True story: I once played basketball with Hayley, the singer of Australian band, The Jezabels. She broke her finger and she still kept playing. Okay, so she didn’t actually know it was broken, but the point here is she played through the damn pain. Yeah that’s right: she’s a badass.

The Sydney-founded, London-based band are a big deal in their home country. They’re last record, Prisoner, went to number 2 in the charts and won an ARIA, which is like scooping a Grammy in the US or a Mercury Award in the UK. The quartet then closed last year by touring in support of both Depeche Mode and the Pixies. Pretty. Fucking. Cool. Their forthcoming third record, The Brink, is a bold cut of emotive, epic-pop hinged on Hayley’s sky-scaling Stevie Nicks-ian melodies (with a pinch of the 80s thrown in for good measure).

We encouraged Hayley to pillage their collective photo albums—of Nik Kaloper (drums), Samuel Lockwood (guitar), and Heather Shannon (keys)—and this is what she uncovered on her trip down sartorial lane…

A very early, tiny picture of The Jezabels who formed in 2007.

Hayley: We all grew up in relatively different social circles. Though Heather and I knew each other, we were always rather different when it came to taste and style. We all listened to different music, from classical (Heather) to bluegrass (Sam), to technical thrash metal (Nik) to 70s and 80s pop and an obsession with Abba and Queen (me). So, when we got together to make the coolest of all substances—music—we were not coming with any kind of common aesthetic in mind. The combination of our four disparate characters may have been as visually incoherent as our early music was. Probably the best word to describe it was a little daggy, but showing potential. (The term “daggy” needs defining to most non-Australian readers. It means uncool, unfashionable, but comfortably so. Imagine an Ugg boot, though, somehow they got cool, which is unnatural in my opinion.)


Nik does black.

Nik loves some early American emo bands such as Sunny Day Real Estate, and the spectre of emo fashion still lives on in him, possibly unbeknown to him. He usually has stretchers in his ears, tight black tees and jeans, In winter it’s jeans and long sleeve button up shirt. To be honest though, I think he just wears what he wears because he hasn’t thought about clothing, as anything other than something to prevent one from being arrested, since he was in high school. That’s the way it always as been. That’s probably the way it always will be.

In the early days, people started describing us using words such as indie and disco. As an ABBA fan, I was totes loving the disco vibes, but it emerged that there were a couple of indie bands we were all into, and our Sydney Universty-influenced fashion at the time probably had something to do with us falling more naturally into the indie category for the first EP cycle. Indie was just cool at the time and people just seemed to be wearing flannelette shirts, and other button up shirts of various descriptions and skinny black jeans.

Arcade Fire shot by Rebecca Miller in 2004; The Jezabels.

We liked indie bands with consciences. The Arcade Fire and The National were emerging as what are now called “important” bands of our generation and they were certainly having an influence on us among a million other so called indie bands. Radiohead obviously were an all round favorite.

A little disco influence…



Ray-Bans (including their cheap imitations) would be pretty close to the top of the list in the 00’s fashion cannon.

Sam has always maintained a pretty classic jeans and shirt style. He has this saying for when you’re lost or in some kind of pickle, “Talk to blokes.” It’s Australian for “Ask people for help.” I think if he had a saying for his style it would be “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

Somewhere along the line my interest in gothic literature and just a general malaise of first-world atheism-induced depression (some might call it the knowledge that there is quite possibly no meaning to life) turned me toward 90’s influenced black clothing and red lipstick. It seemed the natural progression at the time, though as I write it here I’m not quite sure those eggs quite make an omelette.

Fairuza Balk in The Craft. Classic.

A possible influence on me.

It was probably the sheer effectiveness of black as stage attire, and a subconscious desire to look like some sort of unit as we never had before, that marked our gradually progression into being an all-black-wearing band, pretty much all the time. I don’t need to explain why black is great in a fashion sense, but for a touring band, black is great because you always know what to put in your suitcase and you don’t need to wash too frequently (handy for tour). It also makes you look more badass than you actually are.

The Jezabels Tour Dates

3.26 – El Rey Theatre – Los Angeles, CA
3.29 – Rickshaw Stop – San Francisco, CA
3.31 – Doug Fir – Portland, OR
4.1 – Neumos – Seattle, WA
4.2 – Imperial – Vancouver, BC
4.4 – Starlight – Edmonton, AB
4.5 – Republik – Calgary, AB
4.7 – 7th St. Entry – Minneapolis, MN
4.8 – Lincoln Hall – Chicago, IL
4.10 – Lee’s Palace – Toronto, ON

4.11- Sala Rossa – Montreal, QC
4.12 – Brighton Music Hall – Boston, MA
4.15 – Bowery Ballroom – New York, NY
4.16 – Johnny Brenda’s – Philadelphia, PA
4.17 – Rock N Roll Hotel – Washington, DC

The Brink is out on PIAS on February 18.