Parkway Drive film ‘Viva the Underdogs’ captures unlikely rise
Since forming in 2003, Byron Bay metal quintet Parkway Drive has become one of the world’s most popular Australian live acts. A new film captures a major year of global achievements.
In the final month of last year, Parkway Drive did something it had never managed to do before: the Byron Bay band headlined an Australian music festival.
As the top-billed act at Good Things, the quintet ended each night with an awesome, pyrotechnic-heavy spectacle that cemented its status as the undisputed national leaders in heavy music in front of more than 50,000 hard rock and metal fans across three consecutive shows in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.
Strangely, though, this arrived almost a decade after Parkway Drive began playing to huge festival crowds overseas, particularly in Europe and Britain. At home, the honour had been unusually long in the making, a fact not lost on vocalist Winston McCall.
“It’s always been that thing that’s bummed me out, where I always felt like … well, it was fact: Australian bands got treated less than — and seen as less than — overseas bands because I feel as though we, as a culture, tend to look to America for most of the things that are popular,” he says.
“We always found that a lot of the interactions that we had (with festival bookers) were like, ‘Yeah, Parkway can play — but you’ll be billed under these other bands.’ So we wouldn’t play at all.
“When (Good Things) finally came around as a slot, we were like, ‘Yep, we’ll do it — and we’re going to not cut a single thing that we bring to every other festival that we headline overseas. We’re going to show you what a Parkway headlining slot actually looks like and what an Australian band can do.’ It was a very big ‘this is our statement’ moment.”
READ MORE: Parkway Drive: Pole position | Parkway Drive ends 2019 with a bang by headlining Good Things
Since forming in 2003, what the quintet has managed to fit into its career so far is remarkable, as has been extensively documented in 2009’s Parkway Drive the DVD and 2012’s Home is for the Heartless, the latter of which formed a travelogue of its world tour following the release of third album Deep Blue.
As the footage in those films showed, the group has long since proved its ability and willingness to perform wherever on the planet its fans demand its presence — including rarely visited countries such as Russia and India — having first established its domestic reputation via heavy touring in regional areas with a steadfast emphasis on playing all-ages shows.
Those first two films capture five wide-eyed young Australians in the process of accumulating life experiences in tandem with building the one thing to which all serious artists aspire: a sustainable career that will allow them to live comfortably from making and performing their music.
A third film, Viva the Underdogs, offers a rather different proposition: a group of men in their mid to late 30s — some of them fathers of small children — preparing for a 2019 world tour that hopefully will include playing to some of the biggest audiences of their career.
The film opens with a frank discussion that lays out the financial risks involved in the coming run of concerts, which would include shipping an extensive and resource-intensive stage production — and about 50 crew — from venue to venue, for months on end.
“We’re basically making nothing, straight up — we’re pouring every cent the shows make into putting the show on,” guitarist and manager Luke Kilpatrick says on camera. “That’s kind of our business strategy. We think it makes a difference.”
For McCall, such insights were an essential element for helping fans to understand the significant investment that the independent, self-managed band puts into its collective livelihood.
“There’s no fallback,” he tells The Australian via phone from Byron Bay. “It’s not like we have this massive musical empire behind us who is pumping funds into developing an enormous band that’s going to sell billions of records.
“You have an entire generation who don’t understand the concept of even paying for music, and a record industry that used to be worth billions which is worth a shadow of that now.
“When you operate on the level that we do, that risk — and everything that you want to create — falls directly back on to us, so we have to make sure that we can handle the weight in every single shape and form.”
The film is directed by Allan Hardy, who developed an innovative, award-winning music video for the band’s 2018 single, The Void. At first the documentary had no clear shape: instead, with the musicians’ blessing, Hardy and his crew simply kept the cameras rolling until a story began to reveal itself.
The narrative thread that eventually gave Viva the Underdogs its momentum was the lead-up to a landmark event in the band’s career: headlining Wacken Open Air, an annual heavy metal festival held in northern Germany that attracts about 75,000 fans.
A top-billed booking at Wacken is a serious achievement for any act, but perhaps especially more so for a group that began writing and recording while firmly entrenched in a niche subgenre known as metalcore — which blends elements of heavy metal and hardcore music — before gradually outgrowing the latter style across its six albums to date.
That Wacken performance forms the film’s final act, and the footage captured is breathtaking: a sea of people as far as the eye can see banging their heads, screaming along and moving their bodies to aggressive, melodic music written half a world away in Byron Bay, where the five musicians still live when not in transit or on stage.
On that tour, the bulk of the setlist was taken from the two most recent Parkway Drive releases, 2018’s Reverence and 2015’s Ire. Far from retreading the same artistic ground, the group continues to play to the biggest crowds of its career while performing its newest music to hearty applause — a rare feat that few giants in the often tail-chasing world of heavy metal can get away with.
Releasing three films about one band within the space of 11 years may sound pretentious or excessive. But what this singular — and decidedly unpretentious — group has achieved to date is extraordinary. Viva the Underdogs, then, is only the latest chapter in a long, compelling tale whose ending is far from written.
Viva the Underdogs screens nationally in cinemas on Wednesday for one night only ahead of a release on streaming video platforms later this year. Parkway Drive’s national tour begins in Brisbane (June 13) and ends in Perth (June 24).