Parkway Drive’s Sydney Opera House debut to pair heavy metal with orchestral
In 1999, one of the world’s biggest metal bands collaborated with an orchestra to produce S&M: Symphony & Metallica. In June, Australia’s own heavy metal leaders Parkway Drive will make a similar creative leap at the Sydney Opera House.
Not content with merely becoming one of Australia’s most popular musical exports, Byron Bay heavy metal band Parkway Drive will in June undertake a novel challenge by shifting its songbook from the mosh pit to the conductor’s stand for a black-tie orchestral event at the Sydney Opera House.
With their penchant for crafting explosive spectacles punctuated by blasts of fire and Ben Gordon’s spinning drum kit – which rotates through 360 degrees while he continues playing upside down – members of the chart-topping band have long since become comfortable with headlining major music festivals here and abroad.
But playing inside one of the world’s most recognisable buildings alongside a symphony orchestra and a choir? None of the quintet could have seen that coming when they first began performing together at the Byron Bay Youth Centre in 2003.
“We always doubted, in the Parkway way, that anyone like the Opera House would ever want us to play in their venue,” said frontman Winston McCall. “But it’s definitely not the case.”
“That’s the thing; it’s us learning that stereotypes are not necessarily there from their own creation. It’s something that we’re guilty of putting on other establishments, as well.”
This collaboration is billed as a one-off gig at the concert hall on Monday, June 9, and the opportunity came about when the Opera House team requested a meeting with the band shortly after it had completed its 20th anniversary tour, which played to about 65,000 Australian fans last year.
“Their pitch was, ‘We want to put on the best show that the Opera House has ever had, and we want it to be something that completely redefines what can be put on here’,” said McCall, 42. “We were very humbled. They all came and watched the 20-year anniversary tour, and they know what we’re capable of.”
Those seven arena shows began with a most unusual entry: the musicians parted their sea of fans by walking through the crowd to initially play on a small stage at the front – a grassroots call-back to their early days of playing at tiny venues while surrounded by their mates – before stepping onto the much bigger stage behind them, which was packed with cutting-edge performance technology.
With that tour, McCall said, “what we aimed to do was give everyone everything that Parkway is, from the roots to the loftiest branches. The loftiest branches happen to be very high up in the ceiling and on fire now – but the roots are where it resonates”.
Heavy metal and orchestral music might sound like strange bedfellows, but it’s not a new idea: Metallica pioneered this marriage in 1999 with S&M, which involved the US quartet performing live with the San Francisco Symphony, with spectacular results.
For Parkway Drive, although the ARIA Award-winning band has been accompanied by a string quartet on several of its most recent tours, extending that idea by rearranging its music for a full-length orchestral concert is a mighty leap.
Yet as the band has shown time and again across the past two decades, a willingness to take bold creative risks has become a shared mantra that sustains them.
“It’s really neat to work with different articulations of melodies, and concepts for songs which already push to the boundary of where our imagination could create,” McCall said.
“To all of a sudden have 40 other different tools to articulate that original vision, you’re just given a bigger canvas. Still the original visions; reinterpret, or just reinforce?”
With a giddy grin, the frontman summed up what was ahead for the band thanks to this most unexpected opportunity: “It’s really f..king cool,” he said.
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