FROM THE SAND TO THE STRATOSPHERE
OVER A WICKED 15 YEARS, PARKWAY DRIVE HAVE GONE FROM BEACH BUMS SHREDDING UP THEIR LOCAL PUB TO A GENERATION-DEFINING METAL MONOLITH. NOW, THEY’RE TAKING THEIR STORY TO THE CINEMA. WORDS BY MATT DORIA.
Hell hath no fury like the bloodthirsty fortitude and undying passion of Byron Bay metallers Parkway Drive. Since making their mark on the scene with2005’ s Killing With AS mile, the band have consistently pushed further, fought harder, and cranked up the volume louder with every new effort.
2020 looks to be another wild year for the quintet, as they wrap up a titanic two years of international anarchy on the back of album no. six: the critically adored Reverence. A follow-up is in the pipeline, lead shredder Jeff Ling assures us, but in the meantime, fans will have a new chunk of longform content to sate their Parkway-starved palates with: a full-length theatrical film.
Following lowkey home projects ParkwayDrive:
The DVD and Home Is For The Heart less, the new big-budget documentary – dubbed VivaThe
Underdogs, its title pulled from the lyrics of setlist staple “Wild Eyes” – aims to take a deeper, dirtier, ultimately more daring look at Australia’s biggest metalcore band. As Ling fills us in, such a project has been a long time coming for Parkway Drive.
Do you consider Viva The Underdogs a sequel to the first two Parkway docos, or is it more like a reboot, telling the story from the ground up?
You can definitely relate them to the other two – it has that kind of similar flavour. It basically just goes into a lot more depth – we get a little bit deeper on things like what it’s like on the road and being away from family, and also shedding a bit of light on how much work we actually do behind the scenes.
What was that process like, going back through the last 15 years of your lives and condensing it into this epic two-hour story?
It’s pretty humbling. You really do take for granted all the thrills and spills along the way. You kind of forget them, or you’re just always focused on the next big thing. So yeah, looking back on it all and seeing some of the old footage was wild. There’s a lot of unseen footage as well – the guys did some major digging into our archives of footage, and they found some pretty weird stuff. There’s plenty of interesting material to be seen, that’s for sure.
The story of Parkway Drive is so crazy and monumental. Would you ever go the route of doing a Bohemian Rhapsody- esque drama?
I mean, in a way, this is kind of like that – we show more of the real drama that happens. It’s always been there, but with a lot of DVDs and movies, you sort of glorify the good things and don’t sh ow as much of the negative aspects. So yeah, that’s probably one of the bigger parts of the movie – it’s definitely not all fun and games, and there’s a lot of sacrifice that comes with [being in a band like Parkway Drive] as well.
It’s kind of an anomaly, the way Parkway has captured the attention and spirit of this generation – especially in an era of pop music that was, and is, fairly adverse to heavy acts. What do you think it is about Parkway Drive that allowed you to burst through the industry’s barriers and take the world by storm in the way that you have?
Well, we’ve always had a unique way of running things. In the very early stages of dealing with management and labels and all that kind of stuff, we realised really quickly that our vision was our vision, and we didn’t want anyone else messing with it. We had directions that we wanted to go in. Management agencies and labels would have these templates for what they’d see as a success story, but those just didn’t match what we wanted to do.
We’ve always been passionate about the direction of the band, the sounds that we have, taking control of our recordings and all of that. Everything we do is basically 100 percent us. Our guitarist [Luke “Pig” Kilpatrick] is our manager, and all of our live shows are designed by ourselves; Winston and Luke get really hands on with all the theatrics and production. We don’t have any foreign influence, really. And I would definitely say that’s our greatest achievement.
How have you managed to retain that independence, even as Parkway has grown into the monolithic brand it is now?
To be totally honest with you, at this point, it is pretty overwhelming. It’s a lot of work, and you can see why most bands just get a team to run the whole thing. It is starting to get to that stage where it’s actually really difficult to manage everything and still have your family life, your tour life and your work life, and have it all be organised. We’re still holding it together at the moment, but we’ll have to see how we go in the future.
Another thing too is that, bar one member, you’ve kept the same lineup since ’03. I can’t think of another band in your class that could say the same. How do you stop yourselves from wanting to rip each other’s throats out?
At this stage in the band’s career, the absolute most important thing is transparency. Communication is everything, and you have to be extremely honest with each other. You have to be on the same page, and because everything is going a lot further than we ever could’ve imagined, we’re constantly talking about what our next move.
That’s where a lot of bands fall apart. They get to a point where they go, “Oh, I’m over it,” and they just sort of turn their back on it all. And if you’re not talking, things start going wrong – you’ll start arguing, and it’s just all pear shaped from there. So I would just say it all comes down to communication. We’re always communicating our ideas, and we’re just so lucky that we all have similar visions and ideas about where we should be going as a band.
Coming into a new decade of Parkway Drive, how are you excited to progress your skills as a guitarist?
I mean, anyone that’s into the guitar and knows our music will be able to tell, but I sort of gave up taking on the tech world with super fast riffs or speedy solo stuff. I just realised that I didn’t have the time to spend ten hours a day practising scales or messing around with time signatures. That just wasn’t my thing anymore, so I focused on writing cool licks that hopefully get stuck in people’s heads. I want to come up with really different, strange sounds that you don’t hear in other metal bands.