My Chemical Romance is set to reunite for a one-off show.
My Chemical Romance headline day two of Leeds Festival, 26th August 2011. Photograph by Mike Gray/LFI
The ‘Welcome to the Black Parade’ hitmakers – comprised of brothers Gerard and Mikey Way, Ray Toro, Frank Iero, and James Dewees – split in 2013, and in the six years since they went their separate ways, fans have longed for a reunion.
And on Thursday (31.10.19), the band announced they would be getting back together for a one-off show at the Shrine Expo Hall in Los Angeles California on Friday, December 20.
The show will mark their first performance together since 2012, and comes almost a decade after their last album, ‘Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys’, which was released in 2010.
My Chemical Romance’s reunion comes after frontman Gerard ruled out the prospect of getting back together in an interview earlier this year.
He said: “We definitely get offers regularly to reunite – it’s a constant thing…It’s flattering, it’s really nice of people … I miss playing with the guys, but I don’t think so.”
When the group split, the 42-year-old singer claimed the band weren’t needed anymore because Barack Obama was in power and he admitted the changing political climate in the US made him consider a reunion, but ultimately decided against it because he is such a different person now.
He added: “That’s stuff I thought about when the world started to get super f***ed-up again … It definitely came into my head, but I’d changed so much as a person.
“I didn’t know how I’d fit into it any more, I didn’t know how the band would fit into it any more. But you’re right, the world is definitely in need of something positive.”
Gerard admitted one of the reasons why the ‘Na Na Na’ musicians split up was because they stopped having “fun” and felt under a lot of pressure while making their last album.
He said: “When things start to succeed and go really well … that’s when a lot of people start to have an opinion and that’s when you run into struggle … everybody had a f***ing opinion about what MCR should be. So it made it difficult to figure out what direction to take next. You get caught up in this trap of ‘Is it ever gonna be good enough?’
“It wasn’t fun to make stuff any more. I think breaking up the band broke us out of that machine.”
