Parkway Drive Interview Part 1

Ok, here goes. This is part 1 of what will be a 3 part interview with my good mate and Parkway Drive singer, Winston McCall. For future reference during this interview here are some abbreviations and alias's to help you understand what the hell we are talking about.
Pig= Luke
Gaz= Ben
Pie= Jia
Chode= Jed
Jbocc= an abbreviation for Jeff and Berwin's Original Call Crew ( a tough crew of ugly heads)
Youthy= The Byron Bay Youth Centre
Enjoy



Lets start right back at the beginning, who's idea was it to start the band?, i know that you were all in other bands at the time also, so how did the first line up come about? Who were your influences at this point? and what, if any goals did you set for yourselves?

I think it was a combination of myself and Gaz at the start. we'd both done hardcore bands before and just wanted to try something a little different. The idea at the time was just to try and be as heavy as we possibly could. We knew it would sound more metal but all we had as a reference for sound was the hardcore bands we knew. Neither of us listened to metal, (and we pretty much still don't), and the whole "metalcore" thing hadn't blown up yet so we just tried, and wanted it to be heavy, but still come from as much of a hardcore background as we could. The next step was finding a guitarist that could actually play the kind of shit we wanted to do, and coming from Byron our options we're very very slim, and by slim i mean there was only one.

Some kid called Jeff who Gaz kind of knew that could apparently play heavy shit, knew a bit about hardcore and wore tracksuit pants a lot. We jammed with him a couple of times. He was metal, real shit metal. Everything was drenched in reverb and was pretty tripped out. We thought it might not work out, but after we told him reverb on everything sound like an echoing shit, he played some mental riff and we freaked out. We jammed with him a bit and another guy who was even more tripped out than Jeff, until we decided to ask our old mate pig if he wanted to play guitar with us too, which worked out well because pig wrote some great hardcore riffs and Jeff wrote some great metal stuff so the both taught each other i guess. We had no real goals, its was just for fun, its always just been for fun. I mean what the hell does a band from Byron Bay have to aim for anyway. For us, hardcore meant playing at the local youth centre and hanging with our few friends who liked doing the same.



Do you remember much from the first few practices? They would of been at Parkway (the house) right? and what do you remember about the first show? Did you have enough songs for a setlist and who was it with? Iam presuming it was at the Youthy?

Yeah kinda. it was pretty weird and rough. i can just remember thinking how strange it all sounded. we just started playing shit. Jeff was playing actual riffs which freaked us out because basically all we ever heard was power chords, so this was something strange for us. Plus the fact we chose to tune the guitars lower than anything we'd heard before, meant we were all in over our heads when it came to any kind of experience producing the sounds we wanted. I think shit actually came together pretty quickly because we ended up playing a show after only a few weeks but i may be wrong, i cant remember that well.

Our first show was at the youth centre with charred remains, shoot to kill and from these wounds. At the time Gaz was still drumming in STK (Shoot To Kill) so he played two sets, which was a charge. I can't remember much other than crafter being present, jeff wearing a huge Nike shirt and filthy tennis shoes, and me moshing out to my own band on stage. We played about 6 songs. It was pretty mental. Our mates moshed, chode ran through the pit and fly kicked the roller door. Meatdog was going crazy. All in all it was great. I can remember finishing and thinking how fucking fun it was playing a type of music that kids can just lose there shit to for an entire set, and not just certain parts. From these wounds headlined and showed everyone how to play real metal. Fuck they used to be good.


When was your first out of town show? Iam guessing it would of been in Brisbane during the peak of the infamous "NCHC", haha. I can imagine you all jumping into the piece of shit JBOCC van (like we did last week) and making the drive up to Brisbane. Did it feel like you had made it, or did you just take it as another show?


Not sure on the date but it was the famous Mary Street venue in Brissy. To be honest i Can't remember much about the entire show other than I was wearing a shitty Your Night Sky T-shirt (pigs old pop punk band). I don't think Jeff even owned his shit house van yet it was that long ago. I have no idea how we got up there. I think a whole crew of Byron kids scammed rides with everyone and we just did a big convoy of cars. It didn't really feel like we'd "made it". To be honest there has never been a time when it's felt like that. Show's are just shows. I don't think the idea of hardcore and "making it" really. We never had a goal to get anywhere, but i guess we were stoked to play a show out of our home town. I think it was only our third show at that point so it was pretty cool.


At this point did you guys make a point to play as often as you possibly could wherever you could? Was there any sort of plan at all? Or were you just happy to play any show you could get on? Do you remember any shockers or good shows from this early stage?


We definitely made the point to play whenever we could we could but there was never any plan behind it all, we just like playing shows. It's all we had. When we started the band it was very very rare for Australian hardcore bands tour, let alone frequently, so the idea of doing the band as anything less than just something fun to do wasn't even bought into the equation. Every show back then was great (we still have only played a handful of shows the we actually didn't enjoy). The fact that we got to travel and go to shows was amazing. Every show our mates came to and destroyed everyone. I'm sure anyone that saw us in the first couple of years of our existence would have been smashed by at least one of them. It was great.

The first tour we ever did was with IKTPQ and we took a convoy of 2 vans, one being the newly purchased shitbox, the JBOCC mobile, and Paul Birds equally shit van. It was great. It took us three days to drive to Melbourne thanks to some shocking navigation. We played at the arthouse and in Melbourne and freaked out because mindsnare had played there. Strange fact about our show other Melbourne show, Kiss Chasey played between us and Prom Queen. The only kind of shocking show we played was in some dodgey club in brisbane to a handful of people. Kids sitting down and drunks trying to start fights. It was pretty shit other than our then 13 yeah old mate Haz( who now does our merch) cart wheeling into some dude holding a beer and almost cutting the dudes finger off. I think that was the first ever ambulance at a parkway show.


You touched on that your first tour was with IKTPQ, was this before or after the split with them was released? Did Parkway Drive ever record a demo? or were the songs on the IKTPQ split or the "What We've Built" Comp your first recorded songs? and which came first? What do you remember about entering a recording studio for the first time?

Yeah the tour with IKTPQ was just after the split cd came out, but we had a demo before that. It was a tape with a hand written lyric sheet jammed in the case and no cover. classy. This was before the days of mass cd burning and myspace. I think we only made about 20 copies. Some went to mates in Adelaide and Melbourne, the rest just circulated Byron. I think I still have one.

It had six songs on it I think. We recorded it on Jeff's shitty 4 track in the Parkway House. One take, everything all played at once. I think it sounded ok, but i can't remember that well. The songs later went on to be on both the Split and the "what we've built" comp, re recorded of course. The first time we ever went into the studio was for the split, but we recorded 7 songs and used them on both the Split and the Byron Comp. It was mental. We recorded in a town called Austonville (i think thats how you spell it), about half an hour west of Byron. The first day we drove there in Jeff's new van he freaked out and thought we we're lost and we're all going to die. Being in the studio was crazy. We had no idea what we we're doing and the guy recording had no idea what we wanted sound wise. He had only done some shitty new metal and Hippy stuff before so it was hard to explain that the vocals we're supposed to sound heavy and the guitars needed to just chug in certain bits. All in all it came out pretty well. It was a defining learning experience. The funniest thing i can still remember to this day is Jeff handing the engineer Hatebreed's "Perseverance", and saying i want it to sound like that hahaha.