WAKE UP IN YOUR T-SHIRT

the other day i was sitting around thinking about t-shirts. i have a shit-ton of t-shirts. i only ever really wear 4 or 5 of them, but there they sit in my closet like a silent monument to my obsessive nature and extended adolescence. i have a t-shirt that i got when i was in grade 7 for crying out loud! i think a big part of me wanting to have a band was so that we could have t-shirts and lots of them. so, i thought why not have a little online gallery of all our shirts modeled here by the lovely miss skeeter diamonds.
so here we go, the good, the bad, the ugly...


fig.1 "the jacknife" designed by moi
this was our first ever t-shirt. pretty standard issue. named after our only song that anybody likes. the colors and placing of the design are a bit "snow and surf" if you know what i mean. in the beginning we wanted all our shirts to be "wacky" colors so that people would really have to want to wear them because they were into our band. some people were like "why is ladyhawk carved into the knife? how do you carve a name into a knife with itself?" well you don't, doi! you use another knife. i had an old swiss army knife from cub scouts that i carved my name into just like on the shirt.


fig.2 "the jacknife redux"
we eventually remade the shirt in basic black with the design a little bigger. you know what i just fucking realized? "jacknife" is totally the wrong spelling! it's jacKknife! 2 fucking k's! oh my god, all this time... it's on our fucking album like that! it just looks wrong, doesn't it? wow, i'm an illiterate moron. i never went to college.


fig.3 "girlybirds" designed by big ry peters
this has probably been our most popular design. a real money-maker. good work, ryan. this one came in assorted colors, but of course good ol' boring black was always the big seller.



figs.4 and 5 "give up your dreams tour shirt" back designed by lil' ol' me
here's a limited edition variation of the popular stand-by, made for our very first tour ever- the legendary "give up your dreams tour" of 20 ought 5. ahh, it really brings me back to those heady days of yore... maybe you can't tell from the photo, but the tour was a whole 5 shows venturing as far as edmonton. we really were on the verge of giving up our dreams at that point, i was pretty sure that it would be our first and probably last tour. we had a local label all lined up to release the first version of our first album, but somewhere along the line they just stopped returning our phone calls and emails. the only other label we bothered sending it out to was our current label and they replied with a form email stating tactfully that they had no interest in us or our music. so, for some reason, we just figured that if none of these people were into it probably nobody else would be either and we should just throw in the towel- thus giving up our dreams. well, as history shows, our label was obviously bullied or pressured in some way by our friends/label mates to sign us anyway... allowing us to dare to dream once more! anyway, that tour was funny. after playing a local show i remember nothing about, we went on to play my favorite venue of all time: the basement of the knights of columbus hall in rutland (ryan's home turf) to my favorite crowd of all time: kelowna teenagers. we then went on to play our first calgary show, thus beginning our continuing love affair with the stampede city. interesting trivia: there's a song on our last album about a band we played with at that show. i wonder which one? in edmonton we had the lamest and most condescending sound guy of all time. we also started our tradition of going to sean's baba's house for delicious yet punishing ukrainian food. for some reason (probably because we had nowhere to stay) after the show we decided to drive all night, just in time to get to kamloops at 7 in the morning and spend all fucking day sitting in a gravel parking lot beside the bridge. brutal. i'm sorry to anyone from there, but i have no love for kamloops. there is a long standing rivalry between kelowna and kamloops that goes way beyond minor league hockey beefs. it just sucks and smells bad there. anyway, after eating at the weirdest restaurant ever (called tumfillery, like tom foolery (i assume), but with tum and fillery instead, get it? me neither.), we played at a coffee shop with a teenage band that covered "dazed and confused" in their set, god bless 'em! good times indeed. also, in case you can't see, there's a skull with a joint and pot leaves and beer cans and shit on there, because that's what we're into, right?


fig.6 "bring me the one they call ladyhawk" aka "robot overlord" designed by dr. jonny molson
the theory around here is that vancouver is still deep in a near suicidal post-S.T.R.E.E.T.S. depression. the heart and soul of our city died a little when our beloved jonny moved to new york. i mean, a man has to follow his own happiness, and i'm not saying that's wrong, but the rest of us are just left here sobbing quietly while trying to bang our heads to a record. beer doesn't taste as good anymore. seriously, NOFUNCOUVER. jonny's new band CHILDREN is probably about the most face-rippingly amazing band on earth at this time, but they aren't here and that's no good to me, damn it!


fig.7 "the grim and searching eye of ladyhawk" designed by me and mapee
this is my personal favorite, at least of the shirts that i've done. i got to showcase my love of trying to draw grim, spidery metal band logos and it worked out pretty ok. it also maybe makes it seem like our band is kinda badass and evil, right? i think the colors are nice, too. i wanted to have a shirt that featured the beautiful and mysterious ladyhawk from the cover of our first album... who is she? where did she come from? why is she naked? questions...


fig.8 "the hubert" designed by steve hubert
truly a classic. our most elaborate t-shirt, screen printing-wise, designed by our spiritual advisor steve hubert featuring himself holding a flashlight. this one came in some truly gross colors as you can see. steve is featured in the background on the cover of our first record and in the painting on the inside as well. the sweater is still in existence, ready to swaddle a new generation of huberts in it's velvety warmth.


fig.9 "the fish taco" aka "you had me at taco" designed by jeff lee
there is no good mexican food in vancouver. maybe in all of canada. there is some ok mexican food, but it ain't great or cheap. the best part about going on tour in the states is getting to eat shit loads of tasty, dirt cheap mexican food. i especially love the real sketchy shit, sometimes it's just worth the risk of potentially crippling diarrhea. i think i would actually kill for a fish taco from filiberto's in pheonix or el siete mares in l.a. right now. some people took offense to this shirt because they assumed it was some juvenile vaginal reference or something. the truth is we asked our buddy jeff to design a shirt for us and he said "cool, fish taco..." (somewhat cryptically) and then a couple weeks later there it was. i think it has a cool summer camp kinda vibe. there's even little pot leaves in the taco around the trout. new york also stole jeff and his lovely wife jenny from us. must you suck EVERYONE we love into your gaping black maw, cursed city!


fig.10 "dumped" designed by r.j. peters
getting dumped sucks, but you always write the best songs when it happens.


fig.11 "ladyhawk elementary" designed by jeff lee
another design from the multi-talented mr. lee, this one ended up looking just like a t-shirt from my old elementary school. i think elementary school might have been even worse than high school for me. all i can really remember is a lot of glue sniffing and detention. this one time they pulled me out of class for several days and made me sit in this little room beside the office while some guy in a suit did intelligence tests on me, i guess they couldn't tell if i was really stupid or really smart. all i know is that after that i went to "enriched" classes in the library with some other weird kids (i could never tell if they were stupid or smart either) where we did some artsy-craftsy projects and read the hobbit and shit. now everything has evened out and i'm pretty sure i'm of average to low-average intelligence.


fig.12 "daddy" designed by yours truly
this is a one of a kind design made specially for skeeter here. the word "daddy" is so creepy to me, i only used it because it made a nice upside down cross with ladyhawk. remember that aphex twin video for "come to daddy"? fuck that shit is scary!


fig.13 "stoned wolfman" designed by me, myself and irie



fig.14 "shots" designed by simone schmidt
yup, that's us on there. simone is in an amazing band in toronto called $100. you should check them out on myspace:
www.myspace.com/1hundreddollars
this is the shirt that those dudes in london, ontario bought thinking we were ladyhawke, the girl from new zealand. seriously. we're on the fucking shirt. four dudes. that shit is still funny to me.


fig. 15 "what is that?" also designed by simone schmidt
this cool looking guy (pictured in the tank top version) seemed to confuse a lot of people. i think it's a parrot. it says ladyhawk in the feathers, but it's pretty hard to read. it also says "i seen ladyhawk 2008" in little small letters at the bottom. it's a cool shirt. i love unreadable band logos! black metal is the best for that shit, check this out:

say wha...? or this one from one-man suicidal depressive (emo) black metal dude xasthur

kinda makes my attempt back at that purple shirt seem pretty lamely legible...


fig.16 "shroom jams" designed by this guy
i only made 12 of these bad boys especially for the 10th annual kelowna boxing day show this last december. here's a video of our dear friend jon-rae fletcher making my eyes get all watery at the show (that's ryan and darcy up there with him)

there's just something about performing in front of a giant lit up wreath... so christmas-y.
oh ya, this shirt totally glows in the dark!



figs. 17 and 18 "what the fuck?"
ok, let's see... a redneck biker alien sucking a woman's breast and it says "it must suck to be you" at the bottom. it must suck to be who? the person wearing the shirt? the person reading the shirt? the topless woman? the back sums it up nicely, "my body is here, but my mind is on sex", couldn't have said it better myself, alien brother.
oh, and this fucker glows in the dark, too.