“
C
alling us nu-metal now is, to
me, like saying, ‘You suck.’”
By 2007, it’s fair to say
Chester Bennington had
grown weary of his band’s
association with that most
misunderstood of sub-genres. So, too, had
the usually more reserved Mike Shinoda,
who was even angrier. “We thought, ‘Fine,
you’re pissing us off. We’re going to make
something so different that you can shove
nu-metal up your ass.’”
For Linkin Park, their third album, Minutes
To Midnight, signified more than just the
cutting of ties with the past. It was a chance
to slay it all together, because, as guitarist
Brad Delson had put it, “We had to kill the old
Linkin Park to find out who we are now.”
The band had certainly had a lot of time
to do the deed, with the years following the
release of Meteora giving them the chance for
a collective breather.
“That break was necessary and mandatory,”
said bassist Dave Farrell firmly. “We had done
a ton of work for our first two albums and, in
between them, we had been remixing, writing
new material and touring constantly. Those
four years were brutal and exhausting.”
They certainly had been for Chester, who
had got divorced from his wife, Samantha, with
whom he had a son, Draven. The singer himself
had experienced the pain of his parents’ divorce
when he was 11, and knew of its lasting effects,
so struggled with the situation.“I felt someone, like, came up to me and
said, ‘Here’s a big pile of shit. Eat it!’” reflected
Chester. “I lost all my money in the divorce
and I’m only just starting to get back on my
feet,” he admitted later. “It’s been like a roller
coaster: one day you’re married, the next day
you’re not. One day you’re rich, the next day
you’re not. I’m happy now, but at times it has
felt like being hung, drawn and quartered. I’ve
been pulled in every direction.”
The happiness he mentioned was the result of
having been pulled in the direction of the aisle
once more, having married model Talinda Ann
Bentley in 2006. The couple welcomed the first
of their three children, Tyler Lee, a few months
later. Despite these positive developments, the
truncated intensity of everything that happened
to Chester in this period had left him feeling in
some kind of limbo. “I couldn’t be fully happy
with the new life I was starting and couldn’t, you
know, end the other life.”
Chester and Mike had begun to explore
creative lives outside of Linkin Park. For Mike,
it was his new project Fort Minor, which leaned
more heavily on his passion for hip-hop.
Debut album The Rising Tied was released
in November 2005, and was buoyed by the
success of single Where’d You Go, featuring
a guest spot from Jonah Matranga, of
Sacramento cult favourites Far.
As for Chester, he had met Ryan Shuck back
in the Hybrid Theory days, when he was the
guitarist in LA industrial rockers Orgy. Five
years later the duo formed Dead By Sunrise.Having helped reinvent rock at the turn of the millennium,
LINKIN PARK – by now bona fide festival headliners –
set out on album number three to reinvent something
else entirely: themselves...
MINUTES TO
MIDNIGHT
KERRANG! 332007
Photo: PAUL HARRIES