Plague. Death. Floods. The last few years have taken their toll on Parkway Drive and put them in group therapy. Is there any light in the darkness?

WORDS: STEPHEN HILL

 PICTURES: DAVE LePAGE

You lied to us!”

As the words boom from the silhouetted figure sitting opposite, a fist comes crashing down on the rickety old table in front of us, the sound echoing around the walls of the crypt we find ourselves shivering in.

“You lied; there’s no way to talk your way out of this. Every single thing you said wasn’t going to happen, happened.”

Winston McCall is angry. We haven’t seen the Parkway Drive vocalist for four years now, and, due to the fact that he’s decided to meet us in the dark, dank underground crypt of London’s St Pancras Church, we can’t really see him right now. Nonetheless, we know he’s seething.

“The government spent years telling us that our taxes and insurance would rise if we put plans in place to try and stop something like this,” he continues. “We were told that it would never happen. We were told it was once every 50 years, then once every 100 years, then once every 500 years – and it happened twice in a matter of weeks. Now there are people whose homes have been destroyed, and the land they own is literally underwater and worthless. Who is going to buy that land when it’s at the bottom of a river? How are these people, on low incomes, meant to recover from that? We’ve been saying for years that this was going to happen, we’ve…”

Winston puffs out his cheeks and sits back in his chair for a second, presumably in an attempt to calm himself.

Back in February, a series of floods decimated eastern Australia. Homes were destroyed, food shortages were reported, 1,000 schools were closed, evacuations took place and 22 people lost their lives. It was one of the most catastrophic events in Australia’s history, with 677mm of rainfall in Brisbane breaking the highest threeday total ever recorded. As residents of Byron Bay, the most easterly point of the mainland, the members of Parkway Drive saw it all happen. It was, in Winston’s words, “Some Old Testament shit”.