Tag: inspired the black parade

Posted 54 years ago by

This record had gone through a few different incarnations. I had wanted to keep the story open as to not get locked into something we didn’t have the songs for, and a few ideas started the ball rolling.

It started as a record about Hell. One of the earliest titles for the record was ‘The Fall Of The Damned,’ named after a renaissance painting of the same name. I even did  a mock-up of the album artwork using the painting, and it looked pretty cool but it just seemed arbitrary and lazy. I knew we wanted to tell a story but I knew I didn’t know what much about Hell, so I started to research it. I bought a ton of books on the subject and started reading.

– Gerard Way, Black Parade Special Edition

Posted 54 years ago by

One of the most terrible things about the English education system in Ireland is its ruthlessness. I know no image for that ruthlessness in the natural order. The ruthlessness of a wild beast has in it a certain mercy—it slays. It has in it a certain grandeur of animal force. But this ruthlessness is literally without pity and without passion. It is cold and mechanical, like the ruthlessness of an immensely powerful engine. A machine vast, complicated, with a multitude of far-reaching arms, with many ponderous presses, carrying out mysterious and long-drawn processes of shaping and moulding, is the true image of the Irish education system. It grinds night and day; it obeys immutable and predetermined laws; it is as devoid of understanding, of sympathy, of imagination, as is any other piece of machinery that performs an appointed task. Into it is fed all the raw human material in Ireland; it seizes upon it inexorably and rends and compresses and re-moulds; and what it cannot refashion after the regulation pattern it ejects with all likeness of its former self crushed from it, a bruised and shapeless thing, thereafter accounted waste.

The Murder Machine, Pádraic H. Pearse
Posted 54 years ago by

From Wikipedia: The Order of the Holy Spirit was an Order of Chivalry under the French Monarchy. All Knights of the order were also members of the Order of Saint Michael. The symbol of the order is known as the Cross of the Holy Spirit. This is a Maltese Cross (i.e. a cross formed by the meeting for the points of four isosceles triangles); at the periphery, the points of each triangle are rounded, and between each triangle there is a fleur-de-lis. Imposed on the centre of the cross is a dove. The eight rounded corners represent the Beatitudes, the four fleur-de-lis represent the Gospels, the twelve petals represent the Apostles, and the dove signifies the Holy Spirit.

During the French Revolution the Order of the Holy Spirit was officially abolished by the French government along with all other chivalric orders from the Ancien Regime, although the exiled Louis XVIII continued to acknowledge it. Following the Restoration, the order was officially revived, only to be abolished again by the Orleanist Louis-Philippe following the July Revolution in 1830. However, the Legitimist pretenders to the French throne have continued to nominate members of the order, long after the abolition of the French monarchy itself.

Posted 54 years ago by

The Oscar-winning costume designer Colleen Atwood (the picture is of some of her outfits from the 2004 film A Series of Unfortunate Events, one of the films she did shortly before The Black Parade) designed the band’s military uniforms.