With just a few months of touring left before returning to the studio for album number four, Byron Bay’s masters of metalcore Parkway Drive are working harder than ever. Moments before leaving for the Big Days Out, frontman Winston McCall caught up with Nils Hay to talk about touring, the new album and what he sees for the band’s future.
LIVEGUIDE: Hi Winston, thanks for taking the time for a chat today. Are you guys in NZ for the Big Day Out yet?
WM: No, we’re literally 20 minutes away from heading off. I’ve just dragged my bags to the door. You’re the last thing I get to do before we hit the car and drive to Brisbane and fly off.
LG: Fantastic. You’re on the BDO line-up, which I’ll come back to, leading into your second regional Sick Summer tour. Given the sheer number of smaller Aussie towns, how did you pick the ones to put on the tour? Did the surf conditions factor in at all?
WM: Yes, the surf conditions definitely factor in! (Laughs) Other than that, I’m not too sure. We try to spread it out as much as we can and I’m not quite sure what the criteria is for it. Our guitarist does a lot of the routing, so he’d probably know a bit better than me. I’m sorry, I’m a bit clueless on that one.
We try to cover as much as we can in the time that we have and at the same time, we like being able to tour Australia and see it. A lot of the time these days the schedule’s so rough that you fly to a city and then you fly to another city the next day and another city the next day. We’ve realised that Australia’s a really beautiful country and to be able to drive around and see the landscape and the towns is a real privilege.
LG: Talking of planes, after Australia, you’re to the UK and Europe for a bit. I note you have a couple of breaks in the schedule in late March and May. Is the touring juggernaut taking a break, or are you planning some studio time?
WM: There’s a bit of a break and then there’s studio time. The last tour we do for this album is that Europe tour, then it’s back into the studio for us. We’ve been writing for a fair while – we’re actually way ahead of ourselves in that respect – we have most of the record actually written. We’re going to try and do some different stuff on this record, so there’s some stuff that we’re going to have to wait until we get to the studio to figure out, so we’re doing what we can until we get there.
LG: OK. You told NME six months or so ago that you had some ideas for album number four that were “bigger than anything you’ve done in the past.” Can you elaborate on that at all?
WM: (Laughs) Yeah, that’s something we’re going to really live up to! When I read that back I thought “Aw, fuck! They’re going to expect us to sound like Queen or something now.”
I’m not sure how we’re going to live up to the hype of that particular quote but yeah, we have plans – it’s something we want to do bigger than anything we’ve ever done before. We have ideas, but at the same time, what everyone thinks is ‘big’ differs from person to person. There definitely are ideas that we haven’t tried before and influences that we haven’t put in before and production things that we’ve never tried before.
I think if it all comes together, the record on the whole will definitely sound like a different Parkway record. It’s still going to sound like Parkway, the songs sound like Parkway, but there’s stuff in there that you won’t have heard before.
LG: Cool. What kind of influences are we talking about here?
WM: God… Everything? Absolutely everything other than me singing – because I can’t. We want it to sound different to just a standard metal record or hardcore record or anything like that, but at the same time not gimmicky. We’re looking at absolutely everything; the stuff that we listen to brings a lot of influence in, and the stuff that we listen to is basically everything but heavy music. You’re looking at a range of influences.
LG: Okay…
WM: Sorry, that’s a really open-ended answer isn’t it?
LG: It is, but you’re not ruling anything out, which is good…
WM: Yeah, that’s pretty much it. That’s the way we’ve gone about it. At the moment, we have a song that involves (guitarist) Jeff (Ling) hitting a pot with a spoon. As fucked up as that sounds, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. If we’re going to allow that to get into a song then we’re pretty much allowing anything we can pull off.
LG: Alright, and will any of the new stuff be making an appearance on the Sick Summer Tour?
WM: Yes.
LG: Fantastic.
WM: We were actually going to play a new one at Big Day Out but we left it out. We’re going to save it for Sick Summer because we thought it’d be something special for the actual people coming just for the gig. We will bring out some older stuff for Big Day Out and then Sick Summer gets at least something small. I think they’re going to get the tip of the iceberg – but at the same time, it’s a pretty heavy tip.
LG: With new stuff coming on and people hitting pots with spoons and the like, are you guys having to make many changes to the live set-up to accommodate the fresh material?
WM: Well, so far we haven’t even worked that one out. Hopefully not, I’m definitely a fan of writing music you can play live. I don’t want to rely on massive backing tracks and having click-tracks and it just becoming a sterile experience. I really don’t like going and seeing a band that sounds so clinically proficient that it just sounds like a record. We’re not quite sure on that one yet – it definitely comes into the actual recording process though.
If we think of an idea we also think of how we’re going to pull it off live. So far, the song or songs that we’re going to play on Sick Summer are the most stripped back and raw songs that we’ve got so far. They’re probably not going to have too much on them when we go to the studio, but we’re definitely happy with them.
LG: On that, you guys hit something like 40 different countries last year…
WM: How many did you say?
LG: 40 is the figure I read.
WM: Yeah, I tried to figure it out the other day, it’d have to be something like that..
LG: How do you maintain any kind of home life or a relationship when you spend that much time on the road?
WM: With a lot of effort. It’s definitely an effort. Yeah. It takes a really trusting person at home to maintain a relationship, a really amazing person. Maintaining a home life is something we’ve adapted to; it’s really awesome to be able to do this stuff – it’s absolutely amazing – but at the same time, it’s unlike anything I’ve ever done before. It’s like being a nomad with no home and then you come back to this place that’s so familiar and just as it’s regaining that familiarity that you remember, you get torn away and you go on these adventures to these places that just blow your mind.
LG: You guys have been making music together for about nine years now, in that time have you ever got sick of it, or it reached the point where you seriously considered doing something else?
WM: No. Not quite. There are times when you chuck a little sook and go “Fuck, this sucks. I wish I was at home.” But it is to the point where you slap yourself and say “What the fuck are you talking about?”
I have friends that have worked the shittiest jobs in the world for several years to pay off one of the trips that we do, that we get to do as a job – as something we love doing. You’ve just got to give yourself the reality check and tell yourself to harden the fuck up basically, as simple as it is. It doesn’t happen that often.
LG: Ten year anniversary coming up, a new album to launch late this year, are you guys planning anything big for it?
WM: Not at the moment, but it would be an idea to do something, wouldn’t it? We’ve thought about it occasionally but there’s been so much stuff going on that we’ve never sat down and though “Will we get to ten years?” There’s actually footage of us from about a year into the band saying “What will you be doing in five years?” and we all assumed the band was going to be broken up. So, it’s definitely one of those things where we’re just surprised we’re still going.
LG: OK, let’s reframe that question then. What do you think you’ll be doing in five years?
WM: Now that the band’s been going so long, it wouldn’t surprise me if I was 34 and still yelling at kids. It also wouldn’t surprise if the band had stopped. If that was the case though, I really have no idea.
I had no idea what I was going to do before this band started; I was failing at university and I was working in a coffee shop and everyone else was working dead-end jobs in Byron and somehow this turned into a job. If it ended now, I don’t know if we’d go back to doing that. Fuck, I don’t even know.
Parkway Drive are currently touring as part of the Big Day Out ahead of their national regional Sick Summer II tour. For details, check out the gig listings.