Here's Five: Shihad

To mark the 20th anniversary of their sophomore album Killjoy, enduring rock group Shihad are taking the stage on Friday night and performing the breakthrough record in its entirety. Originally released in May 1995 and subsequently gaining praise from the likes of Iggy Pop and Metallica, the nine-track award-winning album received the remastering treatment and has been re-released as a deluxe vinyl, as well as on CD and digital formats for the big 2-0. To celebrate the occasion UnderTheRadar got in touch with lead guitarist Phil Knight, who shared a few memories of putting Killjoy together for our Here's Five feature...

1. You Again
This song, next to 'The General Electric', has one of the penultimate Shihad riffs ever. It's one of the easiest and fun songs for me to play. Around the Fish Album period [the colloquial name for third album Shihad, I went through a period of thinking it was way too bogan, and I didn't want it in our setlist for at all. But I eventually came around. Shame on me. Jon's lyrics are about his girlfriend at the time. I'm amazed they stayed together for as long as they did.

2. The Call
My only guitar solo. Two drums kits. Don't really know what the lyrics are about.

3. Debs Night Out
I came up with the music for this song on my Roland sampler, and overdubbed the bass guitar line on my girlfriend's twin cassette deck. When we recorded it at York St Studio, the engineer actually made a physical tape loop to run on one of the multitrack machines. All very primitive, but it worked. I believe Jon's lyrics are about a junkie friend of a friend. I think it was raining.

4. Bitter
Me and Jon wanted to bury the vocals in the mix like My Bloody Valentine, but Tom wasn't happy about that. He lost the vote. Another song about Jon's girlfriend and how they hated each other.

5. Silvercup
I think the lyrics in this song were about Jaz Coleman and how we had legal problems with him when he found out that we were going to record our second album without him. We had signed a contact promising that we'd give him first option to produce Killjoy, and we didn't honour that, apparently. Funny. Now we love the crazy dude, and we had an amazing experience recording FVEY with him as producer and head shit-stirrer, once again.

Shihad will be performing 'Killjoy' in its entirety this Friday 22nd May at The Powerstation in Auckland. Head over here for more details.