From the Archive: Parkway Drive - Winston McCall Interview

Originally appeared in Buzz Magazine, December 2008.

Kicking back in his native Byron Bay on the tail end of a massive international tour, Winston McCall, lead vocalist of the immensely popular Parkway Drive pauses for reflection. How does a hardcore/metalcore band such as theirs react to writing and record a chart-topping album? (Horizons managed to debut at #6 on the ARIA Album charts.)

“It’s been pretty good. It’s been better than we ever could have hoped.” Having that said, it wasn’t completely out of left field.

“When Killing the Smile came out it got such a good reception it was better than anything we could have hoped to have achieved with that. We were put in the position where we thought nothing could ever do better than it.”

Horizons wasn’t destined for any sort of greatness – Winston describes it as the “backup” album to merely ride on the coattails of Killing.

“Funnily enough, Horizons seems to have gone really well; the songs we play live seem to go down just as well if not better than the old songs, I like the songs more and kids seem to be stoked on it.”

Being as popular as a metalcore album could ever have dreamed to have been, was this the signal for a headlong drive into the mainstream, albeit the fringes thereof? According to Winston, underground core lovers need not be frightened by the neon lights and MTV cameras just yet.

“I don’t think so. Simply because you still don’t hear any of it played on the radio and [metalcore isn’t] definitely breaking any kind of mainstream barrier in terms of acceptance, you never see film clips or anything like that, it never has any support like that…you could hear it on Triple J or on independent radio stations. The volume of kids listening to it is testament to how big the actual following is. Other than that, it’s still definitely under the radar from the mainstream.”

Parkway Drive have built themselves from the ground up, playing in Europe to mere handfuls of people all the way up to headlining shows.

“When we went to Europe, it was like starting up again, as if you were a brand new band,” he recalls. “We’d be playing in the smallest venues you’ve ever seen without stages and holes in the roof, but now we’ve got thousands of kids rocking up and it’s just ridiculous.”

Has Winston ever considered playing something else for the band?

“No,” he insists, “I’m so, so bad. I cannot play an instrument.”

Even despite being revered for his vocals, Winston doesn’t think they’re anything praiseworthy.

“I can’t sing either. I found that I could scream at kids and I lost my voice like hell when I first started out but it was the first thing I could actually do that gave me an outlet for the passion that I had. I wanted to start a band but I had no ability to do it because I couldn’t play anything, I guess that was the only thing left for me to do. (laughs) I still can’t play anything for shit.”

He did, however, try to learn the harmonica, but to no avail. How would it fit into the Parkway Drive sound?

“Well, I don’t think it would. But it seems pretty simple. I’m finding that it’s more complicated than it looks. I find myself going ‘hee’, ‘haww’ over and over again and I’m like,‘shit, how do you actually play this thing?’”

Metalcore has long been considered the orphaned lovechild of heavy metal and hardcore music, which many fans on either side relish in deriding instead of accepting.

“Europe has the most unified scene when it comes to that. But when you go to the States, it’s broken down even beyond that. You’ll go to a show and kids won’t come out unless it’s a specific genre of music,” he reveals.

“There’ll only be a handful of bands that fit their criteria and will actually go out of their way to support. To me, I don’t really care what the label is. If it’s heavy and there’s a punk ethic, I’ll call it punk. If hardcore kids like I’ll call it hardcore and if metal kids like something I’ll call it metal. To me, the music being played is a lot more important than the label being placed on it. I don’t think pigeonholing a band will make it sound any different or any better. I don’t think that’s going to change, though.”

Parkway Drive recently re-mixed and re-mastered their first album, Killing with a Smile after only two years of recording it. Why would a band resort to re-mastering after only two years? Winston explains that it wasn’t a business decision, but as a thank you to their new fans that couldn’t find their earlier work.

“Well, our first album went out of print, so kids couldn’t find it. So we got our first album and all of our other out of print stuff before Killing and whacked it all together and put it on one release. We tried to make it available to kids if they wanted it. It wasn’t so much of a marketing ploy, it was doing something that kids asked of us, I guess.”

And Parkway Drive are always accommodating to their fans.

“We try to hang out with as many kids as we can after shows and stuff and we try to make kids as happy as they can. For example, I signed some guy’s nuts in New Mexico.”

You read right. He signed a fan’s nutsack.

“He got them out and they were swollen, and I signed them. I even took a photo with him afterwards. It was crazy.” All part of the Parkway Drive service.

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© Tom Valcanis / Crushtor Media Services, All Rights Reserved. Posted with permission.