Review: Shihad at Astor Theatre
Shihad at Astor Theatre
w/ Battlesnake, Rat Salad
Friday, February 21, 2025
In their 37 years as a band, there’s no question that Shihad have built a big, loving fan base. So it was no surprise the two Perth shows of their final ever tour sold out quickly. A crowd of black t-shirts descended on The Astor on Friday, filling up both levels, willing (though perhaps unready) to say farewell to a band that has soundtracked their lives.
Geraldton’s RATSALAD opened the night. These guys are chaotic fun. In fact, it seems like they were having as much fun as anyone mucking around with high kicks and swinging mics. Their brand of high-energy punk sees singer Jaz doing the worm on stage, and at no point did they lose any momentum. Go listen to their track Nutsack.
Touring nationally with Shihad are Sydney’s Battlesnake. For the uninitiated, watching them play is like attending some sort of medieval metal church. A bright red cross illuminates the stage with the monks chanting as seven men dressed in quasi-religious costumes venture onto the stage. There are angel wings, long robes, ruby jewels, and singer Sam sports gold sequinned horns. There’s a pink keytar and a flying V guitar in the mix! It’s a hilarious spectacle, and they have the songs to back it up, like the thumping The Battlesnake or the epic ode to 80s metal Atomic Plough. The set is high octane from start to finish, and by the end, two of them were down to their underpants for their cover of AC/DC’s Let There Be Rock, doing flying kicks off the drum riser.
How do you cover a 37-year career in one set? Not easily. And to be perfectly honest, not completely successfully. But Shihad’s set was going to take us time travelling to their very beginning, starting from their most recent album, 2021’s Old Gods. Unfortunately, it meant the show was off to a kind of slow start, as few people in the audience seemed to know the songs. In fact, nearly the first hour of the set was lacking singalongs as they worked through their last five albums.
People still looked to be enjoying themselves, but it wasn’t until the opening notes of 2002’s Comfort Me rang out that the crowd erupted, as they did again for Everything. “So you’re down with the Pacifier album then,” said singer Jon Toogood, noticing the change in energy from the crowd, adding, “Sorry about the name change!” in reference to their short-lived moniker Pacifier. (It was 2002, not long after 9/11, and the name Shihad was thought to be too close to the word jihad.)
Next was another fave, Semi-Normal, before it was time to move onto arguably their most popular album, 1999’s The General Electric. My Minds Sedate saw people mosh like they were teenagers again, with call and response from Jon to the crowd, the lyrics as relevant as ever. The title track, The General Electric, also got the audience riled up, and it was clear this was Shihad’s most well-loved era.
But it was the classic song Pacifier that unified the crowd, as everyone turned their phone torches on and waved their arms above their heads in unison. Then, following instruction from the band, the mosh bounced up and down to Wait and See. To round out the set, they play a few tracks from their very early work, like Yr’ Head is a Rock and You Again, which show just how much the band’s sound has actually evolved over time. But as if they would leave us without playing a couple more hits.
An encore was called for and kicked off with Run, seeing multiple crowd surfers being handed around down the front. They also threw in a cover of Split Enz’ I Got You, which it seemed everyone knew the words to, before wrapping up with 1996’s Home Again. It was a sweet end to a bittersweet gig and the end of an amazing career for Jon, Karl, Tom and Phil. Here’s hoping they pull a Farnesy and we see them somewhere again down the line.
SHANNON FOX
Photos by Paul Dowd
