Words: Tom Bryant Photos: Paul Harries
"If my brother hadn't been in this band when I started it, I don't know if I'd have got through it all."
Gerard Way is looking across the table at his brother Mikey and talking about how important their family connection is.
"He's my best friend and he understands me like nobody else on earth," replies Mikey.
They're an odd pair, in some ways. If you didn't know they were related, you might not initially guess. While some siblings wear their shared DNA in clear physical features, you have to peer closely to see the similarities between Gerard and Mikey.
But, look hard enough, and they are there: something around the eyes, a little about the mouth, mannerisms that both adopt and then, of course, there's that broad New Jersey accent.
It is, though, not so much how they talk as what they talk about that makes their family connection clear. With private jokes, remember whens and wow, I forgot thats, they reveal the moments that forged their bond: long car journeys sharing a Walkman, hours alone at home, musical tastes that developed in tandem, and lives that are intertwined with shared experience.
Three years the younger, it was Mikey who first fanned the band flames when he took his brother to watch Smashing Pumpkins play at Madison Square Garden. And it was Gerard who took that inspiration and ran with it, eventually creating My Chemical Romance from the experience he had that day.
And since then, their paths have remainded shared: music, ideas, drink and drug addiction, depression, celebration, sobriety and much more. And, today, they're in the mood to talk about it.
CHILDHOOD
Gerard: "We wrestled a lot as kids but we didn't fight. In fact, come to think of it, there was a lot of wrestling...."
Mikey: "We watched a lof of WWF wrestling and copied that."
Gerard: "We were pretty close - that's probably why we still are now. We brought each other up in certain ways: creatively and emotionally. We were solitary together, if you see what I mean. We would entertain each other or talk nonsense for hours. That's why we have such a dialogue today: we know what each other are thinking, what we're going to say and we still enjoy it."
MUSIC
Mikey: "We werw always into the same stuff. We both love Britpop and we used to listen to [Blur's] Parklife together, reading all the Liam Gallagher vs Damon Albarn stuff in the music press. We discovered it all together through a friend."
Gerard: "That friend gave me a cassette of the Best Of The Smiths once before we were going on a family holiday to Virginia. Those tapes saved our lives on that drive. Mikey and I would sit there in the back of the car, with one Walkman earpiece each, sharing The Smiths."
SMASHING PUMPKINS
Mikey: "We got super into The Smiths and then, after that, we got into the Smashing Pumpkins. We played hooky from school one day and took the subway to Madison Square Garden to watch them. That was the show that changed everything for us."
Gerard: "Mikey bought me the ticket and so we hopped on a train. That was the show that started it all for this band. It got rid of that punk trap of 'keep it real'. That one show taught us that you could play a huge fucking rock show and still have integrity."
THE CHEMICAL BROTHERS
Gerard: "That was a nickname we had for a time. It was because we had a really bad drug problem together."
Mikey: "We used to drink a lot and we used to do some drugs. It was a means to an end: it was a way of getting from city to city. You had to build yourself off again. We got into a bad routine. I missed home and I was petrified to play, so I would get intoxicated. Then I had to find a way to wind down, so I'd take something to make that happen. Sometimes the drugs were like installing a shut-off switch in the back of my neck."
Gerard: "The crazy thing is that it's the same thing that killed Michael Jackson: he had to be put to sleep by one drug, then he had to be woken up by another. That's what everyone in bands is doing; they're just doing a cheaper, low-level version of it."
Mikey: "But we both broke it in the end. You see the damage it's doing to you and the changes it's making to you. Also, people I knew started to drop dead from mixing things and that's a wake-up call. It's only a matter of time before it happens to you - if you go to the barbershop enough times, eventually you're gonna get your haircut."
WAY SHIT
Gerard: "Are there times the band catch us doing something together and write it off as 'just some Way shit'? There's gotta be. We bitch about the same things in unison together."
Mikey: "We both hate flying. If you ask the other guys, I bet they would tell you there's loads of other Way shit."
Gerard: "We're always in the lobby half an hour before we need to leave anywhere, having a coffe. We always show up to things at the same time and do the same thing."
Mikey: "We're always super early for things, it's weird."
SUPPORT
Gerard: "Mikey's always got my back. He's one of the most supportive people in my life alongside my wife. Anything I want to do, he's there for me: from working on a drawing as a kid, to what we do now. And I've always tried to be there for him. Knowing there's somebody out there who has so much trust in what you do is great."
Mikey: "There are times you look across the stage, see him, the think back to when you were kids. Back then, we'd joke about it: 'Would it be cool if...'. We'd have ideas of what our band would look like, what it would sound like and what it would be like. We formulated fantasies in our heads about this mythical rock band."
Gerard: "I always saw myself doing something with him and I always will. If we decided we weren't doing My Chem anymore, I'd still do something with Mikey. I couldn't not."
