention of releasing them. They were too personal and quiet to work with layers of guitar riffs and heavy rock drums. “I don’t want it to be ‘phwoar’,” he says. “I want it to be ‘OK’.” These were songs to heal, to process the trauma of the past few years. “I was writing to try and work out what had just happened and how I felt about it. It was all about going back to a safe place.”

Soon, though, he had eight songs. His tinnitus was settling down. His confidence was growing. Toogood has written many songs in several different groups, from Shihad to The Adults, but they were always alongside other people. This was different. It was all him. Yet, he believed it sounded better than anything else he’d done. “I went, ‘I’m not sure but I think that’s some of the best shit I’ve written.’”

Finally, he plucked up the courage to visit his record label, Warner Music. There, he headed into the boardroom to play the songs he’d been working on to a room full of executives. “I was nervous,” he says. “I turned it up. I couldn’t even look at them.” After his song, ‘Last of the Lonely Gods,’ had finished, he turned to face them. Tears rolled down cheeks. Finally, someone spoke. They said: “That’s the best song you’ve written.”

This week, those songs are no longer just for Toogood. His first solo record, called Last of the Lonely Gods, is being released on Friday, and he’s promoting it with his biggest nationwide jaunt yet. Shihad isn’t over: he’s played his album to his band mates and received their approval. For now, though, it will just be Toogood, his guitar, a stool, and a bunch of songs that “make me feel better”. This time, he hopes his tinnitus stays firmly in the back seat.

Jon Toogood’s Last of the Lonely Gods is out on Friday - vinyl can be pre-ordered here; his 19-date nationwide tour kicks off on Friday in Kerikeri - dates and tickets can be found here.

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