Linkin Park fan? Discover the tribute band METEORA!

Linkin Park fan? Discover the tribute band METEORA in this new written interview without delay!

Hi Meteora, thank you for taking the time to answer our questions! Can you introduce yourselves and tell us about your band?

Hi Valentine, we are METEORA, the Linkin Park tribute band (formed in 2015) in the Lille region. We are 5 friends (Jia, Thibaut, Julien Victor and Alexis) at the core of the band and have been making music together in a band since secondary school. We have always had at least one Rock/metal original composition band together since 2007, then we wanted to create a tribute project to pay homage to the band that marked our generation and got many fans/musicians started in Metal, Linkin Park. 

Since 2015, it's really been a joy to play live with childhood friends, in front of French, Belgian, Dutch audiences in wonderful atmospheres and venues. However, we only do about ten/twelve concerts a year because it's really out of passion and with our professional/family lives for all 6 of us, we sometimes make sacrifices to all be available at the same time.

You welcomed a new member, Mitchell (aka Matt Se7en on Youtube), as a vocalist a few months ago. How has his integration into the band been going?

Mitchell is a Dutchman we discovered 10 years ago on Youtube with impressive covers. We reached a point at the beginning of the year where we had to find a new singer and we came across his Linkin Park covers again. We took a chance by proposing our project to him, without really believing it would work, it turned out that he was dying to perform live with a band again... and doing it by covering Linkin Park was a dream for him, so the planets were perfectly aligned. 

We're very, very happy to have him with us, he brings us a lot and moreover, he shares a lot of passion and common values with us. At the very beginning, we were a bit worried about welcoming a member who doesn't speak French and afraid of not knowing how to communicate, but actually it went really well and it's even helping us improve our English. We're also teaching him a few words in French.

Tell us about the place Linkin Park occupies in your life.

Linkin Park has always been a band that mattered to us, on the same level as Slipknot, Rammstein, Rage Against The Machine, System Of A Down... these are the bands we listened to on repeat in secondary school and that we can still listen to on repeat with pleasure and nostalgia. We had the joy of seeing Linkin Park in concert in July 2017 (at Werchter), a few days before our idol Chester Bennington took his own life... these two moments deeply affected us for two different emotions.

Being in a Linkin Park tribute band has clearly reinforced our passion for this group. We try to make this live tribute as seriously as possible so we study the equipment used, the studio and live sound of Linkin Park, their history, their show... we've listened to all the tracks even the bonus/demos.

Do you have any advice for an independent band that wants to start as a tribute band?

The first advice we would give is to play music live regardless of the project (original compositions, covers, tribute), to savour it while remaining critical of your performance to always seek to improve in terms of the show (in terms of equipment, stage performance...).

For tributes, we advise to really cover a band out of passion but also to gauge your ability to do justice to the covered band live and to offer a quality show in terms of stage presence or music. Finally, it's a bit of common sense, but we would advise choosing a rather rare tribute band or one that doesn't exist: for example, there is no Avenged Sevenfold or Sum 41 tribute in France... while there are about twenty/thirty Muse tributes in France. Yet, there would be demand for this kind of band if the tribute is of quality.

You have the chance to perform on great stages (Hellfest Cult, Halloween Tribute Fest...). Is there a concert that particularly stood out to you? If so, which one and why?

We work a lot on booking and sometimes even self-producing certain dates, because all these great dates don't (except for some) fall from the sky, we still have to fight to play in new cities and thus promote the tribute scene and meet new Linkin Park fans. 

We are infinitely happy to play more and more in magnificent venues, in front of increasingly large audiences and in cities that we have enjoyed or will enjoy discovering (Nancy, Lyon, Vannes, Annecy, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Nantes, Namur, Charleroi, Compiègne, Liège ...). 

One concert in particular that marked us by its exceptional context, in November 2018 at Paulette in Nancy which was sold-out (550 people) for several months... which took place on the first day of the yellow vest protests! As a result, we had a lot of trouble getting to Nancy by road due to the roadblocks, so quite a bit of tension and stress accumulated during the day... then we learned that our singer, who at the time was coming from Lyon, had been completely blocked there with no way to join us. 

So we had to do this concert that we had been waiting for so long without "our Chester Bennington" and despite everything... we had managed to put on a very good show with our Mike Shinoda who had done the work of two, plus the singers from the two other bands who had come on stage to sing a few songs with us... we even brought someone up from the audience to sing with us and he was exceptional. After the concert, we were emotionally and physically exhausted from this day... but proud to have managed to put on a quality show despite this difficult context.

Speaking of music and concerts. What's on your merch table?

For several years, we've been selling Snapback caps and giving out Meteora stickers. We had quite a few requests for T-shirts so we wanted to start T-shirt production for a while but we wanted (as always) to do things right and therefore first find a nice design. Once the budget was available and the right idea was found, we launched with Distrolution about fifty Meteora T-shirts (with the gundam referencing the Reanimation album cover). 

During our concert at the Halloween Tribute Fest... We didn't expect to sell so many with about forty sales out of the fifty in stock! We're very happy with the audience's reception of these T-shirts and we've already reordered a small batch of about a hundred T-shirts. 

We'll think about maybe making hoodies or other T-shirts with different designs. We'll have to rack our brains again to find a cool design. Thanks to your team for the support and the quality of our T-shirts... all this for a very interesting price.

Overall, as musicians but also as music fans, what are your favourite merch items and why?

As music fans, we're not necessarily original... all members of Meteora have T-shirts, tank tops, caps and hoodies of their favourite bands (LP, Rammstein, BTMH, Slipknot, Red Hot, Rage, The Ghost Inside...) because these are things we can wear daily and proudly display.

We'll leave you with the final word!

Thank you for these pertinent questions! We're very happy to work with Distrolution... we hope to realise even more Merch projects with you, hopefully for the greatest pleasure of Linkin Park fans or simple followers of Meteora.

We're also inviting all Linkin Park fans to our upcoming concerts in Bordeaux (January 6), Amnéville (February 24), Compiègne (March 9), Vannes (March 31)... as well as other concerts or festivals in preparation for 2024 in Paris, in the East, near Mons (Belgium), Lyon.

Thank you from the bottom of our hearts to all the spectators who come to see us, follow us and encourage us!