Chester Bennington’s vulnerability resonated with a generation

I saw the band for the first – and now surely last – time at Brixton Academy two weeks ago. It was a special one-off break from stadiums, and it fucking ruled. I was touching distance from Bennington as I crowdsurfed to a riotous Faint, and the fact that it was the penultimate time he would ever stand on a stage is hard to countenance. It’s the curtain call for a group that have been omnipresent since I was 9, and, as the saying goes, a kick in the childhood.

In 2001 Hybrid Theory was moving 100,000 copies per week in the USA alone, and the group tallied 324 shows on the road – both ridiculous amounts by any measure. That was only the start, too. I vividly remember a school trip a couple of years later where every single dorm room, no matter what type of kid was in it, was filled with the sounds of Meteora. Next to Billabong shorts and polyphonic ringtones of Chingy, it was probably the most unifying thing of 2003 for anyone under the age of 14.

It must be so strange to get to that level, and Linkin Park never came down. Meet and greets in Montevideo one week and playing to 150,000 in Shanghai the next was the norm for close to two decades. You wonder whether it gets rote in the same way a work commute does. By all accounts though, Bennington and his bandmates were genuinely approachable and appreciative people, and that never let up.

In Bennington’s case, that extreme visibility was harshly magnified by what was on show. In 2011 he opened up about his abusive childhood, but he was a hero to millions precisely because he internalised raw feelings and made them permutable. Scan the lyrics and the same tropes crop up: wounds, smothering, pain, emotional abuse, a lack of solace. Even if his specific depth of trauma doesn’t resonate, if you were into Linkin Park as a kid, the band became a vessel for your negative feelings. No-one ever really sits down and explains discomfort to you at that age, so to hear it in naked clarity on a CD – which, handily, slapped hard – was transformative. Tragically, that discomfort is what tipped the scales for Bennington.

Even with a wildly successful career built on chewing through his depressive tendencies, no-one knows what was going on inside his head: celebrities aren’t infallible. Bennington wasn’t, and it finally got to him. Still, it’s heartwarming to see condolences flooding in from publications, pop stars and even personal friends, a band finally being given their due.

I’m not after total revisionism: Shinoda’s total lack of flow, and Hahn’s wildly scribbling turntables are, honestly, quite shit; equally, I could happily go through the rest of my life without hearing those opening notes of Numb again (thanks Hov). But, as the outpouring of grief has shown, at one point or another Linkin Park meant a lot to many people all over the world. No matter where those fans’ refined tastes ended up, Linkin Park remained the first favourite band of millions, and that number is only ever going to climb. Even though they’ve physically come to an abrupt and heartbreaking end.