Back In Black! My Chemical Romance triumph at Welcome To Rockville

“Well,” smirks Gerard Way. “Look who’s back.”

Has it really been 20 years already? It only feels like last week that a much younger My Chemical Romance arrived onstage at Reading 2006, drummer-boy suits and all, to unveil the first proper live look at their new chapter to the UK. Billed after Slayer at teatime, as they unveiled bits of The Black Parade they were met with a storm of beer cups, burgers, wood chips and a fucking golf ball. The fun bit was the look in Gerard Way’s eyes as he led his band onstage, daring the naysayers to do their worst, and finished as a ketchupped-yet-unbowed hero of the day.

“They would have had to literally carry us off that stage for us to quit,” he told K! soon after. “We weren’t gonna give up or we’d have been full of shit.”

Two decades on, they arrive to close the final night of Rockville as all-conquering heroes, playing The Black Parade in full as a grandstanding testament to being a photo-finish for Band Of Their Generation. Bring Me The Horizon aside, in the near-200 bands who take to a stage this weekend, none have the same gravitas and, frankly, pandemonium as the Jersey boys.

Even with such an open goal, they play it as a trick shot. The visuals, extras and short-moustached fash bad lad onstage set a tone that’s like Monty Python doing Charlie Chaplin’s hilarious, mocking Springtime For Hitler. Being My Chem, this is camp-maxxed to a wicked extreme, with propaganda-ish visuals meeting Gerard’s Bowie swag. It’s the sexy riot such a record demands.

What quickly makes itself known is just what an ambitious throw MCR were making. Like, yes, you know that anyway. Marrying their Jersey thriller-punk grit with the theatrical grandeur of Queen is the record’s killer formula. But seeing it here, with this much heft, played out on such a massive scale, with the sort of distance that Queen, Bowie, Pink Floyd and Meat Loaf had from their own world-changing works when TBP came out, it’s all thrown into IMAX-style perspective.

‘Tis also a rare band who can be in this situation and deliver such drama with its sharp, shitty fingernails still scratching at you. So, while Dead! is all theatre kid stomp, This Is How I Disappear has a stinging vinegar burn. I Don’t Love You is a power ballad with a venomous sting in the tail. A while a goosebump-inducing, violin-backed Cancer’s ‘Soggy from the chemo’ observation remains a poetry both blunt and touchingly accurate.

For those there at the time, there is also an age-related relatability. Not least Welcome To The Black Parade (obviously, obviously), where the youthful thrill of defiantly carrying on makes more sense than it even did when it was first unleashed.

Gerard is absolutely in his element, as well. On the band’s last UK run, though great, at times he seemed to be wrestling with the whole bit at times, like a man keeping a massive power just out of engulfing distance. Here, even with the more obscure theatrics, he is the king of it. Charm itself. A man who has finally embraced being one of the finest rockstars of his lifetime. How else does a song as potentially daft and Bugsy Malone as Teenagers become one of the exhilarating highlights of the weekend? Bringing the main set to a glorious end, Famous Last Words underscores the album’s emotional power, with 50,000 people bellowing ‘I am not afraid to keep in living’ as the stage burns around the band.

An encore of non-Black Parade bangers I'm Not Okay (I Promise), Na Na Na (Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na) and a rousing, climactic Helena follows, ending the night, and the fest, in a blue of hysteria and wild energy. It's almost like seeing the marching band for the first time again. Wembley, you're in for something stunning this summer.

Read this next:

• The story of My Chemical Romance’s The Black Parade: “When it was done, I knew that we’d created a monster”
  
• Frank Iero: "Am I Still Alive? Or Is This All Just A Weird Figment Of My Imagination?"
• A deep dive into My Chem’s classic video for Welcome To The Black Parade