My Chemical Romance have scored their first UK No.1 album, with The Black Parade reaching the top 20 years after Robbie Williams kept it out.
The band’s 2006 record has topped the Official Albums Chart following its 20th anniversary reissue, finally moving past the No.2 position it originally reached behind Williams’ Rudebox. For all the album’s standing among My Chemical Romance fans, it had never taken them to the top of the main UK albums chart until now.
According to Music Week, The Black Parade jumped from No.162 to No.1 with 20,172 UK chart units for the week, including 9,257 vinyl purchases and 7,977 CDs. Those physical sales accounted for most of the total, as fans returned to a record first released two decades ago.
Released on October 23rd, the deluxe anniversary edition adds six bonus tracks to the original album, bringing together three rare B-sides and three live performances from the band’s 2007 Black Parade World Tour.
Among them is ‘Someone Out There Loves You’, also known to fans as ‘Stay’, a song performed during that tour that never received an official studio recording, making its inclusion a draw for listeners who have spent years following the material surrounding the album. The accompanying video (below) captures the band playing it at Maxwell’s in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 2007.
My Chemical Romance ‘Someone Out There Loves You’
“For the first time, we have included everything we finished during those sessions in a single collection,” the band said in their anniversary announcement, which also detailed the return of original cover artist James Jean.
Jean created three new pieces featuring characters from the Black Parade era, revisiting the album’s visual world alongside the expanded music collection. MCR credited his artwork as an important part of how the record was first presented, bringing him back into the project for its twentieth anniversary.
The UK chart also had room for another major release from 2006, with Amy Winehouse’s Back To Black returning to No.4 following its own expanded anniversary edition. This time, though, The Black Parade finished ahead of the competition, giving My Chemical Romance a chart milestone that eluded them on its original release.
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