I took my unassuming uncle to see My Chemical Romance *not clickbait* 

By Ella Miller

Just over a year ago I went to see My Chemical Romance on their reunion tour. My Chem is my favourite band and one of the only bands, as a non-music-listener, that I can put on for hours straight and love every minute of.

I had taken a gap year and had been living with my family in London, England, for a few months. I was working at a Whole Foods to pay off my visa and plane tickets and realized with a little cash on my hands, I could maybe treat myself to going to a live show.

At the time, My Chemical Romance’s fabled return tour had been in the works for almost three years, the band having reunited in 2019 after a six-year hiatus. They had planned to go on tour beginning in 2020, but a certain worldwide pandemic got in the way of that.

For once in those black hole years of the pandemic, the stars aligned, and thanks to these delays, I was in the right place at the right time. That place being Milton Keynes, on the eve of May 19, 2022.

The Milton Keynes show was only the third on the tour and took place months before the band set foot in Canada for their Toronto and Montreal dates. If I went, I would be among the first Canadians, first North Americans even, to see the band perform since their hiatus.

I excitedly told my uncle that I was hoping to go to this show and that the public transit options were promising, so I should have no issues getting there. He explained it would probably be better to drive there, and if I got him a ticket, he would play chauffeur.

I agreed. I spent a few days biting my nails to nubs as I puzzled over which seats to pick before handing over a grossly large sum of money for a massive cheapskate like myself to the Dark Lord.

Once Ticketmaster had my money, there was no going back. I was really going to see My Chemical Romance. I only had one crushing thought: How am I going to explain this to my uncle?

For those unacquainted with the cult of My Chemical Romance, the fanbase can be intense. The band is truly for the weirdos by the weirdos, and because of that, the fans are fiercely protective of the musicians who give them a place to call home. The MyChem lore is dense and accessible only through geriatric LiveJournal pages and 144p Much Music rips from the early-2000s.

I knew that there was really no way to indoctrinate my uncle into the cult in a timely fashion. All I could do was focus on myself, and making this experience as seamless as possible.

The day of the concert, despite my efforts to manifest a clean bill of health, I was, in fact, sick.

Nothing was going to prevent me from seeing this show, however. My uncle and I made the agonizing crawl through rush hour London traffic that nearly doubled the length of the trip. Our commute to the venue was not helped by the parking situation.

Unlike in Canada and the United States, where developers will gladly bulldoze a nature reserve to build a behemoth parking lot, England does not have the space for such luxury. The parking we got was over a 40-minute walk from the actual venue. We then stood in a line that spanned the length of the stadium. It was pop-punk purgatory – I get sweaty just thinking about it.

It was during this time that I could see my uncle start to truly reflect on his life decisions. There he was, in a fleece zip-up sweater, surrounded by punks with their eyebrows pierced with unsterilized safety pins.

I would not call him entirely out of place, though.

Despite the concert acting as a homecoming for the emo community, the community is diverse. I was delighted to see an elderly woman on a mobility scooter there, supported by her family and absolutely killing it in black lipstick.

When we finally got to our seats, and after I fought tooth and chipped black nail for some merch, it got real.

The opening acts finished and the stadium went electric, an energy flickering through the crowd spreading from person to person. We were a tinderbox ready to ignite, hungering for that spark. We wanted to be engulfed and transformed.

The unease of the crowd was not entirely self-perpetuated. The band’s sound crew had begun to play a low radio static buzzing over the speakers. The entire stadium was in a plague of locusts simulation, which did nothing to calm my already fraying nerves.

The band appeared onstage to no fanfare. They simply walked on, radio static still pulsing through the air. The crowd more than made up for the band’s lack of bombast. We became living haunted houses, racked with screams and jolts, entirely unable to contain spectres within.

Okay, maybe I lied a little when I said that there was no fanfare.

To understand, I must delve into the My Chemical Romance lore. My Chem, pre-hiatus, was known as a very theatrical band. Their manifesto, in fact, was to be as dangerous as possible. At the helm of it all was their lead singer, Gerard Way.

Over the course of the band’s hiatus, though, this theatricality seemed to have bled away. The now-older Way, in his few media appearances, would be spotted in mottled green army jackets and jeans. Cozy, yes, but a far cry from the skeleton onesies and candy apple mop tops of the past. I didn’t really care about this transformation and had accepted this as our new reality.

I was wrong. I was so wrong.

The night of the concert, Way shed his skin as a mild-mannered father and emerged onstage as a contorted bloody creature somewhere between the White Violin, 90s David Bowie and Carrie. He stalked the stage with meandering paces, occasionally falling to his knees and writhing like a person possessed. He screamed and moaned, ranting about rats, before waxing poetic about the one-eyed stray cat he had adopted.

They were still the same band.

The first song, ‘Foundations of Decay’, began, and there was no going back. The concert itself was transcendent. The overwhelming bass drum and walls of sound present in ‘Mama’ and ‘Destroya’ ripped me apart from the inside, chattering my teeth and shaking me damn near out of my shirt; the nostalgic Smashing Pumpkins-esque ‘Summertime’ played as the sun set; my uncle left to go to the washroom just as the G note from ‘Welcome to the Black Parade’ hit – he returned to 20,000 people on their feet scream-crying the words to the centrepiece of a generation-defining rock opera and he had no idea. I cannot emphasize how perfect it all was.

The show concluded with two encores, one of which was dedicated to the people who should have been at that concert but had passed away over the course of the pandemic. The tribute was set to ‘Skylines and Turnstiles’, the song that founded My Chemical Romance.

For me, that was evidence that after all these years, the connection between the band and the fans that made them was still there. We had grown and changed, but maybe not so much that we had forgotten.

When the lights came up and everybody hissed like vampires (these are My Chemical Romance fans, after all) we knew it was time to leave. Nothing can last forever, and the Great Emo Convergence of ‘22 was no exception. My uncle and I began the trek back to the parking lot.

I was in a daze, not entirely believing the evening that I had experienced. I thought to myself, “I did not just see the disembodied voices that make the music in my headphones for real. They aren’t real. They can’t be.”

The next few weeks – weeks! – would be me coming to terms with the fact that the experience happened. The diary entries seen throughout this piece became my tether, reminding me that I had gone and it wasn’t an elaborate fever dream brought about by my sickness.

Every time I could get it through my head that I had been there, I was filled with overwhelming ecstasy. In my mind, I was part of history: a fantasy world had become real for the first time. I had entered Narnia and returned armed with an assault on the senses that I remain grateful for every time I remember it.