HAVE YOU EVER SEEN THE LIGHTS?

the black parade is dead! (2007)

It’s something widely known in the pop punk community that one certain Brandon Flowers used to think that emo was a dangerous genre, that he wanted to beat Fall Out Boy to death, and that he was mad at Green Day for filming their American Idiot concert DVD in England and… not in front of the White House. Okay maybe he slayed with that one. 

So it would be easy to assume that our dear Mr. Flowers hates all the emos. This, however, wouldn’t be true. It all started in 2005 when Brandon and his band won the VMA for “Best New Artist in a Video” and “Best Rock Video” for Mr. Brightside, beating out MCR’s Helena in both categories. Upon being asked about how he felt about this, Brandon said that he thought Helena should have won because he really liked the song (don’t have a link for this source because it’s from an old magazine you know how the mid-2000′s were).

Both bands released albums in the fall of 2006 (TK’s Sam’s Town and MCR’s The Black Parade) which primed them for touring around the same time in 2007. At the beginning of 2007, Brandon told NME that he thought MCR would be the band of the year and that he wanted to “sign up for The Black Parade.” Brandon would go on to praise The Black Parade two months later in NME again:

“We share a lot with My Chemical Romance. It’s funny, if you look at very different bands they often have the same influences. The bands that My Chemical Romance or Kasabian or The Strokes list as their influences are similar to ours. I guess we all come together on David Bowie and things like that. There are threads weaving us together, but we’re all very different bands. It astonishes me, but it’s really cool that it can happen. ‘The Black Parade’ shows that My Chemical Romance have a real gift with melody and they’re doing their own thing. They were all on the Big Day Out with us, and I had emailed Gerard Way before but we’d never met, so that was nice.”

Gerard also talked about how much he liked Sam’s Town and even said it was one of his favorite albums of 2006, which is notable because Sam’s Town was wrongfully slammed in the press for being too different to The Killers’ first album. Gerard said: “We were making our record when this came out, but I can finally listen to it now. It’s one of the most moving records of last year, you feel what he’s talking about and it’s very risky. There’s stuff on there that makes me cry and it’s been a long time since that happened.”

Sam’s Town makes me cry, too, Gerard.

Later on in June 2007, the two bands played at Glastonbury together and took shelter from a storm together: “the Las Vegas rock group are running for cover from a freak tornado, huddled together in a shaking Portakabin with their friends from the band My Chemical Romance as the festival site where both groups are about to play is ripped apart.”

That same month, TK’s drummer Ronnie Vannucci told Racket Magazine, “I think first and foremost, everybody’s got to have their shit together, musically … A lot of bands try to cover it up … Muse and My Chemical Romance certainly don’t cover anything up because they’re both great bands.” The sentiment is likely shared by Gerard, who said at Oxygen Fest that year that he hoped to see The Killers because he “really likes them.”

Not much publicly has happened between the two of them since 2007, though Gerard did tell SPIN Magazine in 2009 that there’s “definitely” a connection between the Jenny in MCR’s Bulletproof Heart and the Jenny in TK’s Murder Trilogy.