‘Twas five nights before Christmas, at a place called the Shrine, and a creature was stirring, in the LA sunshine. It had been 2,771 nights since this particular animal was last spotted in the wild (seven years, seven months and one day, to put it another way, but who’s counting?). The Halloween announcement that Gerard Way, Ray Toro, Frank Iero and Mikey Way were finally reuniting for a My Chemical Romance comeback show was met with mass hysteria. Tickets sold out in less than the time it takes to say ‘MCR’, to 6,299 unbelievably lucky fans.
6,299 lucky fans, and me. Sorry. It’s not that I didn’t like them, they just kind of passed me by at the time. I was a fraction too old when they first came out, and – as will forever be the case with music enjoyed by the age bracket just after yours, they always seemed terminally uncool. Still, it’s Christmas – a time when NME’s British staff can’t be parted from the warm bosom of their families/warm bottles of Jameson’s (delete as applicable), and I’m already in LA. So here I am.
The Collected Works of Kevin EG Perry 