Parkway Drive: metalcore band right at home in Byron; Reverence
It is one of the world’s biggest bands, but Parkway Drive is still right at home in Byron Bay.
In a small residential suburb situated 8km west of the NSW town of Byron Bay, the name of one street is stencilled and painted on to the bitumen in a white font so large it can’t be ignored. “PARKWAY DR”, it reads, with an arrow pointing right, in the direction of an otherwise ordinary neighbourhood.
No other road in the area has its name marked this way. Not Plantation Drive, nor Currawong Way, nor Scenic Vista Drive. They’re labelled with standard-issue steel signs — black text on white background — like nearly every other residential street in this country. What’s so special, then, about Parkway Drive?
Standing sentry nearby is an unusually tall post, covered with stickers and graffiti, whose tip is hidden by greenery.
It’s only on closer inspection that the pole — perhaps 4m high — is revealed to be bare at the top, like an empty flagpole.
Among the many names and dates scratched into the metalwork beneath the pole is a cryptic comment, apparently left by “Tammy” on New Year’s Day 2015. “Winston signed my undies,” it reads. The bare pole is nothing new for local residents, but the decision to paint the bitumen is still fresh.
“Over the years we have replaced that sign more than 30 times and every time we replace it someone comes and pinches it again,” says Byron Shire Council inspections officer Dave Carney, in a press release published last September. “We have tried a lot of different methods including putting the actual sign up really high, and using heavy duty brackets, but there’s always an enterprising fan who will go the extra mile to take it as a souvenir.”
Carney continues: “For 12 years we have been losing the battle with that street sign so the sign crew finally decided to paint the name of the street on the road.” He concludes, though, on a note of begrudging respect: “It is however great to see some local lads still enjoying such amazing success in the tough world of music.”
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About 12km away, on an unremarkable — and well-signed — street in a southern suburb of Byron Bay, the five men who comprise Parkway Drive, the band, are hard at work rehearsing in a room on the first floor of a two-storey home.
They each wear headphones and face each other while their musical instruments — bass, two electric guitars and an electric drum kit — are connected to a home studio set-up that allows them to record directly to a computer.
Today, they are quietly making some of the most aggressive, and most popular, music heard anywhere in Australia. Quietly, that is, because the only person who can be properly heard is singer Winston McCall, he of the signed undies. This “digital jam”, as they call it, is a smart way to avoid receiving noise complaints in the middle of suburbia.
McCall is tattooed, muscular and clean-shaven, with close-cropped brown hair. All five members are keen surfers, but he might have become a professional bodyboarder if he hadn’t found his calling in fronting this band. He stands shirtless, barefoot and with eyes closed, facing a microphone and performing in an inimitable, throaty vocal style that is more often screamed than sung.
His powerful voice fills the room with phrases such as “In your mind / All your demons are rattling chains / Welcome to a world of pain”, while his bandmates rehearse the arrangements of heavy, hook-laden songs from their coming sixth album, Reverence.
Soon these men will begin extensive tours of the US and Europe that will keep them away from the surf and sun of their home town for months on end.
This front room of lead guitarist Jeff Ling’s house has been the band’s rehearsal space for eight years. Its name was taken from the Parkway Drive home of drummer Ben Gordon, known as “Parkway House”, where the quintet first began playing music together as teenagers in 2003.
When Review visits Ling’s home in mid-April, we are offered a plastic chair situated between Gordon’s drum kit and McCall’s microphone. Ling’s black staffy, Bella, is kicked out after she begins dragging her backside in circles on the rug. “Make sure you document this,” Ling says, grinning. “This is the shit Instagram doesn’t tell you.”
Rhythm guitarist Luke Kilpatrick and bassist Jia O’Connor are perched on stools that face a whiteboard, on which a draft set list is written. Some of these songs date back to 2007, from the band’s second album, Horizons, which was performed in full earlier this year during a run of Australian theatre shows celebrating its 10th anniversary.
While the band’s 2005 debut, Killing with a Smile, turned more than a few heads, thanks to its polished collection of songs written in a style known as “metalcore” — which combines elements of the heavy metal and hardcore genres — it was Horizons that put the band on the mainstream map. It debuted at No 6 on the ARIA albums chart and was the first of five of the band’s albums to be certified gold, with sales in excess of 35,000 copies each.
Incessant overseas touring in support of those first two albums, in particular, laid the foundation for what has become one of the most sustainable careers in popular Australian music. While the band plies its trade in something of a niche genre, its career has been a steady ascent toward the top of the world’s heavy music industry.
Although Parkway Drive has for years been regularly filling big venues in capital cities, such as the Hordern Pavilion in Sydney or Brisbane’s Riverstage, it is a rare Australian band in the sense that it boasts a much stronger following overseas.
“They’re definitely the most significant and impactful heavy band that Australia has had, possibly ever,” says Lochlan Watt, the host of Triple J’s weekly heavy metal program, The Racket. “I think you’ve got AC/DC, and then you’ve got Parkway Drive.”
In a few weeks, the group will be playing to tens of thousands of people in locations such as England’s Download Festival, where only headliners such as Guns N’ Roses and Ozzy Osbourne are billed higher.
While neighbours mow the lawn and children ride their bikes on the sleepy street outside, these five men are plotting the precise timing of flame blasts in pyrotechnic displays, and deciding at exactly what point in its set Gordon will be raised vertically on a platform and slowly rotated through 360 degrees while performing a drum solo.
After 45 minutes of heated discussion about a section of the set that will last approximately 90 seconds, by extending one of the new songs, it’s up to O’Connor to break the tension. “Can we just play Carrion real quick?” he quips, producing a laugh from his bandmates.
The bassist is referring to a fan favourite from Horizons, which the band has performed live well in excess of 500 times. Carrion is powered by surging guitar riffs and a monstrous chorus. “In a moment I’m lost / Dying from the inside,” sings McCall. “Her eyes take me away / Tear me apart from the inside out.”
It is a song about the pain of saying goodbye at airports. It is about the emotional distress that comes with travelling the world and playing songs like this one before thousands of fans, while the person you love most is at home in Byron Bay, waiting for you to return.
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After two hours of steady progress at rehearsing the new songs — most of which the band has not played since recording Reverence in Ottawa, Canada, last August and September — Kilpatrick, O’Connor and Gordon pack up to head home.
It won’t be a long trip for any of them: the guitarist lives the farthest away, but his trip will take seven minutes by car at most. “It’s a hard place to leave,” says McCall with a grin, while Ling excuses himself to head upstairs.
As well as shunning capital cities in favour of the NSW north coast, the quintet has also subtly challenged the substance abuse stereotypes that tend to surround heavy metal musicians. Its backstage rider contains coconut water and orange juice, rather than bottles of hard liquor.
“I’ve never seen any of them drunk, and I’ve known them since they were 16-year-old kids,” says Graham Nixon, owner of independent label Resist Records and the band’s long-time manager. “They’re clean-living boys from Byron Bay. They’re still active as far as surfing, and eating right.
“They know that if they were to not be doing that, they probably wouldn’t be in a position to be doing what they’re doing. It’s not as though the band’s made that choice for them; I guess they’ve chosen to not go down that path.”
As depicted in a feature-length documentary directed by drummer Gordon and released on DVD in 2009, the band certainly wasn’t averse to roughing it during its early overseas touring adventures. Rather than seeking proper accommodation between sparsely attended European shows, the band members preferred to drive around in their van and find a spot by the side of the road where they could sleep outdoors.
“When you’re in control and you’re not feeling like shit because you’re doing drugs and alcohol all the time, you are more on top of your finances because you’re not blowing all your money on partying,” says Lochlan Watt, the Triple J radio host who has watched the band perform more than 20 times throughout its career. “I think that’s definitely had a massive impact on their success. It’s given them a lot of stability.”
Watt says that Parkway Drive has “never really been a preachy straight-edge band”, referring to the lifestyle choice of abstinence from drug use, a subculture which remains popular in the hardcore punk music community. “They’ve never had an ideology to shove down people’s throats,” he says. “But at the same time, they still have had a couple of songs over the years about the brutal effects of drugs and alcohol.”
As an example, he cites one of the heaviest tracks from Horizons, which begins with these words: “When your lungs collapse / When your last breath fails …” Says Watt: “The lyrics to Dead Man’s Chest are pretty huge. If you’re a smoker, they’ll make you not want to smoke.”
As McCall explains once his bandmates have left the rehearsal space, the lyrics he wrote for Reverence were inspired by a series of deaths — of friends, fellow musicians and pets — after the 2015 release of fifth album Ire. These events left the band members privately reeling, and occasionally breaking down on stage.
“Jess was there when all of this shit was going down on tour,” says McCall, referring to his wife. “We’ve been together since before this band started, so we’ve seen some shit. She’s at ground zero when the bomb goes off, every time — whereas other people, especially fans, have no idea this shit’s gone on. We didn’t broadcast any of this. No one understands the context of this record. It was literally just survival mode, for all of this.”
The songwriter’s grief is laid bare in album closer The Colour of Leaving, which McCall wrote after digging a grave for his beloved dog, while first track Wishing Wells is about learning to cope with loss. In sum, the emotional truth of the songs on Reverence marks a stark departure from the almost cartoonish imagery of violence and death that characterised the band’s early career.
When this is put to him, McCall nods. “The early stuff was immature,” he says. “It was draped in metaphor, to make them have more impact, simply because that’s all you have.
“You grow up attracted to edgy things, which make you stand out. You watch action movies because they excite you, and the music was adrenalin-fuelled excitement for younger people. Fifteen years on, all of a sudden, the shit you’re writing about is real. It’s 15 years of growth on the planet.”
Having lived through that challenging experience, what will he write about next? McCall doesn’t know, in the same way that none of us can accurately predict exactly what tomorrow will hold for us. With a laugh, he admits he doesn’t know if the band will release another album. “If it keeps going, then that’s great and we’ll see what there is,” he says. “But it’s a big world, and we’ll see where it takes us.”
For now, though, Parkway Drive will leave its sleepy suburban rehearsal space in order to thrill audiences across the US and Europe with a knockout light show, pyrotechnics, a drum kit that’s lifted and spun like a roller-coaster, and a stage with in-built hydraulic platforms that undulate like a centipede.
While the street signs bearing its name can no longer be stolen, Parkway Drive’s unique style of songwriting and performance will last much longer than any amount of white paint stencilled on to bitumen.
Reverence is out May 4 on Resist Records.