Ten thousand feet in the air, hanging off the side of a plane over Lake Elsinore, California, it hit Parkway Drive vocalist Winston McCall that he’d probably made a terrible mistake. When the Australian metalcore band had pitched the idea of skydiving for the music video for Vice Grip, the first single from their fifth record, Ire, they hadn’t actually expected director Frankie Nasso to take it seriously. None of them had ever done a skydive in their lives, they only had a week and a half before they were due to be in Canada to record the rest of the album and, to top it off, Winston was deathly terrified of heights. Why hadn’t they just gone to a deserted warehouse like every other metalcore band on the planet?
Thank God they didn’t. Winston might have spent the entire shoot paralysed by fear, but he acknowledges it was worth the pain. Vice Grip is easily Parkway’s most memorable, badass video. Featuring the band freefalling through the air before coming together in a sunset-lit formation, it’s a bat-shit crazy, hair-raising visual statement. At one point, Winston screams the song’s rallying cry: “One life, one shot… GIVE IT ALL YOU’VE GOT!” before he and his bandmates throw themselves out of the plane into thin air.
