THE UNDERDOGS BITE BACK
Sonisphere Festival, July 10, 2011. Parkway Drive’s first UK festival appearance of the decade, and notable for three reasons. One, it was the best show the band had played on these shores to date, with tracks such as Samsara, Deliver Me and Sleepwalker, from 2010’s Deep Blue, greeted like old classics by a packed Knebworth field. Two, guitarist Luke ‘Pig’ Kilpatrick was rolling about in a wheelchair, having broken his leg in a surfing accident a few weeks before. And finally, midway through the third song of the set, Boneyards, one of the band’s stage props, a huge inflatable wave, suffered a fatal puncture and started deflating towards sorry, inevitable flaccidity. By the end of the set, much to the band’s amusement, it had collapsed completely, flopping over the top of Your Demise guitarist Stu Paice, who was trying in vain to prop it up from underneath.
“Our idea of production then was to buy some funny costumes for our friends,” drummer Ben Gordon fondly recalls. “We hadn’t even considered the seriousness of it all yet. We were just having fun.”
Vocalist Winston McCall interjects, laughing: “We stopped doing the waves after Sonisphere, when we realised inflatables don’t work unless they’re decent quality.”
The last decade has seen many bands step it up, but few have bulldozed through the ranks cheerily down the phone from Winston’s home in Byron Bay, are in a band that’s very different to the one that was flanked by cheap, plastic props back in 2011. These days, the Aussies are known for their stadium-sized sound and huge shows – pyrotechnical extravaganzas that are packed with enough fire to scare the pants off Till Lindemann.
