How a My Chemical Romance show nearly started a riot
The album release is a dying art form. These days, it’s enough to just lob an album onto a streaming service without warning, call it a “surprise release” and bask in the think pieces inspired by your “shocking defiance of music industry norms”. Maybe these artists are satisfied by being able to spend more time focusing on the music and not the promo. That would be fair enough. Personally, I think there should be more people taking a leaf out of the book of My Chemical Romance.
The New Jersey emo titans have always had a theatrical streak in them a mile wide, and nowhere was this more apparent than during the album rollout for their 2006 masterpiece, The Black Parade. One that began with nothing more auspicious than a set of T-shirts rolled out on their official website. After the tour for their breakout album, 2004’s Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge, concluded, the band went back in the studio and kept very shtum about what would happen next.
A few new songs had popped up on the setlists for that tour’s final shows, but other than that, nothing. Then their website’s official store added a new T-shirt—black (naturally)—with the words “We Are The Black Parade” emblazoned on the front. Five words that would go on to define the band and the world of rock ‘n’ roll in general for the next few years, but were, at the moment, nothing more than a T-shirt design. Then, it was announced.
My Chemical Romance would play on the bill for the 2006 Reading and Leeds Festival, and two days before, they would play a warm-up gig at the Hammersmith Palais. The die-hards who queued up early for that gig were rewarded for their devotion. At different points in the afternoon leading up to the doors, a full horse-drawn funeral hearse decked out in Black Parade colours was driven down the road in front of them, before a group of minions clad in face-covering black cloaks led them to the doors of the Palais.
How did this My Chemical Romance show nearly go horribly wrong?
Thus, what you had was a room jam-packed with the most die-hard fans of the most cult-like rock band in the world at the time. These were people who had been waiting all day in baking August heat to catch the smallest show their heroes had done in years, cloaked in mystery and guesswork. It would be one hell of a crowded theatre in which to suddenly shout “fire!”, wouldn’t it?
The moment the houselights went down, an announcement was read over the PA: “Unfortunately, My Chemical Romance will not be able to perform this evening due to unforeseen circumstances. They have expressed their deepest apologies. In their absence, they have asked their good friends to fill in for them.” So, fun fact, this concert was bootlegged and you can find it on YouTube and hear the apocalyptic amount of shit that the audience lost first hand.
It takes them a minute to recover it, too. The band begin the intro to album opener ‘The End’ shrouded in darkness, all clad in monochrome Sgt Pepper uniforms with Gerard Way‘s newly bleached pixie cut making them appear nothing like the singer the audience knew and loved. Over deafening chants of “MCR!!”, the band begin a number that has since become one of their most heard songs and a highly surreal sound to hear two decades later.
One of the more charming aspects of that bootleg is that you can hear the individual shrieks of joy and relief passing through the audience as they realise that “The Black Parade” is merely a pseudonym for the band themselves. By the time the lights go up and the song truly kicks in, what could have been a riot is settled with aplomb, and the band kick off one of their most famous concerts properly.
As the show goes on, Gerard officially announces the ruse, saying that they are in fact My Chemical Romance and that “The Black Parade” is the title of their next album. In an interview with Kerrang at the time of the show, he talked about how that spirit of old-school classic rock pageantry had informed the whole album.
He said, “It’s almost as if we’re trying to spearhead some kind of neo-classic rock movement. Bringing the pageantry and the theatre back. We wanted to capture that glory, that over-the-top-ness and that essence of classic rock in the 1970s.”
I think it’s safe to say that they succeeded in doing just that, long before the album or any of its songs had hit shelves.
