Formed a week after 9/11, the 10-year rise of My Chemical Romance from goth-metal outsiders to mainstream has been slow, steady, focused and strategic – but often with 'fierce battles of attrition', frontman Gerard Way tells TONY CLAYTON LEA
FROM TOP TO toe, the lead singer of My Chemical Romance is a riot of colours – purple/red hair, white shirt, black jeans, blue socks, silver runners with a lime green trim. Gerard Way is tucked into a small room somewhere in the upper floors of Dublin’s O2 venue – the floors and rooms most people don’t get to see, but which, after the band’s quietly spectacular show, will be full of teenagers lucky enough to have been picked for the US band’s meet’n’greet.
Way is a smart cookie; he describes himself as “a visual artist that happens to be in a rock band”, and seems eager to get his point across regarding the similarities between music and visual art. He has said that MCR was born out of post-traumatic stress disorder (they formed one week after 9/11) and connected quickly with the zeitgeist notion of claiming one’s destiny before life as they knew it went pear-shaped.
The band’s rise has been slow but steady, focused and strategic, but often with, remarks Way candidly, “fierce battles of attrition”. They are at a point now where they are becoming more and more mainstream – songs on Glee, songs played before US football matches, songs on pop music radio.
It wasn’t always like this, of course, but the pace began to quicken after the release in 2006 of The Black Parade. Here was an ambitious concept record that mixed piano ballads, vaudeville and knuckle-cracking punk/pop that attracted an older audience, while still holding their teen fanbase in thrall. The result was that The Black Parade sold well over three million, making MCR one of the hottest US rock acts around.
Yet the album quickly became an albatross, a burden exacerbated by tabloid outrage, which in 2008 linked the band to a self-harming cult among their teenage fans. " The Black Parade," explains Way – who, sitting cosily in a sofa chair, expresses himself via a gentle and sincere flow of words – "was a burden emotionally and physically, as well as culturally being a heavy weight. But then I learnt to love it again, which came down to playing the shows, and seeing the responses to it.
“The process of re-engagement with the album began with honestly sitting down and doing media interviews like this, and also just talking to people about it. When we were touring it for over two years, we didn’t realise what it meant to people. We had no perception of it because we didn’t look for it. All we felt was the negative cultural impact – not bad reviews of shows or albums, but rather the tabloidism that went around.”
The band's new album, Danger Days – the True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys, is even better than its predecessor, and looks set to follow that album's slow-burn success.
"The perception about The Black Paradewas that it was a full-frontal-assault-with- guns-blazing album, but it took us almost three years to sell three million records. That gradual process is how it should be, because it gives people time to digest, understand and appreciate. I know a lot of the 'full-frontal' kind of records – they come out, everybody goes wow, everyone wants to like them straight away, yet within a few months they get bored with them; within a year or so, they don't talk about them at all. A challenging record is one that people have to think about, and that will last longer. Like The Black Parade, Danger Days needs to get into the cultural DNA."
The album is already doing this, with quite a few of the songs on it embracing a wider sound, a further-reaching scope. At the moment, everyone points to one of the album’s highlights, Sing, which Way describes as a rock song based on a valid worldview rather than fictional angst.
“It’s a victory to us to get songs of ours on mainstream radio – so yes, that’s an ambition. Not that you construct a song in any particular way, but the game plan is to get under the cultural skin, to infect it like a disease, make a song so damned great that it doesn’t matter if it has loud guitar in it. The idea, then, is to infiltrate. It’s strategic cultural subversion. You don’t like the way things are? Well, don’t complain about it; instead, do something about it.”
Way sees MCR’s latest album as a successful mash-up of rock music and graphic art. “Previously, I had thought that the two forms had needed to be separate. There was hesitancy, perhaps, to join the two, simply because I wanted each art form to have their fair shake. But then I started to realise that all I think about are the same ideas, the same things, and they both relate to storytelling. So the new album was about me taking ownership of being a graphic artist. It’s all circular for me, anyway.”
Circular or not, Way regards certain perceptions of the graphic art form as mistaken and uninformed. It stays underground in a weird way, he implies, and because of that it is sorely underrated. Some people, he laughs, still think it’s just for kids. He explains that he has always been attracted to juvenile things, and goes on to say that the best time of his life, for certain entities such as innocence and discovery, was his childhood.
“So maybe I’m holding on to that,” he smiles, his two arms splayed, mock-presenting his Technicolor dress sense. “Maybe I’m taking the good from it, the joy that you get from discovering a brilliant movie or a wonderful piece of art. That’s why, perhaps, I connect so much with youth culture, because I still, very desperately, hold on to my childhood. There’s nothing wrong with that, I think.”
You’re never too old to have a happy childhood, of course, providing, agrees Way, you balance gleeful enthusiasms with adult responsibilities. “I understand that the honourable reason why someone might not buy an Incredible Hulk T-shirt is because a bill has to paid. But to say that the reason you can’t buy it is because you’re a grown-up – well, that’s just wrong.”
Danger Days — the True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoysis on release through Reprise/Warners
Spandex alert Gerard Way's top three comic book superheroes
'I've always been drawn to ones with less ability, but the top one is Batman, simply because I think he has the best villains — you can't really beat the likes of The Joker, The Riddler, Catwoman, and his surroundings of Gotham City, and the gadgets are great. And for some reason, he seems to be the one superhero that everyone can project themselves onto, which I find interesting.
I really like
DareDevilbecause of his disability of blindness and because of the fact that his superhero ability isn't that interesting. Frank Miller's 1980's graphic novel Born Again, also, took a comic-book character that was virtually throwaway and made a gripping story out of it, so DareDevil became quite cool.
My third choice is a collective
– X-Menhad a big importance for me. I just love the range of powers they have. I like the movies, too – the third one was a bit weird, mind, but I'm really looking forward to the prequel, which is out in the summer."
MCR A bluffer's guide
Formed a week after the September 2001 terrorist attacks in New York, My Chemical Romance (named from the Irvine Welsh book
Ecstasy: Three Tales of Chemical Romance) gradually evolved from a basic goth-metal band into an alt rock act with a keen sense of melody and a committed teenage fan base.
MCR's lead singer, Gerard Way, is a trained graphic artist, and is the writer of the Eisner Award-winning comic book
The Umbrella Academy.
The band's latest album, 2010's
Danger Days — the True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys, is the follow-up to the multi-million selling 2006 release, The Black Parade.
