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"The combination of all of us and all of you is
very fucking dangerous because we have something to
fucking say," Gerard Way will shout to the audience
towards the end of tonight's show. "We want you to
stay who the fuck you are. Don't take anyone's fucking
bullshit because you're better than them."
He will recite this just before launching into Give 'Em Hell
Kid and it is this, better than the skeletal military
jacket he will by then have discarded in favour of a
black blazer, and better than the silver hair that has
saved him from looking like a Meatloaf mini-me,
that you will either get or you won't. You see, Goths
are better than other people and you're either with us
or you're against us. There is no middle ground.
My Chemical Romance are very clever lads. Cynically
or sincerely, they have uncovered the one, true dark
secret of Goth: rather than being about sitting on
your own in a lonely bedsit, listening to miserable
songs and feeling sorry for yourself (that's what the
Smiths are for), Goth is about dressing up and
showing off. It's about making an impression, layering
on more make-up than the next kid, doing things with
your hair that take hours and will upset your
teacher/mother/boss, and most of all, it's about
romance.
That's right, Goth is about romance. There's the
obsession with death, but even that is with the
romance of death rather than the misery of it, which
is gloriously apparent on songs like Cancer ("The
hardest part of this is leaving you") and To The End
("If you marry me will you bury me? Will you carry me
to the end?") both of which will be aired tonight.
Dress like a Goth, head off to the first day in a new
flat, club, college or job and you're immediately
staking your claim. You can instantly identify the
other people (i.e. other Goths) who are worth talking
to. My Chemical Romance's genius is that they've
started their own gang and only the people worth
talking to are invited to the party. Come and join us.
Dressed straight from The Black Parade video, they
open on The End, with its
gloriously overblown music hall pomp as Gerard Way
struts like a latter day Freddie Mercury across the
stage. Dead!, This is How I Disappear and Not Okay (I
Promise) follow in quick succession as the crowd
provide so much accompaniment that you wonder if the
band really needed to turn up at all, dancing, waving
and brandishing armfuls of flowers at the feet to the
new messiah. Who cares if Disappear has nicked most of
its riffs from Magazine's Shot By Both Sides? Not us,
if this is how well it rocks.
Gerard Way is in fine form, stoking the "us against
the world" Goth fires in between songs and then we're
into the marching band early bars of Cemetery Drive,
followed by the nursery rhyme-cum-Cabaret chimes of
Mama. Without Liza Minnelli here to do the
honours, it's left to the crowd to fill in and they
love every second of it, hyped to the heavens in time
for Welcome To The Black Parade, which is beyond
words. It's dripping camp, the bastard child of
Bohemian Rhapsody and the Rocky Horror show and it is
the song of the year, haunting and explosive.
The almost boy-band-ballad of I Don't Love You
follows (because he doesn't doubt for a second that we
do love him, of course) and from then until the end of
the show it is, like the first half, equally split
between the current album and its direct predecessor
Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge, with Teenagers, Give
'Em Hell, Kid and Famous Last Words all thrown into
the mix. Just in case you thought for a second there
wasn't a sense of humour underlying all this, they
finish on an explosive You Know What They Do To Guys
Like Us In Prison.
The encore is the beautiful, haunting and soaring
piano ballad of Cancer followed by Helena, another
love song about early death that only Goths and 60s
all-girl harmony bands can get away with. They will
never again play a venue this intimate. From here on
in, the future is Wembley Arena (already booked). What
a way to go.
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Mercury Prize 2009 nominees
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