How is it that Jon Toogood's most subversive act may also be his most accessible?

After all, who would have suspected that the howler of some of our most masculine rock anthems had an album of club friendly bangers lurking within? And club-friendly bangers with a Sudanese bent to boot?

Yet here's HAJA. And yes, it might be masked as the second album from his sideline project, The Adults, but really, guest vocalists aside, it's pure Toogood. And despite the beats it's every bit as reactionary as Shihad's most recent album, the highly political FVEY.

Shihad members (from left) Phil Knight, Tom Larkin, Jon Toogood, and Karl Kippenberger.

"On that album, I'm literally screaming at a world I don't want to live in. This time round it's about saying 'f... you' by doing something positive. I'm showing you why I don't want to live in that world by proof of practice, by rejecting separatism and showing you how a collaborative approach with the culture as far from our own as a fundamentalist Islamic state and how makes for better music and a better world," Toogood says.

READ MORE:

* NZ's hard rocker gone soft?

* Shihad frontman Jon Toogood - new dad's solo tour

* Toogood pieces of advice

Which brings us to the delicate issue of the African source material and the debate around appropriation.

Toogood's response is essentially the back story.

"Is [appropriation] an issue? Absolutely, but basically I married into a Sudanese family and I didn't do that so I could pilfer some music. I married into that family because I fell in love with a Sudanese woman, Dana, my best mate, and trust me, getting married wasn't easy. For a traditional Sudanese mother I was an outside context problem, I ticked no boxes at all.

"So anyway, we eventually got there and now my son's half-Sudanese, my daughter's half-Sudanese, I'm married into a Sudanese family and in the process I happened to come across this Sudanese music that I fell in love with."

And that's the short version.

The longer story is that the path to HAJA took more than a decade.

WARNER "I'm married into a Sudanese family and in the process I happened to come across this Sudanese music that I fell in love with."

If the death of Wellington music legend, Gerald Dwyer ("the rebel brother I never had"), in 1996 hit hard it was no preparation for losing his father.

"That was like putting your hand in a fire and not being able to get away from it. You'd want to run away some days because you don't want to see someone you love in such distress, but this is what you have to do and it wasn't easy, but I'm so glad because there was nothing left unsaid between me and him."

The loss pushed him toward change. He gave up booze and drugs, and became increasingly disillusioned with guitar music. To his ears there is very little genuine anger left in rock; the rebel pose is now an aesthetic.

So he started The Adults, a short term "holiday", and he invite luminaries such as Shayne Carter, Julia Deans, Tiki Taane and Ruban and Kody Nielson to join him.

"That was about proving to myself that I could make music in a different way because I'd been doing things the same way for a long time and I was bored with the factory line, everything being perfect. I wanted to get back to tuning up at the front of a track with a bunch of musicians in a room and then going bang.

"And it worked. It was great. But that was as much about getting to play with people I respected and as much as I was playing [it] cool, I was buzzing out like "I'm really jamming with these motherf......."

Then he was invited to perform in Silo Theatre's production of Brel, a cabaret-styled tribute to the Belgian polymath. Toogood had never heard of him, but he leapt at another opportunity to test himself.

The creative freedom he gained energised him for a new Shihad album and along came FVEY.

His world had also been changed forever by his encounter with Dana Salih, the daughter of a Sudanese diplomat who was in Auckland for a chiropractic course. She'd arrived at Auckland Museum during his talk on songwriting. She thought he looked interesting so she said hello. He turned and thought she looked, well, like no-one he'd ever seen before.

ALDEN WILLIAMS/STUFF Between playing with Shihad and performing musical theatre on stage, Toogood has been busy.

Moving back to his base in Melbourne (but living apart) for three years before deciding to get engaged was the easy part.

"It took another five years before her parents were cool with it and there were lots of hoops to jump through because getting married in Sudan is never about two people, it's 'do these families interface well?' It's how they knit society together.

"So yeah, they didn't know my family, I don't speak Arabic and when they saw me on YouTube they were probably 'get rid of him'. I was a problem."

Toogood's mother made the expedition to Khartoum with him and the pair bussed to each side of Dana's family and introduced themselves before spending three days smoothing over the local bureaucracy.

But such machinations paled against what happened after the couple asked an Islamic scholar to rewrite their vows so they could wed as equals.

"Word got out and our plans were debated on TV for about a week. We even made the front cover of the two main Sudanese newspapers. Then the media turned up at the mosque where we did the vows, but in the end, I think there was actually quite a positive response because the government is not the people."

Then it was on to the three-day ceremony which was not only highly ritualised and emotional, it was light years from Toogood's experience at his first marriage. Come day three, and the groom is clad in his black garb, snakeskin shoes and henna tattoo's, perched on stage and watching his bride perform a ritual dance, the Subhia. It's for his eyes only - if you don't count the 300 or so of Dana's female friends and family in attendance.

WARNER The new album draws heavily on his time spent in Sudan.

The musical backing, AghaniAl-Banat (literally 'girls' music'), is also unique. It's a form performed only by women who sing while accompanying themselves on drums.

"It sounded amazing, thrilling" says Toogood, "like some new MIA track I've never heard and given Islamic laws it felt kind off subversive. Then at the interval - my wife was off for a costume change - the band kept playing and I couldn't hide my enthusiasm. They were a bit suspicious at first but I was clapping along and they were 'OK cool, now try this one'. It's little more intricate, and on it went until they were 'hey, this honky can keep up with us. What the hell?' Then they stuck around after the wedding and I told them wanted to record with them. I'm not sure they believed me - then a year later I turned up."

His intent wasn't to release anything, he'd heard basslines and melodies as they'd played and he wanted to reshape them at home.

So after getting the band into a studio Toogood teamed up with producer Devin Abrams (Pacific Heights and Shapeshifter) to see what could be done. As they worked, Abrams mentioned how he'd completed a master's degree at Otago based on his Pacific Heights album. Further inspired, Toogood approached Massey about doing something similar based around these Sudanese grooves. His final paper dropped at about the same time as the album.

But then baby number one arrived. "Well, [the record] was only going to be for me, so I put it away and didn't touch music for two years. Then I got thinking about it again and started wondering 'what does that sound like?' And f..., it was still amazing."

Now things were getting serious, so he talked to his label, Warner Music, and sent out invitations for people to join this new Adults 2.0. The very nature of Aghani-Al-Banat meant he focused on women, which only added another layer to the political statement he was hoping to make.

Rebekah Parsons-King/Fairfax NZ Toogood married Dana Salih Toogood in her native Sudan.

Any doubts they'd get it were eased by hip-hop artist JessB's approach to the first single, Bloodlines.

"I let her know what the women in that song are saying, basically 'the aunties of your tribe, the aunties of your father's tribe, and the aunties of your mother's tribe; we're all here for you, now dance.' Jess was: 'Yeah, cool. I'll talk about my experience, how I see the women of my family and what they've given me and how they empower me'.

"Which is my thesis exactly, that there's a universal theme, a female perspective, that runs through all this music, no matter if it's written on this side of the planet or the other side of the planet. She got it just right."

Everything came together - aside from Chelsea Jade and Rwandan (now living in Hamilton) rapper Raiza Bizer (for the track Boomtown) who he hadn't heard from for two months. No matter, it was time to return to Sudan and run his music by Gisma, the headstrong leader of their Sudanese wedding band.

She would decide whether the album was released or binned.

"So she's listening like 'hmmm', 'OK', until finally she's 'oooh, I like this one'. That was Haja, where I'd taken 45 seconds of this classic Sudanese song and turned it into four and half minutes of what I consider 'Boiler Room anthem'. That's when she said 'you've got my blessing' and sweet, we were done.

"But before leaving, I asked if there was any way we could perform this music together. She said 'absolutely, but not in this country, we'd cause havoc if we did it here' and, dammit, that was my initial idea; take over three or four musicians I think are dope and perform in Khartoum."

Then he remembered he was still sweating on his last vocal tracks.

"I'd given up on ever hearing from them again and I'm in Khartoum thinking: 'S..., I've blown the whole budget and I don't have a record'.

"Then their emails arrived within two hours of each other.

"Raiza was first and, oh my God, it sounded fantastic. Then Chelsea, who's in America, saying 'I've done the whole song and I think it's pretty good.' Nah, it's amazing…so I'm Sudan thinking how, in the old days, this just wouldn't be possible, but with technology…and I'm so glad that it did because that's a magic song to me. It shouldn't work but it does."

But if Sudan's out, Toogood hasn't given up the idea of playing HAJA live, he just needs to nut out how. Otherwise he's thrilled to bits to hear how Dana's sisters have reacted to the album.

"They love JessB - she could be huge in Sudan and how cool would that be? Except it would take a year to get a visa and then she couldn't play anywhere…ha."

And if there are any Shihad fans fretting about what's come over their man, well, rest assured.

"I've changed a lot over the last seven years, but I have to say it just makes me even more excited about writing another Shihad record.

"Who knows what'll happen?"