True Romance

You might regard New Jersey's My Chemical Romance as the purveyors of high-concept designer emo epics, or you might more favourably (and accurately) consider them a garish melange of comic strip and future-shock melodrama channeled through high volume rock 'n' roll. For all the complex hair, goth overtones and soft focus ultraviolence, MCR recall Bob Ezrin's productions for Alice and KISS, or rock opera epics like Tommy, burnished with Queen-ly grandeur. The band's fourth album Danger Days: The True Lives Of The Fabulous Killjoys, the follow up to their multi- million selling 2006 magnum opus The Black Parade, feels like a visual event as much as a musical one (the videos for the singles 'Na Na Na (Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na)' and 'Sing' take the form of sci-fi shorts informed by Mad Max and manga). Singer Gerard Way, for his part, doesn't differentiate between audio and visual: he sees his band's albums as cityscapes cinemascoped in sound. He is also, it's worth mentioning, one of the few rock musicians in proud possession of an Eisner award, for his 2008 graphic novel The Umbrella Academy.

"That gave me a lot of skills this time with Danger Days," Way admits. "I enjoy sitting in a hotel room and writing all night. I generally have stuff to do during the day, but when I don't I'll sit backstage and do the same exact thing. Something the band does musically is create worlds, and I think we do that every time we make a record. Obviously the music is the most important, but the visual is almost tied for importance. Even if it's not a concept record with a strict storyline or characters, every single album should have a world that the music lives in. I think we always have to do something ambitious. This time, apart from the music, there was almost twenty times more art created than for Black Parade. It took a year to do all of it and get it ready."
Would he ever consider extending the album's visual concepts into an art exhibition or a film or musical?
"I think I would enjoy a setting in which people could see the car up close, and the costumes, and all the graphic design and sketches that ended up inspiring all that stuff. Once it's warranted I think it would be really cool. I can't really see it as a musical, but some kind of visual thing, like a TV show. I've always been a fan of series like the original of The Prisoner, I saw it as a kid, they did a Sci-fi Channel marathon of it when they first launched the network, so I would really see it as something like that. I actually feel like rock music and comic books and horror movies have a strong connection. One of the interesting things I paid attention to on this record – ‘cos there’s a bit of a psychedelic element on certain tracks like ‘S.C.A.R.E.C.R.O.W’ – is that the psychedelic rock movement actually had a lot to do with comics, if you look at the old fliers, Dr Strange and things like that."
Comics have been good karma for MCR. Their cover of Dylan's 'Desolation Row', which Zack Snyder used over the closing credits of Watchmen, helped pull them out of their post Black Parade comedown slump (an entire album of material recorded with Brendan O'Brien was scrapped before they reunited with producer Rob Cavallo).
"I'm a casual Bob Dylan fan, but I am a Bob Dylan fan, and I've had friends of mine that turned me onto more of his stuff," Way reveals. "Zack had this idea that he wanted to start and end the film with a Dylan song. He wanted 'The Times They Are A-Changing' for the opening and 'Desolation Row' for the end. I said, 'I feel like this movie has this kind of fuck-you energy to it, and that's probably the note you want to end on,' and I brought up this Jim Carroll song – the guy who wrote The Basketball Diaries – called ‘People Who Died’. I said I felt like it should have that energy. And he said, ‘Well I use that at the end of Dawn of the Dead, so I love that song – if you want to give ‘Desolation Row’ that energy I think it’d be perfect.’ It worked out really great. I approached the whole process as a fan of the book first, which is what Zack did. I know Alan (Moore) does disconnect himself from the films they make, but despite what he feels about the end result I think it felt like all the people involved in it creatively were just fans. The only other film of his work I could probably say that about is V For Vendetta."
Speaking of vendettas, MCR are no strangers to controversy. Almost three years ago, UK tabloids associated the band with “self-harming ‘emo’ cults” in their coverage of the suicide of thirteen-year-old Hannah Bond. It was Black Sabbath, Judas Priest and Marilyn Manson all over again.
“I have a greater understanding of why those things happened now, and maybe the motivation behind the endgame they had,” Way says. “Being a tabloid that has to sell papers, that’s their business, that’s what they do. We’re a rock band that makes music, that’s what we do, specifically a rock band that kind of irritates or instigates or polarises, which I think good rock music does. So you kind of had the perfect storm there: you had a tabloid that sells papers by being sensational and you have a band that is sensational. If it wasn't us it would've been an article about somebody else, or something else, to sell papers. That was what they zeroed in on that week. The unfortunate side of it is I think it got a lot of kids put in a spotlight they might not have wanted, and it perpetuated things like hate crimes or violence or bullying, I think it actually made that stuff worse. If that stuff comes up again I'll just take it for what it is. It's not gonna bother me as much as it did last time."
Besides, as Way acknowledges, the energy generated by any rock band is the antithesis to self-implosion.
"That's exactly how I feel. And I think the people who know the material, or are even remotely familiar with it, know that. What we're doing is very positive stuff. I don't think anybody could sit down and watch 'Black Parade' as a video and say, 'Oh my god, this is destructive and horrible.' There's nothing in there that's violent, it's way less harsh than shock-rock or horror-rock or anything like that. It looks like an old Fritz Lang film."
Almost 12 years after Columbine (and mere weeks after Tucson), the real problem is that any sociopath in America can get his hands on automatic weapons.
"Yeah, I mean there were people doing that kind of thing when all they had was books. There's a certain kind of literature and music and film, like Catcher In the Rye and stuff, that challenges people. They're meant for somebody that can deal with it. That doesn't mean we shouldn't have these works because some disturbed individual gets one of them and takes it the wrong way. I guess it means people have to feel that they can get help before they reach for a gun. And getting the gun is a whole other problem. It seems so easy.
"There's been times I've been walking around New York and saw somebody yelling, completely having snapped, and I can see there's a really fine line between somebody like that and a normal person. Something took this person to the point where he's just screaming at everybody. This is not necessarily a homeless person or someone that's mentally ill and has nowhere to live, this is somebody who just crossed that line. I don't know what brings them there, but the world does something to them and they can't process it.
“I love the film, but as a teenager I walked out of Fight Club wanting to perpetuate more violence than I had going to see fucking Blur play live. Or even going to a punk show and seeing NOFX. I was probably too young to handle that film. But rock shows are a good outlet for those kinds of things. Especially where we've gotten these days as a band. The focus is on really letting loose and having a great time and being yourself and that's it. There's no agenda, there's no mission, there's no takeover of the world, there's nothing, just, 'Come and have a good time.'"

Danger Days: The True Lives Of The Fabulous Killjoys gets a live airing on February 16 in the Dublin O2. See hotpress.com for archive interviews.