Be My Escape

“And we’ll love again, we’ll laugh again
We’ll cry again and we’ll dance again
And it’s better off this way
So much better off this way
I can’t clean the blood off the sheets in my bed”

My Chemical Romance’s debut album I Brought You My Bullets You Brought Me Your Love was a legitimate gem of the underground. An album of no real singles but lots of passion, it was furious, gnashing, fast and flailing. Very much authentically of the New Jersey Post-Hardcore scene that spawned it. Yet, My Chemical Romance were straining against their context. Unmistakably unique: the comic book nerds from Planet 13 in a sea of pale skinny lushes. They had ideas and vision, but they couldn’t quite break through fully formed.

With the help of years of hard graft on the road and a major label deal Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge let that heat catch fire. Honing MCR into something sleek and consumable. They stopped dressing in a motley selection of blue jeans, graphic tees and leather jackets, and adopted a more militaristic and stark look. Red, black and white. Suit and tie, bat belt-buckle, bullet-proof vest. You could put a poster of them up on your wall now.

Gerard Way is a world-famous comic book artist, but note that he historically used and manipulated his own image as he would a character on the page. The cute vampire boy, screaming assassin, mourning grand-son. Switching between male and female perspectives, kissable and coy while overtly referencing homosexuality and crossdressing. This was white-hot ahead of its time. Surrounded by an era of frumpily boring, utterly dull, scene gender politics. Give that poster a loving kiss.

Most importantly, My Chemical Romance started writing singles.

From albums one to two My Chemical Romance’s songs went from spasming and wild, with chunks of melody here, screaming there, to being confidently filmic. Classic 3:30 rock songs. Buttressed by the grandiose line in the CD inlay: “The story of a man, a woman, and the corpses of a thousand evil men.” Sweeping tracks of mob bars, prisons, D-Day beaches, Wes Anderson high schools, mortuaries and cemeteries abound. The hooks were big enough to be sung along to, not by dozens, but by thousands.

The band were also dripping more of their authentic selves into the record. The Italianate, Polish and Puerto-Rican heritage of the band members coming across in how unavoidably Catholic it all was. The church-service of Helena, the rosary and Lady of Sorrows Imagery. Assorted crosses and praying hands. The looming presence of momento mori, the last rites and the yawning afterlife ever present.

And all of this grand design and pomp came from bleak past. Being billed from Newark New Jersey (home of the Sopranos), and with many of the band members growing up surrounded by the overspill of crime (Ray Toro’s local pond being used as a dumping ground for dead bodies and Gerard having a gun pulled on him during a robbery), these weren’t middle class boys playing pretend with ghosts and ghoulies, but the sons of the blue-collared trying to make sense of the terrifying world around them through art. This art, yes with all of its makeup and camp, was an honest escape, how many times did they have to say it to be taken seriously? Give My Chemical Romance the dignity of taking them at their word.

The dust clouds of 9/11 billow over his album. The singular trauma that birthed the band. Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge released in 2004, three years after 9/11, two years after the Bali Bombing, the same year as the Madrid Train Bombing and the year before London’s 7/7. My Chemical Romance as soundtrack for a deeply paranoid age. The situation was bleak, the situation was utterly out of your confused teenage hands. But through their music them and their fans could push through to the other side. Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge is the sound of a band running from the world and promising to take their fanbase with them hand-in-hand.

As a Catholic school pupil, black blazer, white shirt, red tie, growing up in a 00s London gripped with terror behind every corner, you can bet I took that hand and have never let go.

Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge has survived and lives on in its fans. A cult album in the truest sense. My Chemical Romance built a world for them to live in with this album, and it’ll stand eternally whether the band themselves exists or not. I remember logging onto Instagram in 2018, while MCR was totally dormant, to find hundreds of teenagers logging on every day to post pictures of Gerard and Frank as if we were all back on 2005 MySpace. What an absurd, but very real situation. The strength of image, the clarity of purpose, the purity of emotion and honesty of soul have driven this album to classic status. Three Cheers.