Mike Shinoda – ‘Negative a Million Percent’ Linkin Park Would Consider a Hologram Tour
We just passed the four-year anniversary of Linkin Park's most recent show, with the band inviting an all-star lineup of musical peers to pay tribute to late vocalist Chester Bennington at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles on Oct. 27, 2017. During a chat with Stryker on his Tuna on Toast podcast, Mike Shinoda talked about the idea of touring with the band in present day, revealing that it's not happening anytime soon.
The co-vocalist and host were discussing ABBA's recent decision to do a hologram tour, when Shinoda flat out shot down the notion of Linkin Park ever doing a hologram run. "Negative a million percent," stated Shinoda, adding, “I hate the idea of doing a Linkin Park hologram thing. It’s awful.”
While Shinoda explains that he gets why ABBA would consider it with the band members getting older and wanting to provide concertgoers an experience closer to what they were in their prime, that's not necessarily a fit for where Linkin Park are in their career.
“For me, I’m like, ok physically I could still tour. That part’s good. Hopefully that doesn’t change any time soon. But now is not the time [for the band's return],” Shinoda explained. “We don’t have the focus on it. We don’t have the math worked out. And I don’t mean that by financially math, I mean that like emotional and creative math.”
As for the full band returning to touring, Shinoda elaborated, “Our bar for like, the threshold for what would be acceptable is high. Just like always. For our band, anything that we do, it’s like it’s gotta be, it’s gotta clear a certain bar. So there’s no, nothing has cleared the bar.”
Linkin Park were supporting their One More Light album in 2017 when Bennington died by suicide. In the aftermath of his death, the band reunited onstage on Oct. 27, 2017 for an emotional all-star concert featuring Bush's Gavin Rossdale, Alanis Morissette, Bring Me the Horizon's Oli Sykes, Machine Gun Kelly, Korn's Jonathan Davis, members of Blink-182, No Doubt, System of a Down, Sum 41 and Avenged Sevenfold among others.
While the band has been on hiatus ever since that show, Shinoda has gone on to release and tour in support of his solo music. And while they haven't toured or worked on a new album since Bennington's death, the band did return to the public eye in 2020 with a variety of promotions for the 20th anniversary of their Hybrid Theory album.
Hear more of Mike Shinoda's chat with Stryker on the Tuna on Toast podcast via Apple below. It's also available for Spotify users.