204. My Chemical Romance
Milton Keynes Stadium
22 May 2022
There are few sights more surreal than driving into Milton Keynes, that lost dystopia of roundabouts, chain hotels, and failed urban optimism, only to discover that it has become ground zero for Britain’s reunited goth and emo population. Picture a black tide of eyeliner and complicated shoe wear, swarming through identikit retail parks. It was like the apocalypse just with sensible town planning.
This was My Chemical Romance, back from the dead after nearly a decade, and for thousands of fans (including my daughter, for whom this is not just a band but THE band), it was more than a gig. It was pilgrimage.
We checked into our hotel to find the lobby already overrun by the faithful: goth teenagers in smeared mascara, twenty-somethings revisiting their youth, and more fishnets than a trawler’s convention. My daughter was fizzing with anticipation; I was quietly amused, realising I might have stumbled into the world’s friendliest vampire convention.
Over food and drinks, we started counting the different variants of goth on display. There was Classic Goth (velvet, eyeliner, air of tragic romance), Anime Goth (neon hair, oversized sleeves, looks like a walking Studio Ghibli film), Corporate Goth (black blazer, subtle nail polish, probably interns in HR), and Sexy Goth (definitely has an OnlyFans page). It was a social anthropologist’s fever dream.
The band hit the stage with “The Foundations of Decay”, their new single and a fittingly apocalyptic opener. Gerard Way appeared in a tattered suit and medical mask, looking like a post-pandemic undertaker who’d been raised by Tim Burton. His voice, cracked, glorious, defiant, carried across the stadium like a sermon to the damned. The crowd erupted.
From there, it was chaos of the best kind. “Helena,” “Give ’Em Hell, Kid,” “I’m Not Okay (I Promise)”, every song greeted like the second coming. The sound was colossal, the emotion, off the charts as a stadium full of weeping goth kids, heavy mascara running in pools, threatened to cause a serious health and safety slip hazard. Way strutted, wailed, and occasionally looked as though he might burst into tears himself. It was catharsis, theatre, and for this crowd, beautiful nostalgia rolled into one jet-black fireball.
As the songs radiated out from the enormous stage, something genuinely moving started to dawn on me. Looking around at the crowd, thousands of black-clad devotees, I realised this wasn’t just fashion or fandom. This was communion. These were the kids who, back in the day, didn’t fit: the weird ones, the outcasts, the anxious, the artists, the beautiful misfits. And My Chemical Romance had been their voice, their armour, their validation. You could feel that love in the air: fierce, loyal, and utterly unselfconscious.
My daughter was completely lost in it: singing every lyric, glowing, and as I looked around at thousands of others doing the same, I realised something else: for all the melodrama and eyeliner, this was an astonishingly positive gig. No cynicism, no cool detachment, just unfiltered joy from a crowd who had, at some point in their lives, really needed this music.
By the time “Welcome to the Black Parade” arrived, the place went nuclear. The opening piano notes triggered a collective emotional detonation. People cried. People hugged. I half expected someone to start levitating, caught up in the sheer force of it all.
Leaving the stadium was its own epic journey. Milton Keynes’ post-gig logistics could charitably be described as “dystopian gridlock.” We found ourselves crammed onto the top deck of a bus that wasn’t moving, surrounded by dozens of euphoric young adults still high on adrenaline. The air was thick with sweaty condensation, run eyeliner, and happiness.
My daughter sat among them, grinning from ear to ear, utterly spent, utterly content. Around her, strangers were recounting their favourite moments and hugging people they’d just met. It struck me that, for all its chaos, this was what music was supposed to do, to give people like these a home, a tribe, a reason to feel seen. Milton Keynes might have been born from the cold, sterile logic minds of post-war utilitarians, but tonight, it was all heart.