Alexandra Palace, London, October 3: Hooded figures carrying flaming torches emerge from pillars of smoke. An organ echoes through the night. The smoke clears and suddenly there is a primal explosion of energy. It is visceral, ferocious, intense; an aggressive wall of sound.
It is the heavy metal behemoth Parkway Drive's triumphant return to touring after a three-year absence. There will be pyrotechnics, flames shooting up to the rafters, strobing lights, an ecstatic arm-pumping audience worshipping the music with the reverence of a religious revival.
Parkway Drive is one of the biggest heavy metal bands in the world, headlining European festivals in front of tens of thousands of fans. All seven of their albums have gone gold. "We're up there with the top musical exports of this country, full stop," says lead singer Winston McCall.
On the stage, Winston is pure power, commanding, a master of the animalistic shriek, the guttural "death growl." But this is an alter ego. In person he is by his own admission "a big fluffy teddy bear."
Parkway Drive are not from the cold hard northern hemisphere streets where their fans live. They are, Winston says, "five surfer bums" from the hippie town of Byron Bay.
"I mean there's cows outside," says drummer Ben Gordon of the house on the family farm where he still lives. "If I was to describe myself it would be the opposite of what you'd expect a drummer in a heavy metal band to be like. I'm into surfing, nature, meditation, spirituality, vegan, healthy food. I've never drunk alcohol."
Backstage when other bands are in masks, makeup or costumes, they are in board shorts and thongs. "In Europe we are perceived as some big untouchable rock god metal band," says rhythm guitarist and band manager Luke Kilpatrick. "It definitely doesn't feel like that in our little space."
But last April, Parkway Drive pressed pause on their seemingly unstoppable rise, abruptly cancelling a US tour to go into group therapy. "We feel a limit has been reached and we don't want to f**k this up," they wrote on their Facebook page.
"It doesn't seem to go hand in hand, counselling and an aggressive metal show," Luke admits, "but why can't you be a sensitive, aware human that likes letting their energy out as well?"
There is a famous precedent for a high-profile heavy metal band going into therapy – Metallica, whose legendary documentary Some Kind of Monster made many fans cringe. Lead guitarist Jeff Ling describes it as "a really significant moment in metal history." It was released just a year after Parkway Drive formed and drummer Ben Gordon remembers thinking, "'Oh my God, imagine getting to the point where you need a therapist. Like, we'll never get to that point.' And here we are."
Built-up tensions
In truth, going on tour without resolving their longstanding issues would have been the end of the band, not to mention the friendships at its foundation. After recording their latest album Darker Still during lockdown, Parkway Drive was broken, riven with built-up anger.
Twenty years of relentless touring, creative differences, money squabbles and shifting alliances had taken their toll. "It's a tired old story, how money breaks up friendships and bands and stuff," says bass player, Jia O'Connor.
Walking into that room for the first counselling session was "literally survival," says lead singer Winston. "Like, this is our job. If it stops, we are screwed. We've got nothing to back us up, we are high school dropouts from the '90s."
Rhythm guitarist Luke was so unsure of the outcome that he was going through his finances, figuring out if he would be able to keep his house. "It was a really anxious time for me. All your eggs have been in one basket for your entire adult life. I'd pretty much prepared myself not to be in the band anymore."
There was tension as they took their seats in the Mullumbimby clinic. "Very quickly it started to implode," drummer Ben says. "The first few sessions were very emotional. There were tears." They began to understand that the way they had been operating was "classic toxic masculinity," says the band's lead guitarist, Jeff Ling.
A carefree beginning
In the Byron Bay they grew up in, there had been no expectations other than to go surfing and live in a caravan, says Winston. "You surf, you go to the top park and get hammered. That was it."
The band started out in Ben's parents' basement in Parkway Drive, a loop of a street on the edge of farmland where the houses are hidden by lush tropical foliage. Ben's mum recalls how friends stopped coming to visit them because of the "ungodly noise." Today, they are used to strange black clad figures lurking outside the house on pilgrimage.
Their first gig was on March 21st, 2003, at the Byron Youth Centre. It was chaos, fists flying and kids jumping off the speakers. "All of a sudden music is a possibility," Winston says. "You don't even need to be that great at it. You can pick up some power chords and you can yell and jump and this can provide something in terms of entertainment."
They set off on road trips in a van, touring with no pressure to succeed. "It was just, wow this is happening," says Ben. "We would jump off bridges, surf, see new places and meet people."
Winston's parents loaned them the money for their first trip to Europe. There was no social media, they didn't have a record, or even a record deal.
It was a grand adventure that was often, Ben says, "really hard. We were sleeping on floors, sleeping outside, sleeping in abandoned buildings, eating terrible food, arguing."
They would drive for 12 hours to play a gig for 80 people. "We even slept in an abandoned ship in Spain," Ben says. And for all the gritty hardship, "it was so much fun."
Soon after they arrived in Europe, their bass player left. "We thought," Winston says, "do we get another bass player that knows his instrument and is really good? And we just thought nah, f**k it, let's get a mate that we love hanging out with."
Jia "Pie" O'Connor had never even played bass. He was a fan who sold merchandise for the band on tours. "We called him up. He thought it was a joke obviously," says Ben. "And then he came over and he was terrible at the start."
He would be Parkway Drive's "fill-in" bass player for 17 years. He would always feel "at the bottom of the pecking order, the shit kicker," Jia says. "If we got to a place where there was one shit seat, I would just go straight for the shit seat. That was my role. It's a terrible way to view yourself."
On contract and paid far less than the others, he would watch them flourish. "It starts playing on your mind and you start having resentments," he says.
Cracks start appearing
As Parkway Drive grew more and more successful, they decided they wouldn't delegate to anyone outside the band for fear they wouldn't do the job properly. If there was a job to be done, someone in the band would learn how to do it, says Winston.
"Like, you need a manager, Luke learns how to manage, you want to make a movie, Ben learns how to edit movies. You need a producer, Jeff learns how to do production. You need someone to do interviews and stagecraft, I learned how to do that one."
But that was the beginning of the fracturing. "We started drifting further into our own little worlds," says Winston. "We all just lived in our own little rolling silos."
Winston would be flying around the world doing interviews to promote the band while the others got to stay home and go surfing. "There's no lull for certain members of the band," he says.
Parkway Drive had started on a handshake agreement to share everything between the core members, back when there wasn't much to share. But 15 years later, when the Reverence album was released, there was serious money coming in. The band reviewed their finances. "It was gnarly, it wasn't nice," says Luke. "I'm worth this percentage, you're worth that percentage. It was a shitty time."
Some felt they deserved to be paid more than others. "I wrote this riff, but you wrote those lyrics," says Ben. "But you were there supporting. You recorded, but Luke's managing. I'm making the music videos but Jeff's writing most of these riffs. It's so hard to actually come to terms with who's worth what, and that was a big part of why it fell apart." By the end of the negotiations, a peace had been reached, but tensions were still brewing under the surface.
When COVID hit and Parkway Drive couldn't tour, the band decided to write a new record, Darker Still. "It put a shiver down my spine because I'm the one producing and engineering it," says lead guitarist Jeff, who knew he'd be doing most of the work from his home studio. "Every single time I do [an album], a portion of my soul goes with me. It just takes a massive mental toll on me."
Things soon came to an ugly head. "Jeff became very consumed with the idea of perfection," Winston says. He would cut Winston's vocals and rearrange them, which infuriated Winston. By the time they finished recording, they couldn't even look at each other.
"Things started coming out and they're expressed in ways that are just past a point of controlled dialogue," says Winston. "Just lashing out, which has never happened in the band before."
Getting it all out in the open
Two weeks before they were due to leave for the US, the band met (without Jia) to discuss their future. They knew the tour was doomed. It was Luke who suggested counselling. "We need to be able to talk to each other before we can even think about negotiating," he says.
When the four core band members walked into the clinic for counselling, Ben didn't even care if the band continued. "I didn't really want to be around those people," he says.
They arrived at the meeting "not as loaded guns, but as nuclear warheads," says Jeff. "Everyone's intention was to hold everyone else responsible for how they felt at that point."
As the band's manager, Luke often worked 14-hour days and had control of the finances. But some of his band mates didn't trust him anymore. The way he acted on tour was making them question their self-worth. Luke was "kind of a nasty guy," says Jeff, "and he's kind of in charge of my life."
Luke knew there were whisperings behind his back. Looking back now, he's disappointed in how he behaved. "I was a shithead in school and probably through most of the band life too," says Luke. "I just wasn't very tolerant of people."
This startling admission would be the turning point for Parkway Drive. "He was one of the most boarded-up, highest walls of anyone in the group," says Jeff. "And he just brought it all down. The biggest bully in the room was being vulnerable. This is a really important moment in Parkway Drive's future."
Through the counselling sessions, Winston found out he is unapproachable, that he doesn't acknowledge people. That, he says, "was a complete revelation. What they've described to me goes to the heart of my existence and to the core of my being."
Jeff came to realise his tinkering with Winston's lyrics was a form of "creative bullying".
Parkway Drive now believes that a lot of the damage came from the culture they grew up in, where mates put each other down. "That's all we knew," says Ben. "And looking back it was quite toxic. It was collective bullying."
But "when it came to telling each other, 'You're worth something to me'," says Winston, "we were always too scared to do that because we saw it as a weakness."
Their counsellor Sean showed them how to take down their armour. "He basically gave us tools to speak from our true feelings, as opposed to speaking in a defensive way," Jeff says. Soon, they realised that they wanted to feel like they were in a band again – and that meant reaching out to their overlooked bass player
'Stronger together'
Jia was "completely blindsided" when, after a few counselling sessions, he was invited to join in. He was even more shocked when they started saying nice things to him.
Jia then revealed how he was living with guilt from a decision he had made for Parkway Drive before the 2016 tour. He'd become the carer for his partner, Tegan, after she was diagnosed with terminal cancer. As he was leaving for the airport to go on an important tour, with Tegan's blessing, she suddenly changed her mind and asked him to stay. "And I said, 'I can't cancel on the boys this last minute.' And that was the last time I ever saw her."
Until that counselling session, he'd never told his band mates that he'd put them before his partner. Seeing them crying with him, he realised, "these guys do care."
In the car park on the way out, they stopped Jia and said there was something else they needed to talk about. They wanted him to be a full member of the band. "And we all shook hands," says Jia, "and they said, 'Welcome to the band. Seventeen years later, you're finally in the band'."
Jia is now a partner and a director of the company. It is a feeling, he says, "of sudden belonging." It means the others will take less money, but "we think it is the right thing to do," says Luke. "And it should have been done sooner."
Jia is not entirely sure about this new-sensitive-men thing, though. "Ribbing each other and having a joke and all that, for me that's the best part of it," he says. "Part of me loves the affection in the tease."
Getting ready for their first overseas tour since COVID, Ben says Parkway Drive is being fixed. "I don't think it's been fixed, but we are in a much better place than we were a few years ago or even a few months ago. Time will tell. Could be our last tour ever. But I don't think so. We're calling it Parkway 2.0, as the beginning of a new chapter."
Everyone agrees that the recently completed European tour has been a "monster tour". The reviews have been ecstatic.
"We've done all this personal work together and felt the connection grow stronger," says Winston. "For all the crazy stuff that's going on, we've always loved what we do. We love that time on stage together. We are stronger together and we will get through this shit – together."
Watch Australian Story's 'Getting Heavy – Parkway Drive' on ABC iview and Youtube.
