Linkin Park’s upcoming DVD offers an up close and personal look at the band’s live show, but not as personal as it could’ve been.
At Monday’s premiere of “Live in Texas,” guitarist Brad Delson said the band inserted a surgical camera inside singer Chester Bennington, but “it was kind of an invasive process. The shots turned out to be weird, so none of those shots made the final cut,” he deadpanned.
“Yeah, they weren’t action shots,” Bennington said, smiling.
“He’s got a clean colon, we learned that much,” Delson added, finally breaking into laughter.
Still, “Live in Texas” does have some close-up camerawork that Linkin Park promise will impress fans.
“There wasn’t any fireworks display and we didn’t light a kid on fire, we just put on basically our own show, but we allowed a crew of like 20 camera guys to run amuck through the audience, onstage, anywhere they wanted to go,” Bennington said. “We had cameras up in our faces. And the great thing about the crew that we had was that we didn’t even realize that they were there, so we got really good shots. And it’s just going from so many different aspects of the show that you really do feel like you’re watching a live performance rather than just seeing a couple of different angles from some Steadicams on the venue.”
Live in Texas, due Tuesday, features footage from two Texas stops on the Summer Sanitarium Tour and is accompanied by a live album.
“We spent a long time making Meteora, but we spent even more time on the road, and a large thing we do as Linkin Park is tour and a lot of people have had the opportunity to see us multiple times and a lot of people haven’t seen us,” Delson said. “I think in both cases it will be really nice to have something that really captures the energy of what it’s like for us onstage. Sometimes, while we’re playing, the volume from the crowd actually singing the songs to us is louder than the PA, and so it really is a unique position that we’re in.”
Linkin Park consider the “Live in Texas” DVD a supplement to Meteora in the same way that the remix disc Reanimation complemented Hybrid Theory. “In a sense, we kind of have remixed it,” Bennington said. “We did a live version of all these songs, and it’s in a way that no one’s ever heard it before.”
Unfortunately for fans, this means Linkin Park probably won’t be releasing a collection of Meteoraremixes, even though Bennington said some have been done.
Instead, the band will focus on touring, with a P.O.D. pairing scheduled for early next year, followed by the latest incarnation of the Projekt Revolution Tour. Before the P.O.D. tour kicks off in January, Linkin Park have a week of U.K. dates beginning November 20, followed be a slew of radio station-sponsored holiday shows.
The always diligent rockers also plan to shoot a video in December for their fourth U.S. single fromMeteora, although they refused to reveal the song. “We just released ‘Numb’ and we don’t want to hurt ‘Numb”s feelings,” Bennington said.
It won’t be the latest U.K. single, “From the Inside,” although the singer said he’d like to release the video on his homeland eventually.
“It’s one of my favorite videos that we’ve ever made,” Bennington said. “We shot it in Prague, and the kids who were working on the video were just so intense and they were doing some stuff that we would have never been able to pull off anywhere else than where we were at. The energy that [Joe Hahn] captured in that video was pretty amazing. And the visuals of it and the intensity of it all, it makes it just a really fun video to watch.”