Författare: Glenn Fosbraey Associate Dean of Humanities and Social Scien

Linkin Park have announced that they are reforming, seven years after disbanding due to the death of lead singer Chester Bennington.

Along with the announcement of a six-date international tour and the promised release of new music, it was also revealed that Emily Armstrong, formerly of the Los Angeles group Dead Sara, would be joining founding member Mike Shinoda on co-lead singer duties.

One of the most successful bands of the streaming age, and the only band to feature in Spotify’s top ten most-streamed albums of all time, Linkin’ Park’s legion of fans are divided on Armstrong’s appointment. Many are simply happy to see them return, but others have been critical of the decision to keep using the band name in the absence of Bennington.

Linkin Park are by no means the first band to enter a second phase after the loss of their lead singer. Here are three other notable examples.

1. Queen

How do you replace a singer who many believe is the greatest of all time? That’s the conundrum Queen faced when they decided to continue following the death of Freddie Mercury in 1991.

The surviving band members had a taste of performing with a different frontman during the following year’s Concert for Freddie Mercury, where George Michael’s performance of Somebody to Love stealing the show. After that, they had a go at trying to do it in-house, with Brian May and Roger Taylor sharing the vocals on the 1997 single No-One but You (Only the Good Die Young).

Adam Lambert performing with Queen.

Then, after losing another quarter of the original lineup when bassist John Deacon called it a day, Paul Rodgers took on mic duties between 2004 and 2009.

Adam Lambert became the latest to fill Freddie Mercury’s Adidas high-tops in 2011 – a position he still holds today. Though the band has always performed as Queen + Paul Rodgers or Queen + Adam Lambert, never fully taking the plunge to officially “replace” Freddy.

2. New Order

Post-punk purveyors of gloom Joy Division may have ceased to exist following the death of frontman Ian Curtis – but it didn’t signal the end of the surviving band members’ creative output.

Clockwise from top left: Bernard Sumner, Stephen Morris, Peter Hook and Gillian Gilbert.
Wiki Commons

Rising phoenix-like from the ashes of their old group only a few months later as New Order, guitarist Bernard Sumner was recast as the lead singer. Gillian Gilbert turned the trio back to a quartet when she joined the ranks to play guitar and keyboards.

Gradually morphing from their post-punk roots to reinvent themselves as a dance and electronic act, with the release of Blue Monday in 1983, they made the move from indie darlings to bona fide superstars. Forty-four years on from their (re)birth and still going strong, New Order’s story is one of both survival and revival.

3. AC/DC

Brian Johnson in 2008.
Wiki Commons, CC BY-SA

Following the death of original singer Bon Scott in February 1980, AC/DC acted swiftly to appoint new vocalist Brian Johnson in time to begin recording new material in April that year.

With 50 million units sold and the title of biggest selling rock album of all time, the resulting album Back in Black undoubtedly marks AC/DC’s commercial high point.

Read more:
AC/DC’s Back in Black at 40 – establishing rock bands as brands

The five albums released with Scott at the microphone are often more celebrated by the critics but with 11 studio albums under his belt – and the last three reaching number one in many countries around the globe with multi-platinum sales – it’s hard to see Johnson’s tenure as anything but a massive success. Though the argument about which singer is better continues to rumble on with fans.

Moving on

In the case of the reformed Linkin Park, Shinoda has spoken about feeling empowered by the new lineup, seeing it as the beginning of a new chapter in the band’s history rather than “erasing its past” – an accusation some critics have levelled at him.

We’ll never know what Bennington himself would think, of course, but these words from an interview with Kerrang Radio shortly before his death might reassure Shinoda that he’s doing the right thing: “What matters is that you took the chance to do something that you felt was important to you and that’s what being an artist is all about.”

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The worst-kept secret in the music world is out: Oasis are back. And the only real surprise is that it’s taken so long for it to happen. Since there have been bands, bands have been breaking up. And since bands have been breaking up, bands have been reforming.

Some have led to creative rebirths (Blur, Pixies, Blondie). Others have been disappointing (The Velvet Underground, Outkast, Kiss).

Some bands, like The Go-Go’s have broken up and reformed so many times that it’s hard to keep count. Some split and get back together before anyone knows they’ve even separated, like The Verve, who separated with no intention of reforming in 1995 but were back in the studio only weeks later.

And some take decades to get back together, like the 60s band The Hustlers, who reformed 50 years after splitting upon discovering they had been misinformed about the death of their drummer.

But most reunions have simply led to healthy bank balances for the artists and a chance to relive the good old days for the fans.

For boy or girl bands, breaking up and reuniting is a pretty straightforward process, honed to perfection over the years by Take That, Boyzone, Steps, Girls Aloud, 5ive, Blue, Spice Girls, All Saints, Busted and the Sugababes (and with Little Mix, One Direction, and Fifth Harmony currently midway through the process). The formula is simple.

A band’s success starts to wane.
The most popular member – let’s call them band member A – thinks (or is told) they can do better on their own and leaves to begin a solo career.
Band member A’s first single does well, and the band they’ve left (if they’ve decided to carry on) also have success with their next release as fans rally round the remaining members.
The rest of the band embark on solo careers, each of which is less successful than the last.
Band member A soldiers on with diminishing returns as the rest of the band respectively dance on ice; act in soap operas, or go and do something in LA.
Following years of dwindling sales for band member A, and high profile divorces, lawsuits or bankruptcies for the rest (and possibly band member A as well), the band announce they are reforming. Not because of their faltering individual popularity or the need to finance those divorces, lawsuits or bankruptcies, but “for the fans”. A nation celebrates, and the tabloids report that Ticketmaster has crashed due to the number of people wanting tickets to the comeback gigs.
Repeat as necessary depending on upcoming anniversaries and TikTok trends.

The Beatles members were frequently asked about a reunion.

When are you getting back together?

Society and the media alike have long been obsessed with legacy acts, comebacks and reunion tours. The Beatles fielded the “when are you getting back together” question so often that it became a running joke in interviews.

Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters and David Gilmour are still being asked four decades since Waters left the group, and, until August 27, Liam and Noel Gallagher had been similarly bombarded since Oasis’s split in 2009.

The only official statement to emerge so far from Oasis HQ appeared on the Gallaghers’ social media channels where they said: “The guns have fallen silent. The stars have aligned. The great wait is over. Come see. It will not be televised.” But in the coming weeks and months we will probably hear things about “unfinished business” or it being “the right time”.

Or perhaps they’ll do a John Lydon, who declared before the Sex Pistols’ 1996 reunion that, although the band still hated each other “with a vengeance”, they had “found a common cause, and that’s your money”.

Maybe they’ll even point to the fact that each of Liam Gallagher’s solo albums has spent less time on the album charts than the one before it. Or that Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds albums have done exactly the same thing.

Or that Noel’s latest, Council Skies, is his first album to miss out on the number one spot and exited the charts altogether after eight weeks (compared with the band’s self-titled debut, which hung around for well over a year).

Whatever the reason for their return, Oasis fans won’t care. To them, it’s not the why that’s important, but the fact it’s happening. Time will tell if the reuniting of the brothers Gallagher is going to taint their legacy or enhance it.

And it may well be, as with The Verve, Sex Pistols and The Velvet Underground that even after reforming, the issues that caused the breakup in the first place will resurface and finish them off once and for all.

The knives are already out in the media, with detractors predicting a disaster, but let’s not forget the Telegraph piece from last year, which urged Blur not to get back together as “reunions are always terrible” only for the same newspaper to later call their comeback a triumph. Oasis fans will have their fingers crossed that the brothers Gallagher can pull it off too – and keep their newly rekindled relationship intact.

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