Parkway Drive cancels Australian tour amid ‘unworkable’ restrictions
When Australia’s biggest metal band cancels a tour, the ripple effects are substantial: each scratched show means more than $1 million in losses at the box office, merch desk and bar.
When Australia’s biggest metal band cancels a national tour, the ripple effects are substantial. Each scratched show represents more than $1 million in losses at the box office, the merchandise desk and the bar.
Byron Bay quintet Parkway Drive had sold 31,000 tickets across five arena concerts and was on track for the biggest run of headline shows in its 18-year career when Covid capacity limits on venues forced its hand ahead of the July dates planned for Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth.
“We were backed into a corner; the capacities got reduced to a level where it’s not financially viable for us to do the shows unless we took a massive hit,” guitarist and band manager Luke Kilpatrick told The Australian.
“We lost tens of thousands of dollars having to cancel the venues, but it’s not as much as we would have lost if we went ahead with the tour with one-third to half-filled rooms.”
First announced in December 2019, Parkway Drive’s tour was intended to celebrate a feature documentary called Viva The Underdogs, which followed the band’s ongoing success to become the only Australian act to have headlined one of the world’s major heavy music festivals, Germany’s Wacken Open Air.
US bands Hatebreed and Every Time I Die were also booked for the shows that were originally planned for June last year before Covid forced them to be put off until this July.
“It’s not like the old days when you just write a record, sell a million copies and tour once a year,” Kilpatrick said. “Touring is how you make money. Without that, it’s really hard to survive as a band or musician.”
Planning and performing an arena-sized national tour in the current climate remains a headache for even the most popular Australian artists, with only the likes of Midnight Oil and Tina Arena managing to do it before seated crowds at outdoor and indoor venues.
Like many of his peers in the performing arts, Kilpatrick finds the double standards being applied to live sports and live music galling. “If you can put 50,000 people in a (football) stadium, surely you can put 10,000 in an arena,” he said.
“There’s no difference whether you’re standing or sitting next to each other. It’s the same shit; you’re all over each other.”
The cost of Parkway Drive’s cancellation is “well north of $1 million” per show, according to Chris O’Brien, general manager of the band’s concert promoter, Destroy All Lines.
The tour would have employed an estimated 500 people, or about 100 jobs per show, including the band’s crew, contractors, technicians and staff at each venue.
“And that’s just one tour; there have been thousands of tour cancellations across the industry,” said O’Brien. “The economic impact is catastrophic.”
Currently, indoor arenas in most states allow between 75 per cent and 100 per cent capacity as long as audiences remain seated. Such a requirement is unsuited to the style of music that O’Brien’s company tends to book, however.
“For metal and hard rock crowds, the one thing they love is to be able to get up, mosh and dance and have a good time,” he said. “So for them to be forced to sit down and listen to the music like they’re at a jazz concert is completely unworkable, which is why no artists across the country have even attempted it.”
Another major tour on the Destroy All Lines books features two popular US bands, The Offspring and Sum 41, which had sold 29,000 tickets before Covid hit.
The tour remains in limbo, with rescheduled dates yet to be unannounced while O’Brien and his team attempt to find a suitable window for the visitors to return while navigating a raft of venue restrictions which vary state-by-state.
“Because there’s no clear road map for us from the health department or the governments, the industry is unfortunately still flying blind,” he said.
“If there was something we were at least always working towards, that would be great. But at the moment, everything we’re doing is planning for the unplannable.
“We’re not asking for money. We’re just asking for a road map so we can actually get back to work and do what we do best, which is get bands touring again.”
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