My love of Linkin Park, however, continues to this day. Oh well my tenure in A-level politics didn’t last the year, and I soon switched over to another course. I had th e song back, but then quickly lost it when Miss Carpenter’s finally patience ran out and she confiscated my radio. And so, earphone covertly threaded down my sleeve, I sat there with my hand to my ear, a picture of faux concentration, listening with my free ear to the ever-patient Miss Carpenter and nodding in all the right places as spoke about the importance of referendums. So long did I wait, in fact, that I decided to continue doing so during politics. Given that we were still a year away from the release of the iPod, and even more so from streaming services (legal ones, anyway), I didn’t have instant access to the song, so had to wait to hear it again. The radio presenter said it was called One Step Closer. It sounded like it was going to be the biggest thing in the world. It was also immaculately produced and fiendishly catchy in the way that all the best pop songs can be. It had all the trappings of a metal song, with downtuned riffs and rasping vocals. One day, while making the not inconsiderable journey to school, I heard a song on my little portable radio that caught me by surprise. As politics was generally my first of the day, any music I heard on my way to school – be it Limp Bizkit, who were on the verge of releasing Chocolate Starfish And The Hot Dog Flavored Water, which would sell more than 1 million copies in a week, or Muse, or wherever – would become a talking point in class, whether anyone else wanted to hear about them or not. You see I was less concerned about learning what a three-line whip was – something I’m not sure I really know to this day – and more so about discussing the music I was discovering. My first encounter with Linkin Park’s music came 10 years earlier, and the politics to which I’m referring was the subject of my A-level class, which served another, more clandestine, purpose. In fact, as noted by Kerrang! scribe Ian Winwood in his review of it, they didn’t make what you’d call a political record until their fourth, A Thousand Suns, released in 2010. Not because the nu-metal legends are the most polemical band in the world. When I think of Linkin Park, I automatically associate them with politics. The difference is he got to thread in some professional encounters alongside those personal memories. From furtive listening sessions in classrooms to life-affirming festival performances, his is an experience many can relate to. Like a lot of people of a certain age, Kerrang! writer James Hickie grew up with the music of Linkin Park.
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