The true lives of my chemical romance: a biography
UK edition
|
The definitive biography of My Chemical Romance
My Chemical Romance are the most significant band in alternative rock for the last decade, selling 5 million albums and selling out arenas worldwide until their split after twelve years together. Author Tom Bryant has been given unparalleled access to the band over the course of their extraordinary career and has a unique archive of interviews with Gerard Way and his brother Mikey, Ray Toro and Frank Iero, as well as their friends and those closest to them, allowing him to go behind the scenes and bring their stories to life. From their New Jersey beginnings to international superstardom, from the demons they have battled to the power of their lyrics and their extraordinary connection with their fans, this is the definitive biography of the most adored rock band this century, a story of self-belief and the pursuit of dreams. UK edition: http://amzn.to/1myGFjA US edition: http://amzn.to/1ig2Lo7 |
US edition
|
My Chemical Romance, Kerrang! 21 October 2006
THE STREET outside Philadelphia’s Trocadero Theatre is lined with kids in black. There’s a pulsing throb of excitement that occasionally runs along the queue. “Do you think they’re inside already?” “I think I saw someone at the window.” “Where? Tell me! Where?”
It’s an anticipation that’s been building since 2am when the first of these fans arrived and slumped on the sidewalk outside. “We’ve got to be the first in; we’ve got to be at the front”. Meanwhile the waiters and cooks from the nearby Chinatown restaurants pour out of their kitchens and basements, eyeing them with amusement. The kids ignore them.
By noon their gang is stretched down the street. By seven pm, it’s around the corner and up the block. All of them share one thing – a look of wide-eyed expectation as waves of noise run from the door to the back of the queue. “Are the doors open? Has one of them come out?” They all surge to see. False alarm. But soon they will see their heroes, My Chemical Romance, and all for just two dollars, courtesy of MTV who are filming the show.
Inside, The Trocadero is a hub of activity. A converted theatre, it’s just large enough to be impressive and just small enough to be intimate. Everywhere runners are taping wires to the floor, gabbling in walkie-talkies and checking things off on clipboards. Lights are being strung up on one side, while cameras are hauled into position on the other.
Sat in an upstairs bar, dressed in identical uniforms, are My Chemical Romance. They’re currently being interrogated by MTV. They’re clustered together on stools, lights in their face, cameras aimed at them.
Around them are perhaps 30 people – producers, TV crew, directors, presenters and a host of others. Some care a great deal about this band. Most do not. One executive is texting a friend. “I dunno. Some band. I don’t know who they are. I’m only here because I have to be.”
A presenter fires questions at them, focussing mostly on singer Gerard Way, hair newly bleached blonde, and guitarist Frank Iero. Each time they answer a question, a girl from MTV times their answers on a stopwatch, making desperate ‘wrap-it-up’ signals as their replies run on. Bassist Mikey Way will pitch in too but drummer Bob Bryar and guitarist Ray Toro look moodily on, dangling their microphones between their legs, no intention to use them. Eventually Bryar gives up completely and just puts his mic down. This isn’t really his scene. This isn’t what he does.
You wonder how many times the band have done this in the last few weeks, certainly they will have already been asked the questions they’re being asked today – “What does ‘The Black Parade’ mean”, “Gerard, why is your hair blonde”, “So, you guys like comics, huh?” – but their replies are sincere, courteous and prompt. “If you’re this proud of your record,” says Gerard to someone who asks if he minds all this, “You gotta do the work”.
And My Chemical Romance are very proud of their new record, The Black Parade. You can see it in their excited eyes, their nervous giggles, the way they fall on anyone who has heard it, slyly questioning them as to what they think of it.
But it wasn’t always this way. There was a time when the album nearly finished them. There was a time, not so long ago, when the members of My Chemical Romance were wracked with depression and locked in a room together, screaming abuse at each other. “There were times we really cut ourselves open,” says Gerard. “We cut ourselves open and saw how ugly we were inside. We had our souls drained out…” He leans in, voice quavering, eyes wide. “I’m serious. This record tried to kill us.”
MY CHEMICAL Romance have had to adapt a great deal recently. Two years ago they released their second album Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge. They had a great album, an alcoholic singer, and absolutely no expectations weighing them down. That record sold 2.5 million copies and rising and suddenly its creators were internationally famous megastars about whom column inch after column inch was spun. They couldn’t go out on the street any more, everywhere there were cameras, people wanting them, tugging at them, needing them. Their singer got sober fast, meanwhile the expectations were building and building.
Their crowds swelled, an army of outsiders all who wanted to be given salvation by the band, who looked to them for therapy, for answers. Awards rolled in, praise from the highest quarters, ecstatic pronouncements that this was the greatest band in the world, that they had the answer.
But, get this: inside that bubble, away from the glitter and the showbiz, was a band going through something of a crisis. This adulation wasn’t something they expected or knew how to deal with. It wasn’t even something they felt they deserved. It all felt terribly like chaos.
“There’s a fine-line between treated like a demi-god and being treated like a circus monkey,” says Gerard Way. “When people don’t treat you like a human being, it’s very odd. It happened a lot.”
My Chemical Romance are in their dressing room backstage now – away from the ever more frantic TV crews outside. It’s a bare room, a couple of tired blue sofas, a mirror, strip lighting and a crate of water bottles in the corner. They’ve all shed the military uniforms they have adopted as their Black Parade image – all except Gerard, who looks ever more like he’s growing into his, like a second skin. They’re talking about what they’ve been through since that last record. How they didn’t expect any of this.
“You never quite know what you’re doing when you’re playing in an arena,” says Gerard. “You never quite know why you’re there. You hope it’s because your fans are behind you. But you don’t know whether it’s actually because you’re on TV and on the cover of teen magazines. You’re never quite sure if you deserve it.”
They all have individual examples of the odd moment when it struck them that, for the first times in their lives, they were the centre of attention. Mikey Way tells a story of sitting at the MTV Video Music Awards at what should have been a triumphant moment for the band.
“The interesting thing was,” he says, “I still didn’t feel like we belonged there. I felt like an outsider there. Nobody would talk to us, we just didn’t belong. All these famous people were walking around in really expensive clothes and we were thinking, ‘What are we doing here? Why me?’”
Bob Bryar was accosted by a fan the other day, shortly after he’d stepped out of the men’s room. “She was screaming, ‘I can’t believe you’re real!’ It was really weird. Really weird,” he says, shuffling his feet on the floor and wringing his hands. “I’m not comfortable with photo-shoots, interviews, all of that stuff. All this stuff makes me feel quite uncomfortable.”
These were the thoughts they were taking with them into the studio when they recorded ‘The Black Parade’ – getting used to being the centre of attention for the first times in their lives, suddenly being the heroes when they’d always been the underdogs, suddenly having people hanging on their words.
FOR A band who always positioned themselves as outsiders, suddenly becoming famous, becoming accepted, put My Chemical Romance in a difficult position. It’s hard to keep picking fights when everyone likes you.
“But I don’t think we’ve ever been accepted,” says Frank Iero. “It’s always been that way. I don’t think this band will ever be on top because we always have to fight to survive.”
“Every few months something else happens that we have to overcome,” says Ray Toro, picking up his theme – an increasingly common trick between My Chemical Romance these days. “There’s a new test constantly – Bob burning his leg [during the video shoot to second single Famous Last Words] and that getting infected, the reception we got at Reading [where the band were repeatedly bottled]. It makes you feel you’ve got to stand up and fight constantly.”
There’s a sense that they actually welcome this adversity, that they couldn’t survive without it. Perhaps they need to feel that everyone’s against them in order to bring out the best in themselves?
“I think that’s true,” says Gerard. “I like things around us to be challenging and chaotic – almost as though there’s a dark force constantly fighting us. It reminds us that we have to keep battling. It charges us. This band does need adversity. If we don’t have that, then we’re not doing any good. We need something to fight against, we need to be winning people over and changing their minds. The second we lose that, we become normal, we become mundane.”
Those are some pretty heavy things to have weighing down on you when you go in to record an album. No wonder The Black Parade nearly killed My Chemical Romance.
THERE WAS a point during the recording of that album when everything nearly ground to a halt. The studio, set in an old and allegedly haunted house high in the Hollywood Hills above Los Angeles, gave stunning panoramic views over the glittering city below.
Gerard Way was staring out at this view one day, cigarette burning in his fingers, turmoil in his head. He looked at everything below him and none of it felt real. He wasn’t sure who he was, he wasn’t sure what his role was, he wasn’t sure why he was needed.
“I was staring at that cityscape wondering what the hell I was doing with my life,” he says. “I went through a crisis. I was examining every awful thing about myself. I was cutting myself open and taking all the parts out and examining them. I realised, ‘Wow, I’m not a likeable person’. I found out that I was a coward. I became very susceptible to depression.”
He pauses for a minute, thinking.
“It wasn’t the happiest time of our lives. I was extremely intense. I was very edgy, almost like I wasn’t really alive. I was living inside the record. It really did feel like something was coming after us. We couldn’t escape it. It was there every time we turned a corner. It was just staring at us. It was a dark time.”
The problem was that it wasn’t just Gerard who was going through this. He says that everyone in the band was going through something similar.
Frank talks about recording the album in terms of how much he bled, how much he suffered. “I became really introspective,” he says. “I felt we were treading a thin line between greatness and insanity. We were always on the brink. Always.”
After this interview took place, it emerged that Mikey became so upset and had so many difficulties during the recording of the album, that he temporarily left My Chemical Romance and went into therapy for depression and addiction. This is not something any of his bandmates talk about today, though.
The pressure during the recording process got so bad that the band had to devise a way to release it, a vent to pour out their emotions into. They designated one room in the house ‘The Heavy Room’. They would head in there to thrash out their feelings, to be bluntly and brutally honest with each other – sometimes hurtfully so.
“Mentally, we were beating each other up,” says Ray. “We were getting to the root of some really deep problems. We would spend hours and hours in that room, having long conversations while the little demons we all carried inside of us came out. Sometimes you have to let those things go. That’s just one of the things that was going on in the heavy room.”
“That room drained our souls out,” says Gerard. “It took all our energy. It drained everything out of us. We just talked and talked in there. We talked about everything – life, us, everything…
“Every day we were finding something new and ugly about ourselves. We kept finding things out about our personalities that we didn’t like. We found all the cracks, all the chinks in our armour. We really found out how ugly we were. But, without that, we couldn’t have made a good record. We had to push ourselves right to the edge.”
But they nearly went over the edge, why did they risk their sanity?
“Because,” he says, “this band has always had a desire to achieve greatness. It’s always loved the taste of victory, it loves winning, it loves beating the odds.”
THE BOND between the members of My Chemical Romance has always been vital to what they do. They’ve often said that coming home from touring is like returning from a war, the implication being that the ties between them are equally as complicated and reliant on each other as they are between soldiers returning from the front.
The sessions in The Heavy Room seem only to have made those connections stronger. Mikey Way talks about the “brutal honesty” that formed the basis of the conversations there. Those sorts of conversations have been the breaking of many other bands. But My Chemical Romance eventually emerged stronger, connected by a deep-rooted knowledge of the depths of each others’ personalities.
“We went into the record thinking that we were as tight as we could possibly be – as friends and as family,” says Frank. “We came out of it a hundred times closer. That was shocking. But I definitely know that this – my family – has our back. That’s a great feeling to have when you want to go out and take on the world.”
The blood-letting between the members so changed their relationships with each other that the entire essence of the band began to feel different.
“That’s exactly what happened,” says Gerard, who could well be talking about what his brother went through. “We became so protective of each other when we were making this record that everything became different. We became a different band. We had always loved each other – we’re like brothers – but this was something different.
“What got us through was putting our personal problems aside in order to help the other guy. You would realise, ‘This guy is going through some serious problems, so I have to forget my issues and help him’. I had to forget my anxieties, depression and nightmares to help my brothers. We all went through that. That’s what had to be done. That’s why there were so many talks in The Heavy Room. We just had to be there to listen to each other.”
And you can see it as they squeeze to get past each other in these narrow backstage corridors, the looks they exchange, the club they’re in that no-one else can join. It’s there when Bob, as he frequently does, aims a quick, friendly punch in Mikey’s direction, or when they tease Bob back, saying, “Yes we saw that trick with your drumsticks,” when none of them did. And it will have to be because these five will come to rely on each other more and more over what promises to be a gruelling few months ahead.
“We know that,” says Mikey, meaningfully as it turns out. “This is the sort of time in a band’s career when people might lose their mind. We have to have each other backs to make sure no-one gets broke.”
NOWHERE IS the bond between them more evident than when they’re onstage. The Trocadero isn’t quite full tonight – to allow room for MTV’s cameras to move around the hall, not because the show wasn’t a sell out.
In the auditorium below, the girls who’d been waiting since 2am make it to the front, pressed against the barrier, content to endure the discomfort because what’s does being squashed matter when you’ve slept rough for this?
The man from MTV gives the band a frankly ludicrous introduction. “In 1787,” he cries, “our forefathers signed the United States constitution here in Philadelphia and changed history. And now, in 2006, Philadelphia is to host a gig that will change the course of musical history forever. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE!”
The theatre goes ballistic, fans crawling over each other to get nearer the front, to make their day-long wait in the street worthwhile.
Here, upstairs, it’s no less frantic: fans standing in their seats, bouncing on their chairs. In the roped off VIP area are the band’s girlfriends but in the far corner is perhaps the band’s biggest fan. Frank Iero’s mum, in My Chemical Romance hoodie and t-shirt, is hanging over the balcony, gazing at her son as he whirls below, pride flushed across her face, her mouth singing along to every word.
Gerard Way becomes a ringleader onstage, ever more eccentric and camp, but his movements are more considered than in previous years – less flailing and more purposeful. The band behind him giving him every support he needs, building the platform for him to scream from. Their new songs, meanwhile, are lapped up by the rabid crowd before them – lyrics sung back to the band though no-one here can legally have heard the songs before.
And so the band fall happily together in their dressing room afterwards – as wide-eyed as their fans were before the show. In those looks there’s pride and happiness but mostly there’s exhilaration about what’s to come.
“God, I’m happy,” says Gerard. “I’m excited, edgy and nervous too, but I’m almost violently happy. I feel like we’ve put everything on black and we’ve spun the roulette wheel…”
He pauses for a beat, an adrenaline fuelled grin spreading across his face.
“…But, you know what? If you’re not risking everything, you might as well not play at all.”
© Tom Bryant 2010
It’s an anticipation that’s been building since 2am when the first of these fans arrived and slumped on the sidewalk outside. “We’ve got to be the first in; we’ve got to be at the front”. Meanwhile the waiters and cooks from the nearby Chinatown restaurants pour out of their kitchens and basements, eyeing them with amusement. The kids ignore them.
By noon their gang is stretched down the street. By seven pm, it’s around the corner and up the block. All of them share one thing – a look of wide-eyed expectation as waves of noise run from the door to the back of the queue. “Are the doors open? Has one of them come out?” They all surge to see. False alarm. But soon they will see their heroes, My Chemical Romance, and all for just two dollars, courtesy of MTV who are filming the show.
Inside, The Trocadero is a hub of activity. A converted theatre, it’s just large enough to be impressive and just small enough to be intimate. Everywhere runners are taping wires to the floor, gabbling in walkie-talkies and checking things off on clipboards. Lights are being strung up on one side, while cameras are hauled into position on the other.
Sat in an upstairs bar, dressed in identical uniforms, are My Chemical Romance. They’re currently being interrogated by MTV. They’re clustered together on stools, lights in their face, cameras aimed at them.
Around them are perhaps 30 people – producers, TV crew, directors, presenters and a host of others. Some care a great deal about this band. Most do not. One executive is texting a friend. “I dunno. Some band. I don’t know who they are. I’m only here because I have to be.”
A presenter fires questions at them, focussing mostly on singer Gerard Way, hair newly bleached blonde, and guitarist Frank Iero. Each time they answer a question, a girl from MTV times their answers on a stopwatch, making desperate ‘wrap-it-up’ signals as their replies run on. Bassist Mikey Way will pitch in too but drummer Bob Bryar and guitarist Ray Toro look moodily on, dangling their microphones between their legs, no intention to use them. Eventually Bryar gives up completely and just puts his mic down. This isn’t really his scene. This isn’t what he does.
You wonder how many times the band have done this in the last few weeks, certainly they will have already been asked the questions they’re being asked today – “What does ‘The Black Parade’ mean”, “Gerard, why is your hair blonde”, “So, you guys like comics, huh?” – but their replies are sincere, courteous and prompt. “If you’re this proud of your record,” says Gerard to someone who asks if he minds all this, “You gotta do the work”.
And My Chemical Romance are very proud of their new record, The Black Parade. You can see it in their excited eyes, their nervous giggles, the way they fall on anyone who has heard it, slyly questioning them as to what they think of it.
But it wasn’t always this way. There was a time when the album nearly finished them. There was a time, not so long ago, when the members of My Chemical Romance were wracked with depression and locked in a room together, screaming abuse at each other. “There were times we really cut ourselves open,” says Gerard. “We cut ourselves open and saw how ugly we were inside. We had our souls drained out…” He leans in, voice quavering, eyes wide. “I’m serious. This record tried to kill us.”
MY CHEMICAL Romance have had to adapt a great deal recently. Two years ago they released their second album Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge. They had a great album, an alcoholic singer, and absolutely no expectations weighing them down. That record sold 2.5 million copies and rising and suddenly its creators were internationally famous megastars about whom column inch after column inch was spun. They couldn’t go out on the street any more, everywhere there were cameras, people wanting them, tugging at them, needing them. Their singer got sober fast, meanwhile the expectations were building and building.
Their crowds swelled, an army of outsiders all who wanted to be given salvation by the band, who looked to them for therapy, for answers. Awards rolled in, praise from the highest quarters, ecstatic pronouncements that this was the greatest band in the world, that they had the answer.
But, get this: inside that bubble, away from the glitter and the showbiz, was a band going through something of a crisis. This adulation wasn’t something they expected or knew how to deal with. It wasn’t even something they felt they deserved. It all felt terribly like chaos.
“There’s a fine-line between treated like a demi-god and being treated like a circus monkey,” says Gerard Way. “When people don’t treat you like a human being, it’s very odd. It happened a lot.”
My Chemical Romance are in their dressing room backstage now – away from the ever more frantic TV crews outside. It’s a bare room, a couple of tired blue sofas, a mirror, strip lighting and a crate of water bottles in the corner. They’ve all shed the military uniforms they have adopted as their Black Parade image – all except Gerard, who looks ever more like he’s growing into his, like a second skin. They’re talking about what they’ve been through since that last record. How they didn’t expect any of this.
“You never quite know what you’re doing when you’re playing in an arena,” says Gerard. “You never quite know why you’re there. You hope it’s because your fans are behind you. But you don’t know whether it’s actually because you’re on TV and on the cover of teen magazines. You’re never quite sure if you deserve it.”
They all have individual examples of the odd moment when it struck them that, for the first times in their lives, they were the centre of attention. Mikey Way tells a story of sitting at the MTV Video Music Awards at what should have been a triumphant moment for the band.
“The interesting thing was,” he says, “I still didn’t feel like we belonged there. I felt like an outsider there. Nobody would talk to us, we just didn’t belong. All these famous people were walking around in really expensive clothes and we were thinking, ‘What are we doing here? Why me?’”
Bob Bryar was accosted by a fan the other day, shortly after he’d stepped out of the men’s room. “She was screaming, ‘I can’t believe you’re real!’ It was really weird. Really weird,” he says, shuffling his feet on the floor and wringing his hands. “I’m not comfortable with photo-shoots, interviews, all of that stuff. All this stuff makes me feel quite uncomfortable.”
These were the thoughts they were taking with them into the studio when they recorded ‘The Black Parade’ – getting used to being the centre of attention for the first times in their lives, suddenly being the heroes when they’d always been the underdogs, suddenly having people hanging on their words.
FOR A band who always positioned themselves as outsiders, suddenly becoming famous, becoming accepted, put My Chemical Romance in a difficult position. It’s hard to keep picking fights when everyone likes you.
“But I don’t think we’ve ever been accepted,” says Frank Iero. “It’s always been that way. I don’t think this band will ever be on top because we always have to fight to survive.”
“Every few months something else happens that we have to overcome,” says Ray Toro, picking up his theme – an increasingly common trick between My Chemical Romance these days. “There’s a new test constantly – Bob burning his leg [during the video shoot to second single Famous Last Words] and that getting infected, the reception we got at Reading [where the band were repeatedly bottled]. It makes you feel you’ve got to stand up and fight constantly.”
There’s a sense that they actually welcome this adversity, that they couldn’t survive without it. Perhaps they need to feel that everyone’s against them in order to bring out the best in themselves?
“I think that’s true,” says Gerard. “I like things around us to be challenging and chaotic – almost as though there’s a dark force constantly fighting us. It reminds us that we have to keep battling. It charges us. This band does need adversity. If we don’t have that, then we’re not doing any good. We need something to fight against, we need to be winning people over and changing their minds. The second we lose that, we become normal, we become mundane.”
Those are some pretty heavy things to have weighing down on you when you go in to record an album. No wonder The Black Parade nearly killed My Chemical Romance.
THERE WAS a point during the recording of that album when everything nearly ground to a halt. The studio, set in an old and allegedly haunted house high in the Hollywood Hills above Los Angeles, gave stunning panoramic views over the glittering city below.
Gerard Way was staring out at this view one day, cigarette burning in his fingers, turmoil in his head. He looked at everything below him and none of it felt real. He wasn’t sure who he was, he wasn’t sure what his role was, he wasn’t sure why he was needed.
“I was staring at that cityscape wondering what the hell I was doing with my life,” he says. “I went through a crisis. I was examining every awful thing about myself. I was cutting myself open and taking all the parts out and examining them. I realised, ‘Wow, I’m not a likeable person’. I found out that I was a coward. I became very susceptible to depression.”
He pauses for a minute, thinking.
“It wasn’t the happiest time of our lives. I was extremely intense. I was very edgy, almost like I wasn’t really alive. I was living inside the record. It really did feel like something was coming after us. We couldn’t escape it. It was there every time we turned a corner. It was just staring at us. It was a dark time.”
The problem was that it wasn’t just Gerard who was going through this. He says that everyone in the band was going through something similar.
Frank talks about recording the album in terms of how much he bled, how much he suffered. “I became really introspective,” he says. “I felt we were treading a thin line between greatness and insanity. We were always on the brink. Always.”
After this interview took place, it emerged that Mikey became so upset and had so many difficulties during the recording of the album, that he temporarily left My Chemical Romance and went into therapy for depression and addiction. This is not something any of his bandmates talk about today, though.
The pressure during the recording process got so bad that the band had to devise a way to release it, a vent to pour out their emotions into. They designated one room in the house ‘The Heavy Room’. They would head in there to thrash out their feelings, to be bluntly and brutally honest with each other – sometimes hurtfully so.
“Mentally, we were beating each other up,” says Ray. “We were getting to the root of some really deep problems. We would spend hours and hours in that room, having long conversations while the little demons we all carried inside of us came out. Sometimes you have to let those things go. That’s just one of the things that was going on in the heavy room.”
“That room drained our souls out,” says Gerard. “It took all our energy. It drained everything out of us. We just talked and talked in there. We talked about everything – life, us, everything…
“Every day we were finding something new and ugly about ourselves. We kept finding things out about our personalities that we didn’t like. We found all the cracks, all the chinks in our armour. We really found out how ugly we were. But, without that, we couldn’t have made a good record. We had to push ourselves right to the edge.”
But they nearly went over the edge, why did they risk their sanity?
“Because,” he says, “this band has always had a desire to achieve greatness. It’s always loved the taste of victory, it loves winning, it loves beating the odds.”
THE BOND between the members of My Chemical Romance has always been vital to what they do. They’ve often said that coming home from touring is like returning from a war, the implication being that the ties between them are equally as complicated and reliant on each other as they are between soldiers returning from the front.
The sessions in The Heavy Room seem only to have made those connections stronger. Mikey Way talks about the “brutal honesty” that formed the basis of the conversations there. Those sorts of conversations have been the breaking of many other bands. But My Chemical Romance eventually emerged stronger, connected by a deep-rooted knowledge of the depths of each others’ personalities.
“We went into the record thinking that we were as tight as we could possibly be – as friends and as family,” says Frank. “We came out of it a hundred times closer. That was shocking. But I definitely know that this – my family – has our back. That’s a great feeling to have when you want to go out and take on the world.”
The blood-letting between the members so changed their relationships with each other that the entire essence of the band began to feel different.
“That’s exactly what happened,” says Gerard, who could well be talking about what his brother went through. “We became so protective of each other when we were making this record that everything became different. We became a different band. We had always loved each other – we’re like brothers – but this was something different.
“What got us through was putting our personal problems aside in order to help the other guy. You would realise, ‘This guy is going through some serious problems, so I have to forget my issues and help him’. I had to forget my anxieties, depression and nightmares to help my brothers. We all went through that. That’s what had to be done. That’s why there were so many talks in The Heavy Room. We just had to be there to listen to each other.”
And you can see it as they squeeze to get past each other in these narrow backstage corridors, the looks they exchange, the club they’re in that no-one else can join. It’s there when Bob, as he frequently does, aims a quick, friendly punch in Mikey’s direction, or when they tease Bob back, saying, “Yes we saw that trick with your drumsticks,” when none of them did. And it will have to be because these five will come to rely on each other more and more over what promises to be a gruelling few months ahead.
“We know that,” says Mikey, meaningfully as it turns out. “This is the sort of time in a band’s career when people might lose their mind. We have to have each other backs to make sure no-one gets broke.”
NOWHERE IS the bond between them more evident than when they’re onstage. The Trocadero isn’t quite full tonight – to allow room for MTV’s cameras to move around the hall, not because the show wasn’t a sell out.
In the auditorium below, the girls who’d been waiting since 2am make it to the front, pressed against the barrier, content to endure the discomfort because what’s does being squashed matter when you’ve slept rough for this?
The man from MTV gives the band a frankly ludicrous introduction. “In 1787,” he cries, “our forefathers signed the United States constitution here in Philadelphia and changed history. And now, in 2006, Philadelphia is to host a gig that will change the course of musical history forever. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE!”
The theatre goes ballistic, fans crawling over each other to get nearer the front, to make their day-long wait in the street worthwhile.
Here, upstairs, it’s no less frantic: fans standing in their seats, bouncing on their chairs. In the roped off VIP area are the band’s girlfriends but in the far corner is perhaps the band’s biggest fan. Frank Iero’s mum, in My Chemical Romance hoodie and t-shirt, is hanging over the balcony, gazing at her son as he whirls below, pride flushed across her face, her mouth singing along to every word.
Gerard Way becomes a ringleader onstage, ever more eccentric and camp, but his movements are more considered than in previous years – less flailing and more purposeful. The band behind him giving him every support he needs, building the platform for him to scream from. Their new songs, meanwhile, are lapped up by the rabid crowd before them – lyrics sung back to the band though no-one here can legally have heard the songs before.
And so the band fall happily together in their dressing room afterwards – as wide-eyed as their fans were before the show. In those looks there’s pride and happiness but mostly there’s exhilaration about what’s to come.
“God, I’m happy,” says Gerard. “I’m excited, edgy and nervous too, but I’m almost violently happy. I feel like we’ve put everything on black and we’ve spun the roulette wheel…”
He pauses for a beat, an adrenaline fuelled grin spreading across his face.
“…But, you know what? If you’re not risking everything, you might as well not play at all.”
© Tom Bryant 2010
