Parkway Drive bringing it home for Bluesfest

Formed in Byron Bay in 2003, Parkway Drive have risen from teenage metal underdogs to global heavy music icons. In 2026, they return home for a defining moment, delivering their first ever hometown performance since their Byron Bay High School shows in 2014 – and their first ever Byron Bay festival performance.

Fronted by Winston McCall alongside guitarists Jeff Ling and Luke Kilpatrick, bassist Jia O’Connor, and drummer Ben Gordon, Parkway Drive have spent more than two decades redefining the sound, scale and spectacle of modern heavy music.

Seven caught up with McCall all the way from his home in Byron Bay.

How do you feel playing Bluesfest – you’ve gone from Byron High to becoming incredibly famous, and then playing at home?

It’s really, really nice. It’s been a long time since we’ve been able to play Byron full stop, and basically, the last time we played Byron, we were playing the high school because we were putting on the shows there. We did two shows there, both sold out, and then the band basically grew to a size where we couldn’t figure out how to put on a local show anymore. So to be able to play Bluesfest and for them to give us a shot to play a local show on a festival stage is so rad. It’s so nice for us to be able to to do this, and to be able to give everyone a chance to see this local band do what we do after all of this time as well, because we’ve obviously grown as a band in that period.

You started off at the YAC and places like that in Byron?

Yeah – like, I mean, originally, before the youth centre even came along, we’d play the Ewingsdale Hall, Broken Head Hall, the scout hall in town – basically, we put shows on, and we’d get one to two shows out of the venue before they were like, ‘nah, we’re not doing this anymore’. Noise complaints!

And then in the early, very early, 2000s around 2001 the YAC started letting us put shows on there. So we started running that. And, yeah, we’d bring touring bands through Byron and put on all ages shows. This whole music scene, this style of music, started in Byron, because at that time, there was no youth-orientated entertainment.
So the YAC were being able to put on bands for all ages shows. So it was a place for people to actually go and engage with music when you weren’t able to get into a pub. So it started from there.

So back in 2003 when the band was getting together, did you ever imagine that you would do a slot at Bluesfest?

To be honest, we didn’t anticipate doing anything that we are doing now – we started the band to play shows at the YAC for friends. That’s it. Everything else fell into place by chance, and chances that we took that someone would see us and say ‘Hey, you want to do a record with us?’ And everything started rolling after that. The fact that it’s all come back around to the Bluesy and the fact that the Bluesfest is still going, and is also expanding – the trajectories for both the festival and the band is one that none of us could ever have anticipated.

It’s really, really nice. I’ve been watching the festival over the last few years, even when it was like heading in a direction that they were worried about shutting down – [and now] I’m seeing the lineups becoming more eclectic and taking chances on different things – obviously it does run like counter to the name ‘blues’, but at the same point in time, it’s really rad to be able to see them open their doors to just musical experiences for Byron’s population. It’s really, really cool being able to be at a point where – the band’s almost 23-years-old now – that we do represent the roots of a large generation of Byron in that degree. It’s a really cool thing to be able to have us on that stage and be given the opportunity to do that.

We’re really, really stoked because [Bluesfest] is a staple of this town’s history.

Byron was like the ‘alternative’ community – rebelling against their parents, and their parents thought their music was shit. Every generation does the same thing?

We’re in strange position now as well – a bunch of the guys in the band are parents, and I’m 43 years old. We started this when we were in our 20s, and it was rebellious, that’s the thing it was. ‘We’re doing this because the adults won’t give us a place to put on all-ages gigs. So we’ll do it ourselves.’ And now we’re at a position where we have friends, like so many friends with families who want to come because their five-year-old kids like the band, which is really, really, really crazy.

I think it’s very hard to explain to people who would possibly just put on a track and say, ‘Ah, it’s for me’, that it translates far further than you actually think. There’s something with it translating to kids who don’t have a concept of what a musical genre is, who just enjoy the music in the first place and the energy of it. I think there’s something about this band, which is, we’ve always been a live band first, and a recorded band second, if that makes sense? It was always about trying to catch the live energy on a record, but experiencing what we have energetically. When it comes to the live show, it is a completely different ballgame in terms of people understanding what this band is, and the doors to this sound kind of breaking open in people’s mind.

That’s what it’s going to be all about it at Bluesfest – breaking down doors?

100% – that’s the thing. I mean, it’s one thing to talk yourself up in terms of, ‘I know what we can do’, but at the same time it’s something that we’ve just seen happen over the years.

Anytime we get to play to someone for the first time, and watch it connect in someone’s mind, and watch them enjoy themselves, is a really great thing. And to be able to be doing that again in this town, it means a lot. Because when we used to play the town, it was people who just knew what it was, and they were in. That’s the thing. It was like a private kind of club. And now this is the first chance for us to be on a mainstream stage in this in this town. So it’s really cool, yeah.

Can the fans look forward to new music for the Byron show, or are you going to be playing old stuff, or a bit of a mixture of both?

A bit of mixture of everything. Basically, we want to give people the best pathway experience you can get – our sound is quite expansive these days, and it will be weaving everywhere in terms of those live moments. Basically, we don’t have stuff written for a new album to be able to play ‘new stuff’. That’s what we’re working on. Literally. We’re not touring at the moment, so we can create the next album, but at this point in time, we don’t have anything brand new. But that being said, the latest single we put out last year, we still haven’t even played in Australia. So, yeah – Exciting!

And how do you how do you think the blues and and the heavy metal fans are going to go together?

I think absolutely fine. I think there’s probably a bit more of a misconception going for how people think the heavy fans will to interact with people who have an opinion about the metal fans. I think anyone who’s never been to a, let’s say, heavy music concert of any kind, I think it’s one of the most caricatured and possibly misunderstood group of live music audiences that you can find – you’ll find that they’re some of the kindest, most genuine, most warm people that you can get.

When you grow up listening to this kind of music, you’re very used to being an outsider, and you’ll find that outsiders tend to stick out, stick up for the other people around them, because they know the value of connection, and that’s what I’ve always found around the world – this music is about connection, and it’s strange because it’s connection to something which is quite spiky when it comes to the audio nature of it.

It’s very, very spiky, but underneath that, it is about the human connection, and it’s a very genuine connection for people because of that factor. So it’s like one of the most challenging musical forms to listen to. So when you have someone that takes the time to actually listen to that art, it’s genuinely shown respect by the other people inside that already, who understand what’s going on. So yeah, I think people are really going to enjoy it. It’s just a very good energy.

Do you find the physicality of the show, now that you’re in your 40s, takes more preparation and recovery time?

Here’s the thing – I am so fit and so in there, because I want to perform at my top level, but I also want to always do more. So every time I reach a level, there’s always something else. It opens another door of opportunity. So we’re not a band that’s kind of ever plateaued in terms of, ‘this is the potential that’s sweet – let’s just make sure we can maintain everything we do’, it has always been about an evolution, to take it somewhere else, which means, age is something that you have to overcome in terms of the physicality of it. You just work harder. I’m in the gym five days a week in the first place. It’s great. It’s what drew me to this music in the first place – the adrenaline and the drive – and there’s something about it which does bring out the physical nature of like, the connection with the music and the body, which is really, really great, and I want to keep that – otherwise I’d be playing something softer.

Are you getting enough time to do surfing in between the five days at the gym?

Sometimes I’m sore in the water from the gym, and sometimes I rock up at the gym completely sunburn. But it hasn’t really helped that we’ve had a bad summer of surf, but at least we got some sharks!

Are you still finding new audiences for your music?

Definitely. It keeps growing, it’s really, really crazy. The band is the biggest it’s ever been. The trajectory keeps going UP! It’s strange because it seems like exponential growth, which is a really incredible thing to be this far in. But I mean, all that takes is one person, either being a listener or going to a show, giving the music to a friend, and going, you got to listen to this, and them connecting to it, and all of a sudden the band’s twice as big. And when you get to this point, something becoming twice as big is just very, very large – exponential growth.

It’s always been like that for us, like it’s never been, we’ve never had that moment where it’s been a huge spike all of a sudden, we’ve smashed through this mega star kind of thing. It’s always been these steps. It’s just over the last few years those steps are just larger.

For a long time we were like, ‘It’s going to stop’, and then after 23 years of it not stopping, you kind of realise that there’s something here for which there’s no reason to stop. And you keep doing what you want to do, and you keep expanding the art that you’re creating, and keep on the same artistic trajectory, and there’s no reason why it should stop. So it’s really nice to be able to share this with more and more people.

The biggest joy we have is being able to give someone an experience which they will be able to remember and value at the end of the day. That’s that. That’s it. It’s a joy for us to be able to create a show, music, an experience, for someone, that they will go, ‘Whoa! Remember when I saw Parkway?’. It’s cool to be still being able to do that.

And what’s your current earworm?

Oh, that’s a very good question. I kind of don’t have one at the moment, because we’ve been working so much on our own material, it kind of takes up all my musical bandwidth. I’m just running those things back through my head constantly, until the next day, when I go back into the studio. So exterior music for me is not like massively coming into effect. It’s only been the last month, but I do find it just blots out kind of everything. That’s how my brain works. I was really loving a lot of pop music before we started writing, I went on a big K-Pop dive. I was really enjoying that, and then we just started writing. And I’m like, ‘all right, now I’m in this zone’.

Do you find musically you’re searching for inspiration, or does it generally come quite easily to you?

It comes quite easily to me. I’m one of those people. It definitely doesn’t go for everyone, because it doesn’t go for the rest of the guys in the band, but I struggle to NOT create and NOT be inspired by things.

I do more than what we have going on in the band, just because if I don’t it, my brain kind of short circuits. I need to do something, I need to put down something, and when I’m not creating with the other guys in the band, which is where that kind of feedback loop of our own stuff lives, I’ll be listening to other music, and that will send me on creative spirals this way and that way, and there’s definitely never time where I’m wanting for inspiration – the idea of, kind of, a dead stop writer’s block, for me, I’m kind of the other way around, where if I don’t have an outlet for what’s going on at this point in time, then it just becomes all jumbled and messy. I need to keep things moving, flying out of me.

I’m the one pestering the guys going, ‘I’ve got ideas. I got this thing, I got this thing, I got this and I got this other thing, we’ve got to start working on this’, and ‘yep, there’s more!’

Parkway Drive play Bluesfest on Thursday, April 3. Tickets at bluesfest.com.au