The Jezabels

16 January 2012

by Nathan Jolly

Splendour In The Grass, 2011. The Jezabels are just starting on a compact stage in front of a space far too small to house their perpetually growing fanbase. As the traffic surging towards the stage reaches dangerous levels, organisers are forced to close off entry to the area. According to guitarist Sam Lockwood, this moment was the beginning of an amazing six-month period for the band which saw them hit #2 on the ARIA chart with their debut album Prisoner (“We knew we wouldn’t get #1 ‘cos Adele was there”), sign two overseas record deals and basically continue their unchecked ascension into a number of overseas markets.

“It’s been a pretty good year,” Lockwood says modestly. “The good part of the year started at Splendour; we’d finished recording [Prisoner] and hadn’t played for a while because of this. We came back and played a pretty good show and that sort of kicked everything off. Then we released the album and did some touring overseas. We did a month in Europe in September and a month in the US and Canada in November.”

A few days after this interview took place the Sydney four-piece jetted over to Asia, where they are attempting to break ground. It’s been a meteoric rise for the band, propelled by the groundswell built in Australia and America off the back of three well- received EPs. Most bands would be tempted to jump into recording an album once national interest arrives, however The Jezabels played it slowly, continuing along the EP route which had helped them come to prominence.

“We were talking with our producer Lachlan [Mitchell] who came on tour with us when we were supporting Josh Pyke a while ago; we’d sort of spoken about whether we were ready to do an album yet. It was just after the second EP [November 2009’s She’s So Hard], we were driving down the highway so we had a lot of time on our hands. We had a two-hour discussion where we decided it’d be awesome to do a trilogy of EPs.”

There were also fiscal elements at play: “It made a lot of sense. We hadn’t really worked out what we wanted to achieve with a full length CD and what we sounded like yet, and because we were independent we didn’t have the money to splash out on a really nice CD either. We found our EP sold really well at shows where we were supporting bigger bands, so we thought if we can keep that going we can get our music out to a lot of people - they’re cheap at $10, so everyone seems to buy them.” Although the band have become a household name since last winter, with Lockwood admitting the interest “came all at once, as it tends to do,” they were determined to tread carefully when dealing with the major labels that had started sniffing around the band.

“We sold out a show at the Oxford Art Factory a few years ago and that’s when [the label interest] all started happening. We met so many cool people, and there were so many people we could have worked with – and some we do on a freelance basis – but we found by that stage we’d come so far and built ourselves a real solid following. We’d done it organically, and we didn’t feel the need for the services of the label industry. We had a really good relationship with MGM and our independent publisher Two Fish Out Of Water and didn’t want to change that. We didn’t need the label. “It was an ideological decision, too,” he adds, “we could do what we wanted.”

While eschewing the label path in Australia has paid dividends, the band was savvy enough to know that overseas markets are much tougher to crack without representation.

“I don’t know if anyone from Australia has succeeded in America by being independent,” Lockwood explains. “When you see the scale of what goes on... because we’re trying to play Europe and America, and now Asia, it’s a bit much to do it on your own. We had a little bit of interest in America and Europe from major labels but we decided to go with really cool labels [Mom + Pop Music in the US and PIAS in the UK], they are really nice people and we agreed with their ideology.”

With their schedule locked out until September, Lockwood is looking forward to 2012, despite the potential for fallout.

“We’re becoming better at touring now because we get along better; we have worked out how to treat each other when in a van for three months in a row. We used to bicker a lot, but its gotten better. If you can maintain a respectful relationship with each other, you can continue touring for years.”