For the first time, MCR's enigmatic bassist reveals the private agony that drove him to the brink of suicide. Mikey Way has been wandering around bacstage in Las Vegas for a while now. It's a few hours before his band, My Chemical Romance, are due onstage to healine a free show at The House Of Blues. At first he's chatty, proud that MCR have risen from opening these kind of shows a few years ago to now being the main attraction. In part it's due to the astonishing success of 'The Black Parade'. More than that, it's due to the strange and alluring charisma of this band, a darkness operating beneath the surface. Thinking about this is when Mikey starts to sound nervous.
As he paces around, it's clear there's something he wants to get off his chest. He begins to talk about the making of 'The Black Parade', the record that's put him where he is now. He mentions the shadowy forces the band say drove them to the edge of disater during the recording process, hinting that the band member most troubled during those tense months was, him.
While his brother Gerard Way has been open about his battle with drink and drugs, Mikey's struggle has been less publicised. Yet he says, "I was pretty bad, I was two steps away from the Betty Ford Clinic. When Gerard stopped drinking [in 2004], it put me on the road to recovery - it's just that my road took a couple of years. Well, I stopped doing the drugs, so much but it was more the drinking that I latched onto. I didn't have a problem because it wasn't making me depressed. But then, later on in life, I realised I had a real problem."
As he speaks it becomes clear just how difficult life has been for Mikey in the last year. Quietly, as he talks, he reveals how he became paralysed by depression to such an extent that he was close to leaving the band, leaving his friends and more worringly, how he even thought of suicide.
WHAT WERE YOU GOING THROUGH DURING THE RECORDING OF 'THE BLACK PARADE'? "It was a mixture of being 25 and taking a cocktail of anti-depressants and drinking on them. I had stopped doing drugs, but I was really depressed. There were a lot of traumatic events that I had been through that I hadn't properly processed or accepted. Also I moved to Brooklyn just after we got home from touring 'Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge' [in late 2005] and it was the first time we'd had the chance to be home for any length of time. It was the first chance we'd had to be normal hunman beings for a while. That was a hard hit to me. It felt weird. I just couldn't get used to being home for two or three months. I just didn't get it."
WAS THAT CONFUSING? "Yes, everything was supposed to be stable and great - but it wasn't. On top of that I had all these chemical dependencies and I had just turned 25, which depressed me. Life was getting to me."
WAS THERE A LOT OF PRESSURE ON THE BAND THEN TO WRITE A SUCCESSFUL FOLLOW-UP TO 'THREE CHEERS FOR SWEET REVENGE'? "Yes, there was the pressure too. People were saying, 'You guys are making your follow-up, you've got to beat the last one.' That was in my head the whole time. Then I started worrying about my own abilities too."
YOUR MUSICAL ABILITIES? "Yes, that and everything else. Everything - life in general - everything was going round my head."
DO YOU THINK YOU'VE BEATEN IT NOW? "I don't know if I have truly beaten it. I'm a ******** better, though. I'm probably at 80 or 90 per-cent now. Basically what happened was that I left the Paramour house [the studio in which MCR recorded 'The Black Parade']. I left after I had a mental breakdown. I went through some trauma. I left the house to stay with one of my best friends [the band's lawyer and close friend Stacy Fass]. Getting out of the Paramour was the turning point for me. That house has just escalated everything in my head and made everything a million times worse."
WHY WAS IT SO BAD THERE? "Here's the thing - being in that house was like being in another country. You couldn't get cellphone service and the internet was really bad too so it felt like all my lines of communication were down. I didn't have my driver's licence at the time so I was stranded on the property. It was miles from anywhere. We had these long vigorous practice schedules where we would wake up at noon and play until midnight. If you mix all that with the fact that I was manic depressive then it was as though someone was pouring gasoline on all my problems and setting fire to them."
THAT'S A VERY HARD WAY TO MAKE AN ALBUM. "Yeah. And I almost didn't get through it."
WHERE YOU CLOSE TO SUICIDE? "I was really close. I knew that I was going to leave the band, or maybe just leave planet Earth altogether. I felt like it was either one or the other. I just thought, 'I can't deal with this'."
WHO HELPED YOU THROUGH IT? "Oh - everyone. My band, my brother, my parenst, my finacee, all my best friends. My friend Stacy saved my life. She got me out of the house, she put me up at her place and kicked me out of bed and made me go to my therapy appointments. She made me get active help."
WHERE YOU SEEING A LOT OF THERAPISTS? "I was seeing four different doctors a week. They were two steps away from putting me into a hospital. I think Gerard wanted to check me into somewhere."
IT WAS THAT SERIOUS? "Yes, it was really bad but I knew that being checked into somewhere wouldn't help. I was stronger than that."
IT SOUNDS LIKE YOU'RE FEELING BETTER NOW. "I'm on medication and that helps. My brother and I have a history of depression, it's a genetic thing. People aren't all wired the same. Me and him were born like that. So I take medication. And everything is great for us now. I'm happier than I've been since I was 14. I'm on top of the world, I really am.
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