Parkway Drive: Sign o' the times

Turn off the Pacific Highway at Ewingsdale a few clicks inland from Byron Bay and you’ll find yourself at the Australian equivalent of Abbey Road. Not that you’d know it of course – the local council’s all but given up replacing the Parkway Drive signs adorning the lush coastal street after realising their reinforced signage was no match for the dominant hardcore band’s fanbase.

    Naming themselves after the home studio address where the quintet first began jamming in 2002 has resulted in headaches for the local shire, with one recent council report stating four Parkway Drive signs have been swiped already this year.

    “It would have to be the most stolen sign in Australia,” frontman Winston McCall sighs. “They gave up putting it back up on the post, then they decided to put it up the telegraph pole 20 metres off the ground but it still got stolen a bunch of times. The council even tried to buy our name from us so that they didn’t have to replace signs every few weeks. It’s crazy – we’ll be jamming and suddenly we’ll hear a car burn past with a bunch of guys just going, ‘Wooooo, yeah!’. It’s not a tourist destination, it’s just 100 metres of street!”

    Debuting at number two on the ARIA Chart last week, Parkway Drive’s third album Deep Blue has proven them to be a force to be reckoned with. Speaking from the tour bus in Pittsburgh, where the band are currently on their second Warped tour, McCall seems as excited about a backstage World Cup challenge as cracking the Aussie top five and the US top 40 for the first time.

    “We haven’t really celebrated going to number two because we’re not the celebrating kind. We did win our game of soccer against England’s You Me At Six though, so we celebrated that. News of the number two spot came through the same day, so that was pretty cool. We’re not really sports nuts but we do like a bit of competition – and being Australian you don’t like to be beaten, especially by England.”

    McCall suggests that this year’s 43-date Warped tour isn’t too different from the band’s first appearance on the bill in 2007 in support of their second album Horizons.

    “It’s still run in the same fashion and it’s just like jumping back in the saddle. The catering is great and everyone treats us really well, so it’s interesting to have that experience from three years ago fresh in our minds, but the crowd reaction now is very different to say the least. We were playing amazing shows then, but this year it’s been absolutely insane so far.”

    Despite being affable guys with a love of the beach, Deep Blue finds the band creating a dark concept album featuring a protagonist with nothing left to believe in. Is there a light at the end of the tunnel for this character who’s hit rock bottom?

    “I don’t know – I’ve never really been able to write about positive things too well. I get worried it comes across as cheesy when I do, it’s dishonest of me to write like that because I believe human nature is generally negative. Just look at the ways of the world and it seems as though we lean more towards the greedy, violent, ignorant tendencies than the compassionate, peaceful and loving side of humanity. It seems that’s the way humans are programmed, so that’s the way I see the world.”

    Bad Religion’s Brett Gurewitz, who heads up Parkway Drive’s US label Epitaph, dropped by the Los Angeles studio during Deep Blue sessions to add vocals to album track Home Is For The Heartless.

    “We’ve been fans of his band for a really long time and highly respect his work, so it was even more ridiculous to have him excited about working on our album. We already had the track laid out with my vocals on it and we’d not tried it with a melodic style of vocal over the top, but we had an idea it would work. Luckily Brett came in, was super-psyched about it and nailed it – we couldn’t have hoped for it to come out better. It was pretty cool!”

    McCall suggests he’d be lost if he didn’t have the band to channel his energies into, but it’s been suggested in previous interviews he’s quite the chef.

    “Put it this way: I like to cook things and I like to eat things, but there’s no way in hell I’d work in a restaurant. The closest I have come is working in a café, but with the pressure I absolutely suck.

    “Cooking something at home is far different from cooking up big batches of food on MasterChef,” McCall laughs. “I’d definitely choke on MasterChef – there’s a big difference between that and picking up a recipe book, cooking a recipe and saying that it’s nice.”

    Surely if we can get I Killed The Prom Queen on Celebrity Big Brother we can get Parkway Drive on Celebrity MasterChef?

    “We’ll see – maybe there could be a spin-off if they’re happy to cook vegetarian hot dogs. Being a vegetarian definitely makes it trickier.”

    Now that Deep Blue has been so positively received, do Parkway Drive have to change the goal posts for future ambitions?

    “Not really. We still have the same mindset in that we just do what we do. Everything has come about from us not trying to achieve anything specific, so we’re just going to continue writing the music we enjoy and try to progress. If we do get a chance to write another album that’s great, if people enjoy it that’s even better, but the day we start aiming for things is the day we start missing what we’re aiming for. It sounds stupid, but if you aim for nothing then everything you achieve will be a success in itself.”

Parkway Drive, The Devil Wears Prada, The Ghost Inside and 50 Lions play Adelaide Uni Cloisters on Sat Oct 2. Deep Blue is out now through Resist.

Words: Scott Mclennan

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