After Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell committed suicide in May this year, Chester Bennington, the powerfully voiced lead singer with Linkin Park, wrote a moving requiem to his late friend and sometime colleague. “Your voice was joy and pain, anger and forgiveness, love and heartache wrapped up into one,” he said. “I can’t imagine a world without you in it.”
When he sang Leonard Cohen’s elegiac hymn Hallelujah at Cornell’s funeral, nobody could have imagined that two months later Bennington would also take his own life. He did so on what would have been the 53rd birthday of his former colleague, with whom he had toured and duetted and to whose son he was a godfather.
It brought to a tragically early end a turbulent life and a tumultuous career, in the course of which Linkin Park became one of the biggest bands of the past 20 years. The group’s first album, Hybrid Theory (2000), sold about 30 million copies, making it one of the bestselling debuts in rock history.
Bennington’s passionate singing and angst-ridden lyrics were at the emotional core of the group’s sound, a slick and bombastic blend of heavy rock and hip-hop topped off with surprisingly melodic, radio-friendly choruses.
With the rapper Mike Shinoda as his vocal foil, Bennington’s songs chronicled the anguish of the abuse he had suffered as a child and his struggles with addiction in a way that found a chord with alienated teenagers and outsiders everywhere. The songs — with titles such as Crawling, Numb, Blackout and Victimized — were often bleak, but millions found hope in feeling that Bennington and his bandmates were articulating their own emotional confusion and understood their pain.
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“I have been able to tap into all the negative things that can happen to me throughout my life by numbing myself to the pain and being able to vent it through my music,” he said. “I think that’s why a lot of kids relate to it.”
Bennington had a complex personal life. He became a father at 20 when his girlfriend Elka Brand gave birth to their son, Jamie. Five months later he married Samantha Marie Olit, with whom he had a son, Draven, born in 2002 as Linkin Park were becoming one of the biggest bands in the world.
Long periods away from home drove them apart and the marriage was annulled in 2005. He blamed the divorce for contributing to his substance abuse, although it was a case of chicken and egg. That same year he married Talinda Ann Bentley, a former Playboy model with whom he had three children, Tyler, born in 2006, and twins Lilly and Lila, born five years later.
A devoted father, in recent years he had cut down on touring because his children cried when he left, and he remained close to his former partners. He adopted Brand’s son Isaiah from another relationship in 2006. A photo on social media showed the heavily tattooed singer encircled by the three mothers to his children and grinning broadly, while holding up a cup prominently inscribed with the word “pimp” in outsized capital letters.
“When I’m not doing Linkin Park, I’ve got to be home with my babies,” he said. “I’ve got kids in college, one in high school, one in fifth grade and twin girls who are five. I also have two pygmy goats, three bantam chickens, a tortoise, six dogs, two cats and some fish. It’s like a farm.”
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He was born Chester Charles Bennington in 1976 in Phoenix, Arizona, the youngest of four children. His mother was a nurse, his father a detective who handled child sex abuse cases. His childhood was troubled: his parents divorced when he was 11 and, left in the custody of his father, he grew up resenting his mother for abandoning him.
From the age of seven or eight he was sexually molested by an older friend. “I was getting beaten up and being forced to do things I didn’t want to do. I was too afraid to say anything,” he said in 2008.
The assaults continued until he was 13, but he did not tell his father until he was in his thirties. “I hated everybody in my family and there was no one I could turn to. The only thing I wanted to do was kill everybody and run away.” He found solace in writing poetry and music — and drugs. “Getting high, drinking a lot and having sex with a lot of great girls is a pretty good escape.”
At 17, he moved back in with his mother, who was so shocked by his emaciated appearance that she banned him from leaving the house. Instead, he sat at home drinking until he was “a full-blown, raging alcoholic”.
When he was finally allowed out he formed a band named Grey Daze, but he was working mundane day jobs when he was invited in 1999 to audition for a band named Xero. He got the gig, moved to Los Angeles and they became Linkin Park. The group recorded seven hit albums, the most recent of which, One More Light, was released two months before Bennington’s death and topped the charts in America and made No 4 in Britain.
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In 2013 Bennington took on a second band when he succeeded Scott Weiland as the lead singer with Stone Temple Pilots, a band he had grown up admiring. Once again, death struck close to home. Weiland had been sacked because of his unreliability and two years later died from a drug overdose.
“If it wasn’t for music I’d be dead. One hundred per cent,” Bennington once said. Yet it seems the music he loved exacted a terrible toll.
Chester Bennington, musician, was born on March 20, 1976. He committed suicide on July 20, 2017, aged 41