Official Charts Flashback 2006: My Chemical Romance's Welcome To The Black Parade rises to Number 1

In the midst of our own 2021 emo revivial, this week in 2006, My Chemical Romance gained their first UK Number 1 with this rallying punk-pop anthem.

You may have heard that over the past year, emo has arrived back on the scene.

Thanks to acts such as Olivia Rodrigo and Willow Smith channeling the output of pop-rock acts like Paramore, My Chemical Romance and Panic! At The Disco in the mid-00s, rock music (particularly the 'emotional' sub-genre of a certain kind of punk-pop mixed with hard rock instrumentals and pop melodies) is making a mainstream return to the charts.

So it seems fitting that this week in 2006, US emo auteurs My Chemical Romance gained their first UK Number 1 single, as Welcome To The Black Parade jumped a massive 22 places to the top of the Official Singles Chart.

A 5-minute pop-rock opus; Welcome To The Black Parade opens with Gerard Way promising to be the saviour of the "broken, the beaten and the damned" before it's Bohemian Rhapsody-esque production sharply dive turns into a frantic pop-punk burst of energy. "We'll carry on," Way screams, "and though you're dead and gone, believe me, you're memory will carry on."

MORE: My Chemical Romance's Official Chart history in full

It's a fitting summary of the band's third studio album The Black Parade, a concept record about death and the after-life that saw My Chemical Romance graduate to the faces of the emo music movement. Welcome To The Black Parade topped the Official Singles Chart with 34,000 chart sales in its opening week, and stayed at the top of the chart for two weeks. The tracks influence still lives on too - according to Official Charts Company data, it's still being streamed an average of 300,000 times a week in the UK in 2021.

It would be My Chemical Romance's first and only UK Number 1 single, although they did gain a further two Top 10s (Famous Last Words and Teenagers) both singles from The Black Parade, which itself peaked at Number 2 on the Official Albums Chart. After releasing only one other follow-up album - 2010's Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys which peaked at Number 14 - the band split up in 2013. A reunion world tour was set for 2020, but has now been pushed back to 2022, thanks to the pandemic.

Elsewhere on the chart that week in 2006, Beatfreakz' Superfreak soared 36 places to a new peak of Number 7 ahead of Halloween, while there were new entries from James Morrison's Wonderful World (Number 20), Placebo ft. Allison Mosshart with Meds (Number 35), Ordinary Boys' Lonely At The Top (Number 36) and Badly Drawn Boy's Nothing's Gonna Change Your Mind (Number 38).