Music
Interview
My Greatest Hits: Winston McCall of Parkway Drive
The Parkway Drive frontman talks us through his career highlights, from being shut down by the riot squad to their history-making secret set at Download 2024
From Byron Bay’s best-kept secret to international metal giants, Parkway Drive’s story is one of grit, determination, and relentless ambition. Formed in 2003, they’ve spent two decades transforming their groundbreaking take on heavy music into a worldwide movement, growing far beyond their coastal Australian roots whilst retaining a firm DIY ethos.
Rewriting the rules of their scene across seven studio albums, the Aussie riff-masters have become known for their fearlessness to shatter expectations. From the raw ferocity of their breakout debut Killing With A Smile to the grandiose, cinematic vision of 2022’s transformative Darker Still, each chapter of their journey has been marked not only by its passion and intensity – but its innovation.
Currently celebrating their 20th anniversary, the five-piece have built a legacy as one of the most electrifying forces in modern heavy music. From sweaty shows in New South Wales basements to conquering headline festival slots, their live show has evolved into something truly spectacular, known for their abundant pyrotechnics and the visceral stage presence of frontman Winston McCall.
Preparing to bring their biggest show yet to the UK in 2025, we sat down with McCall to revisit the highlights, challenges, and outright chaos that have defined Parkway Drive’s rise to greatness. From gruelling recording sessions to headline-grabbing riot squads and triumphant festival appearances, here are the frontman’s stand-out moments from the last two decades.
Recording Killing With A Smile
“It was a dream scenario for us. We were driving home from a show in Adelaide, all the way back to Byron, and you have to drive across this section called the Hay Plains. There’s f*cking nothing there, you see car headlights, and 20 minutes later that car goes past you. That’s how flat and bare it is. It was two in the morning, and we were like, ‘We should write an album… Who should we do it with?’ Everyone in Australia was shit, and we needed to do something decent, so Adam [Dutkiewicz, Killswitch Engage] was the only name. He’s the f*cking dude, and Luke [Kilpatrick, guitar] was like, ‘I’ll see if I can find his email address’. That was it, and somehow, we get a message back. Luke was like, ‘Yo, he said he’s up for it’.
“That was our first overseas trip, and we lost our first bass player because he just wouldn’t get his passport. Adam picked us up from the airport, which was weird as shit! Adam Dutkiewicz was picking us up from the airport, we hopped in his van and drove out to his studio. We stayed in one hotel room for four of us, and we had to sneak in every day because it was only booked for two people. Two of us slept on the ground, and we rotated. We were there for two and a half weeks, and we cranked an entire album out in that time. I did vocals with Adam’s engineer while they were tracking, and I blew my voice out after the first day. I didn’t sing again until the second to last day of tracking, and then I tracked the whole album in one day. It was mental, it was like 13 hours of me just punching this shit out, doing all the layers and everything. I was singing until I puked, and then we’d just go onto the next song. We were counting the minutes down because we were due to fly out at 6am the next morning, so we needed to have the entire f*cking album tracked.
“It’s mental to listen back to it, because I can remember how much it hurt, even though it sounds pretty good. Everything that went into that album was back-breakingly insane, and the studio was haunted. Some weird shit happened there, I was asleep on the couch at one point, and someone walked past. I got up and followed them into a room where there was nothing there, no people in there, and no way out. The owner had done a seance in there for a relative, and he said he’d never got rid of the spirit afterwards. There were weird things happening with the lights, strange stuff with our gear, and people seeing things out of the corner of their eye. Obviously, we decided to go back and do another album in that studio!”
Our first time playing overseas
Photo by Gary Wolstenholme/Redferns
“We were going overseas for the first time, we had no booking agent, and we had no overseas releases other than a couple of distros. We stayed at Ben [Gordon, drums]’s parent’s friend’s farm for three weeks in England, and we had no bass player. We were living on their farm in a caravan, and we called up Jia [O’Connor, bass] to say that we had got a gig booked in Paris in three weeks. We asked if he wanted to be the bass player, and he thought it was a joke. He thought we were going to laugh at him when he said yes, and he didn’t believe it was real until he actually got to the farm. He thought he was going to pay for a ticket around the world just to have us laugh at him and send him home. It shows how close our friendship was! He’d never played bass before though, and it was a really hot, nice summer in the UK. To condition himself, he would strip down to his boxer shorts, put a bass on, and run through the woods playing the songs to practice. He was getting his fitness up and getting ready for these hot, sweaty shows, and one day he was doing it, and he ran into a bunch of hikers in the woods. They were just like, ‘Who the f*ck is this guy?!’
“So, we drove to Paris to play this show. We got across the channel, pulled off onto this side road, and started driving. It said that from the port to Paris would be 36 hours, and were like, ‘What the f*ck is wrong with this nav?’ We didn’t have Google Maps yet, so we drove for two hours down these little roads, seeing this gigantic freeway next to us. We kept thinking, ‘Why aren’t we on that thing? Why does it say 36 hours?’ Eventually, Jed [Gordon] our merch guy was like, ‘I didn’t want to pay for the tolls, okay?’ So, we were taking the worst road possible to Paris. We got to Paris, drove over the bridge, and the venue was a boat. We were playing a stage at one end of a tugboat in the middle of Paris, with some band that were dressed in gym outfits and wearing gas masks. We had only played a handful of shows though, so we were just playing anything we could. We got up there and played our set, and I can’t remember much of it, but I remember that Jia wasn’t actually bad! I couldn’t audibly hear him being shit, but that might have been the fact that the monitors didn’t exist. He dropped his pick a whole bunch though, he’d be playing and head banging, and then I’d turn around to see him on the ground trying to find his pick again. He got the job done though, and I’m pretty sure we went and got some crazy French patisserie afterwards.”
The infamous Horizons launch show
“We were a reasonable sized band before Horizons came out in Australia, and we had toured in places that no other bands had played in our country. Our whole thing was that we came from a small town, so we were going to take this music to every small town we could get to because we never had that opportunity. It created a pretty big groundswell of support for Parkway running up to Horizons, and when we booked the venues for that tour, we booked this place called The Arena in Brisbane. It was maybe 1,500 capacity, which was f*cking nuts for the type of music that we played. When we started, 200 people was a big show, so we booked this venue and a bunch of other ones… and it sold out. We were like, ‘What the f*ck just happened? A sold-out show?’ So, we booked another night there, and that one sold out as well.
“We played the first night, and it was mayhem. I’d seen Soulfly and Hatebreed in that venue, and that seemed like the most psycho show I’d ever seen, but that wasn’t sold out. We were playing this sold-out show to these rabid fans who had come from everywhere, and no one could move. People were just going down in the pit, and the security had never seen anything like it. They were straight up terrified. Our tour manager came up on stage going, ‘Yo, the cops are here. They’re going to shut this thing down!’ and we were like, ‘Good luck!’ The security freaked out, they were dragging people out, and our bass player was kicking security in the head for not catching people. The vibe felt super intense, and when the show finished the security cleared everyone out. The cops came into the venue, and our tour manager told us to get back into the green room. The riot squads were there, the street got shut down, and the Queensland Police were freaking the f*ck out. I was getting calls from my sister – who was at the show – to say, ‘I’m running down the street, they’ve let the dogs off, the riot squad’s here. This is f*cking terrifying’.
“It was in the main entertainment district of Brisbane, and I don’t think it was that mental, but the perception was crazy. The front page of the newspapers the next day all said, ‘Heavy metal band shuts down Brisbane’. The most psycho thing was that we had a show there the next night, so we had to meet with the heads of Queensland Police and explain to them that people weren’t dying. We had to reassure them that it was going to be fine, and to leave the police and security outside. The next show, we tried to play it a little bit tamer, but it was still mental. After that, we had a rocky reputation with the Queensland Police for a long time. They tried to shut down several large shows, but we just pushed through until it flipped, and they started loving us. Their official Twitter account started posting Parkway references all the time! They rocked up to a show at the Riverstage with 10,000 people there, and they wanted to shut it down because they were getting noise complaints. We were like, ‘What do you think happens when you shut down a 10,000 person show? All of these people are off the streets right now!’ After that, they were on board.”
Winning an ARIA Award for Best Heavy Metal Album
“That was so iconically uniconic for us. Up until then, they didn’t have an award in that category, but Deep Blue went to No.2 under f*cking Kylie or something like that. There was no denying how big this shit was; we were playing 5,000 cap venues, sold out our whole tour, and we were an enormous band in the country. We were a household name for any kid, and Deep Blue was the soundtrack in every school at that point in time. The ARIAs decided they had better invent a category for it, and it was an outdoor ceremony. We were on tour, but our manager at the time went and accepted it. He stood out in the rain and got this award, and then called us to say that we had won. It was 3am in Berlin, we were on the bus to play another gig, and we didn’t realise how much of a big deal it was at the time. It signified a large shift in the landscape of where things were in the country, but we had such a large chip on our shoulder. We wanted to think that it was still very underground, but it was so big that it couldn’t be denied.”
Headlining Wacken
“That was a moment of self-realisation, because that was the first booking that I can remember where I thought it was an actual joke. I had to go back to Luke and say, ‘Wacken, right? Are you sure it’s not just headlining the second stage?’ It was our third time playing it, so we knew what it was and how much it meant. We were aware that we were still very new, and the sound was contemporary. People still thought of us as a metalcore band, and we’re not Motörhead, we’re not Iron Maiden… We weren’t this huge legacy band.
“We’d played a couple of years there where it was muddy as f*ck. We headlined the third stage at 1am one year, and the first 30 meters of the crowd was just a pool of water. With the headline set, there were so many things that could have gone wrong. All you need is a bit of rain, and this was all going to go to hell. The whole lead up to it was just waiting for it to fail. Surely, 50% of the audience would think, ‘These people have not earned the right to have this slot’ and head over to one of the tents, the rain would start, or something would happen. I thought something bad was going to happen right up until we walked to the stage. We stood next to it, I looked at the sky, and it was clear. There was not a cloud in sight.
“We walked through the crowd when we went onstage, so we had no view of the full crowd, but before our set we peeped over the hurricane fencing. We were like, ‘Holy shit, they’re all here. This is going to happen’. From that point, it was just great. It was one of those moments that felt like full on validation in a way that I hadn’t felt before. There were 80,000 humans there, and when ‘Prey’ kicked in it was the biggest thing that we’d ever done. Everyone was singing, everyone was jumping, and they knew what the f*ck was going on. It was like, ‘Whoa, okay, this is going to be something’. You never know how far those things are going to resonate, but I guess it did, because look at what we’re doing now.”
Releasing our documentary film Viva The Underdogs
“That was weird, because it was the last thing that happened before Covid. For me, the last thing I did was go to a premiere for our movie at an IMAX in Berlin. It was really f*cking strange sitting in that cinema, because I hadn’t seen the final take of it either. I remember watching it and going, ‘F*cking hell, it looks like it should be up there. This looks real’. I realised that this had really reached a level, and you don’t expect stuff like that to happen. It’s strange, and it’s a similar thing to playing Wacken, or just being onstage full stop. There’s a time of creation, and then there’s a time where it becomes owned by the world. It’s the actual performance, if that makes sense. Those are the times that really knock you on your ass, because all of the planning is done. Whether you’re standing onstage or you’re sitting in a cinema watching your film, then it becomes real. Everything up until then is a plan, a theory, or something you’ve written, but when you’re standing on the stage… That’s when reality hits you. Seeing that film was a reality slap because I had just done a press tour for a movie that I watched in an IMAX on the other side of the world. It made us look like the biggest band on the planet, but then Covid came three months later to kick the sh*t out of everyone.”
Working on Darker Still
“It’s crazy, because that album literally took us to breaking point. We pushed until it broke, but the final thing we did before it broke was create the album. It took everything out of us, to the point where we had to put it back together or choose to leave it. Knowing that, we all have a massive amount of pride in that album. It’s one that wears its wounds quite plainly in what we’ve said about the creation process and the subject matter, and I think that’s something we’re very proud of, because we committed to that. I love the music on it, but there’s something to be said for committing to struggle, heartache, and darkness because it’s a passion. It couldn’t have been created in any other time or scenario, and the sacrifice for that was the breaking of the band.
“Afterwards, we had to do the work to put the band back together and make sure it wasn’t the last thing we ever did. At that point in time though, you had to lay down and just go, ‘This thing is going to crush me’. It was going to crush us, and that’s the only way it was going to exist, but I’m glad we did it. The healing that came after was absolutely essential, and if we hadn’t made that album we would have broken in another way. It would have been a lot worse, and we might not have healed from it. It would have been death by 1,000 cuts, or death by poison, rather than something that we knew was coming. We were able to pick the pieces up afterwards, rather than just seeing it all burn.”
Our secret set at Download 2024
“That was pretty f*cking mad, because when the concept for it came about, the big reference point for me was Metallica playing that slot. It’s really nuts when we’re playing these other shows in Europe, headlining most of the festivals we play, and then you do a six-song set on the Dogtooth stage. It’s amazing, but we’d got a Metallica set to compare it to. That’s the only thing that jumped into our heads – Metallica did this, and now we get to do it. That’s awesome, but it was very hard to adjust our brains to what it actually meant. It brought back a lot of insecurities running up to it, which was really strange. Lots of the band were like, ‘We’re going to play on a small stage to 300 people, because they’re not even going to know we’re there. They don’t care.’ I think they forgot that we sub-headlined the second stage the year before! I was like, ‘Boys, I don’t think you understand what is about to happen here. This is going to be f*cking mental, brace yourselves.’ It was a similar thing to Wacken, but this time I kind of knew what was coming. Not to the degree that it did, but I knew that it was going to be f*cking nuts. We were driving up the hill through the mud, and we saw the crowd had started 200 meters before we got to the tent. We were like, ‘What the f*ck are these people doing here?!’
“It was a full-on moment, and if it’s something that kicks off the next era of Parkway it’s rad that it always starts with a small show. A show where you get the surfboard, and you get the Parkway songs, but that’s all it’s got to be for it to be absolutely mental. I remember looking outside of the tent and going, ‘I can’t see where the crowd ends.’ Rather than playing in a tent, it’s like you’re playing to a crowd, but someone decided to drop a tent on top of a tiny portion of it. The vibe was just rad, and I love that everyone was up for it. People knew what was going on as soon as the surfboard got lifted up. We were side stage as it went up and we heard the cheer. I’m very glad I didn’t wear a wetsuit onstage though, because that’s what the other guys wanted to do!”
The first 20th anniversary shows in Australia
“You have no idea what you’re in for, in all realness. I have friends who went to multiple shows, and they still tell me they have no idea what they experienced. I’m really proud of it, because it’s a show which took literally 20 years to create. It’s the moment where I can look at the process of creation and not draw it back to just, ‘Hey, we’re going to put on a show to celebrate this thing’. This couldn’t have been possible without so many things. Without songs that happened 19 years ago, songs that happened five years ago, shows that happened, people that we’ve met. [There are] things that we had a vision for seven years ago, but we didn’t know how to articulate then, which are now on the stage. There’s a lot that our production crew and I have held in our heads for so long, turning the cogs and putting it together, and we didn’t fully realise what was going on until the final run-through the day before the first show. Our crew were tearing their hair out going, ‘What are you guys even trying to do?’, but when we finally did the full run-through – it worked.
“It means a lot to me in that way, and it’s the most blatant sign of where we are aiming for this band. It’s funny to say that I think you’re underestimating us, but you will understand when you see this show, and if you don’t see this show – you’ll f*cking regret it. I can 100% say, without any bias, that this will be the best show you will see of the year. Flat out, that’s it. They’ve been the most fun shows I’ve ever been able to play, and it’s cool to be able to go, ‘Shit, it took me 20 years to be able to put this thing together.’ Now, I see why we’ve worked for 20 years, and I see that everyone else understands that as well. You can see it resonate with every beat, and every single thing you put into it hits home in the way you had in your brain.”
Photo credit: Gina Wetzler/Redferns
