Parkway Drive

For the first time in bloody ages, Parkway Drive will be skipping out the usual venues and major cities by hitting the “bush” for a new regional tour. Kicking off in less than two weeks, The All Aussie Adventure Tour will hit smaller towns like Bendigo and Wollongong, with Perth’s most extreme outfit, Make Them Suffer, as the main support. Winston McCall spoke with killyourstereo.com recently about rural shows, letting their fans name the tour, and being called a ‘rock band’.

So, Winston, I’m from Kyneton, which is a really rural Victorian town and a tour like this coming through the area is great to see. As there hasn’t been a regional Parkway Drive tour for about three or four years now.

You know, I think it may have even been longer than that, actually. Maybe close to five, as we went through a little dormant patch a few years back so this tour has been a long time coming.

Yeah, the first time I saw Parkway live was back in 2010, at a YMCA Center inBendigo with like 400 or 500 hundred people crammed into it. The line up was yourselves, Confession, Word Up and a local band called Three Faces West.

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Oh, wow! I think that was called the Surf Rats tour or something like that. That may have been the last big regional tour we’ve done. Sorry about that [laughs].

Nah, it’s all good man, I’ve seen you a few times since then! But I find it interesting that those three other bands on that tour aren’t together anymore. Yet, here you guys still are, six years down the road.

Yeah man, you just can’t get rid of us! We’re very lucky in that sense. It’s good to still to be able to do this and to still do regional shows. This is our fourth or so regional tour in Australia and the first time we ever did one, it was more about trying to see if we could even play those shows in those places.

For real, and I love the fact that you guys can go right off a huge Australian tour like last year, and then do this much smaller tour in the span of a year.

The thing for us is that we’ve always been in this flux of playing what most people consider normal shows. These days, we’re most accustomed to playing large-scale shows, but what we’ve been brought up on is a much smaller environment. Around the world, we play a huge variation of shows. From the biggest festival's we’ve ever seen to this run-down show on this last tour in Missouri with 500 people, where the power kept cutting in and out. We do all of that on almost one tour now, so we get a bit of everything.

Right on. With giving fans the chance to name the new tour, I thought that was such a bold move, as you must have been sent some ridiculous names. If you remember any, I’d love to hear some!

There were some that were just so fantastically messed up, that we couldn’t put them on the poster. The two that I can recall were ‘Bangers And Mosh’, and ‘Skip Towns and Breakdowns’ [laughs]. If you find the Instagram post, you can look up the tag and there are just pages of these potential tour names. We went through every single one, and it was more an exercise in seeing how much we could laugh, really.

[Laughs] that’s rad! Obviously, this is a B or even a C-market tour, but I think a lot of other Australian bands skip over these places. And there’s a lot of fans in these towns like Bendigo. Sure, not every band can do a tour like this, but it’s been over two years since a band like say, In Hearts Wake, have done a regional tour.

I think it all comes down to timing. That’s why we haven’t been as active in Australia over the past four years is the context of who else is playing and what you’re doing on a global scale. Popular bands like In Hearts Wake are focusing more on overseas because all of a sudden there is this demand for Australian bands. Two years ago before Soundwave went bust, they were touring every band they could find under every single rock. It was just flooding the market and it’s over-saturation, and we didn’t want to add to that. So we focused our efforts overseas, but now that’s died down, we’re just like ‘Fuck yeah! Regional tour!’

As you said, man, there are lots of people in these towns. Byron Bay isn’t a B-market; it’s a non-existent market. We know what it means to have a band come through and play and not make you the kid who spends so much on travelling to a city to see one gig. It’s good to be back on this circuit now.

Well said! While you guys are pretty heavy, you’re bringing Make Them Suffer along, who are pretty intense! In a recent interview, you guys mentioned that a place like Byron is full of reggae music, or indie music. I think that’s the same with some of the places you’re playing on this tour. It’s a big deal when a deathcore band supports Parkway Drive on a local tour and suddenly people who may have never heard a down-tuned riff or a blast beat can now be exposed to that.

100% dude! I find that it galvanizes a lot of those scenes and communities, as you may not even realise there are people locally who share the same musical tastes. It helps things grow on a grass root level where access would have been denied. It’s a pretty fundamental thing that’s been lacking. That’s why it’s great to have Make Them Suffer with us for this one, and as you said, they’re pretty intense [Laughs].

They really are! Living rurally, I’ve driven down some dodgy as fuck roads and through some middle of nowhere areas, and I assume the band has been down a few over the years. The kind where you think, ‘Oh, shit, this is it. This is how we die’ [laughs].

Ooooh yeah! The craziest time was when we helped these people at a gas station in America who had said they'd broken down out in the middle of nowhere. We were in the van following them back on their shitty dirt bike and after 15 minutes or so, we noticed that the dirt road we were on was getting narrower and narrower. We thought that if we couldn’t turn around soon, we’d end up following them to the end, and one of them would have a gun and they'd probably rob and kill us. So it was us just going slowly down this road as these trailer trash people on the bike kept on saying, ‘It’s just a little bit further, come on’. We thought 'Fuck this', and just turned around and floored it out of there!

Shit... that sounds like the start of a really bad slasher film.

It really was! It was the middle of the night, going through the bush, and the road is getting smaller and smaller; it was hectic. One of us said ‘Nah, it’ll be right. You’re all scared’. But we had taken one too many corners, we’re miles off the road, and no one is going to notice we’re gone. It was fucked [laughs].

That’s crazy, man! Finally, when Daniel Riccardo joined you guys on stage in London for ‘Deliver Me’, I saw that on Fox Sports News on T.V. NOT on a music website.

He’s a mate of ours and comes out to a bunch of our gigs. So when we asked him to sing that part in Deliver Me, he was freaking the fuck out. He did great, though. But yeah, seeing it pop up on the Fox Sports News the next day was absolutely hilarious with the headline ‘Driver lives out rock star dream’. Like, rock star? Rock band? This is some interesting coverage going on [laughs]. It was just as weird for us to see as it was for everyone else.

I bet, but it was still pretty cool to see, I think. And that’s time, Winston, was really good to talk to you today, thank you so much. I'll hopefully catch you at the Bendigo show in a few weeks!

No worries, Alex. And sick, bring a surfboard and stage dive onto it!