In the middle of the Big Day Out, and with an extensive national tour coming up, Parkway Drive’s Winston McCall recalls some of the  antics of past regional tours.

“Surfboards and bodyboards, kids doing flips off things and stuff like that; I think when you get young kids, a stage with no barrier and a band telling them they can do whatever they want any kind of chaos can happen.”

The bodyboards in the mosh pit started out as friends rocking up to Parkway’s Byron shows with old boards and “just launching”, Winston recalls, but since then it’s become a theme at their concerts. “Once YouTube takes off kids see it everywhere and start bringing boards to the show. We’ve had boards rocking up in spots like Croatia and Eastern Europe where there aren’t any beaches,” Winston laughs.

Another trend surrounding the band is fans getting Parkway tattoos, and Winston’s seen some bad ones. “There are a lot of people I’m sure who are stoked with what they’ve done, but they’re really not good and in a place that you’re going to regret in the next couple of years and then for the rest of your life.”

It seems the tattoo fad has somewhat replaced fan mail for Parkway Drive. “I think mail has gone out the window for us and I don’t think mail lasts that long if people bring it to the show, it just gets sweaty and destroyed in their pocket. The amount of bad Parkway tattoos I’ve seen is definitely higher than the amount of bad letters,” Winston says.

Parkway Drive made their debut appearance at the Big Day Out last month, yet Winston admits he had never been to the festival prior to this year. “Never in my life, it’s pretty weird to say and everyone seems kind of freaked out about that. I think everyone in Australia has been to a Big Day Out.”

To make up for the lost years, he spent all his off-stage time at the Gold Coast show catching as many sets as possible. “It was fucking amazing. I got to watch Kanye at the end of the night and it was the most mindblowing set I’ve ever seen from anyone ever, it was out of control.”

With such a busy year ahead the guys have tried to spread out their live shows so they don’t burn out. “We’re trying to tour in a way that whatever time we spend away we spend the same amount of time at home and recuperate. You spend so much time travelling and on weird sleep patterns and physically beating yourself to death every single night, then the hours spent at the airport, you just get run down, you need time to recoup so that’s how we run it these days.”

While touring is the current focus, the band have kept their noses to the grindstone writing a new album that has them pretty excited. “Ever since we wrote ‘Deep Blue’ we’ve been psyched in that writing process and it’s just sort of rolled over into this.”

Recording should start mid year after their regional tour and Winston says there will be some interesting influences present. “The last album was sort of testing the waters for a few ideas we have in regards to melody and bringing in a couple of different elements here and there, they’re only subtle things. It worked so well for us on those records and we liked bringing in these influences that we weren’t familiar with, so we have a lot of stuff planned to go along with what we’re already familiar with.”

At the same time he assures us they’re still making heavy, fast music; they will always be ‘Parkway’. “We have songs written that sound exactly like Parkway songs, probably the heaviest songs we’ve ever written; it’s sounding heavy but the melodic side of things is definitely going to be interesting.”

CATCH PARKWAY DRIVE AT TWIN TOWNS ON FEBRUARY 19