Gerard Way does not look like the sort of kid who hangs around graveyards or fantasises about dying young and in circumstances of theatrical tragedy.
Way, frontman of dark-rock wunder-group My Chemical Romance has the sober, buttoned-down manner of a musician with an eye on the prize. Gothic angst is My Chemical Romance’s calling card yet Way, if some way short of chipper, is distinctly no nonsense. Ask him about his inner pain and he might well tell you about the time a stale sandwich gave him stomach cramp. Only the lips – sensuous, prone to pouts – suggest an otherness; one imagines him inclined to black moods and withering put-downs.
As I enter Way’s dressing room he appears on the verge of dispensing one such put-down to his tour manager. A rookie reporter has asked the vocalist if he gets off on having 13 year-old-girls in his audience, rhapsodically mouthing his lyrics, and Way doesn’t know whether to be stunned or furious.
“Man, I’m sorry about that,” coos the manager, his pallor somewhere south of corpse pale. Terror has rendered the poor guy practically translucent.
Way shrugs: it’s no big deal, he says. Being famous puts you in the firing line. He can handle it. High-fives are exchanged – mollified, the manager scurries away.
Famous? Heavens, yes. Last year My Chemical Romance sold three million records. In emo circles (a tag from which they recoil incidentally), the band bask in the sort of rarefied status Metallica enjoyed as a metal act 10 years ago. Their music is thrillingly transcendent, appealing to people who’d normally rather lie in an open grave than listen to 20-something Americans whinging in song about their dumb-ass parents.
“Emo – I don’t know what that phrase means,” mutters Way, who formed My Chemical Romance with younger brother Mikey in New Jersey four years ago. “I’ve always thought of us as a rock group. Those emo bands – some of them, I don’t think, are very real. I don’t identify with a lot of their music. It doesn’t move me.”
Little bro’s opinion on My Chemical Romance’s place in the emo scheme will have to wait – right now, he’s lying under the dressing room table, sleeping off a night of partying and an early morning flight from the UK (MCR are limbering up for a sell-out spot at Dublin’s Ambassador). Exhaustion and youth have conspired to lend his features an translucent eeriness – Mikey could pass for Edward Scissorhand’s punk baby brother.
We’re here to talk about the band’s second record, a flailing bulletin of youthful trauma called Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge. If you are a fan, chances are this was your introduction to My Chemical Romance. Way agrees the album was a breakthrough – the first time the group nailed the trick of expressing real pain rather than channeling a vague adolescent moochiness.
What, the ardent listener may wonder, triggered this ascent into the realm of grown up – which is to say, genuine – emotion? Are the pressures of sudden fame to blame? (while no gadzillion seller MCR’s debut, I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love, catapulted them into the emo A-league) Has Way recently suffered a broken heart? Did his puppy go missing?
“Actually, our grandmother passed away a few weeks before we got down to writing the record,” says the singer, whose cracked voice could belong to someone several decades older (he’s 29). “It was the first time someone close to us died. The shock was terrible. It took a long, long time for the pain to go away."
Clearly Way’s message – that it’s okay to feel sorry for yourself no matter how indifferent the world is to your suffering – has struck a chord with adolescent America. Some have gone so far as to hail him as a spokesman for the post-Nirvana generation. Way shrugs, if not quite embarrassed, then at least uneasy.
“I think it’s important that kids know that it’s okay to feel like an outsider, to know that they’re not the only ones. Look at the guys at Columbine. They were messed up kids, they thought they were on their own. Maybe, if they’d had someplace to turn things would have worked out differently.”