King Diamond made a guest appearance at MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE's near-sold-out concert on Saturday night, September 12, at the Alamodome in San Antonio, Texas.
The MERCYFUL FATE and KING DIAMOND frontman — a longtime Texas resident — came out for "Mama" alongside an opera singer credited as Marianne. He did it without his signature corpsepaint, wearing sunglasses, his top hat and the black bishop's coat from MERCYFUL FATE.
Gerard Way's introduction was the part everyone has been replaying. "Finally! Some real royalty in the house," the MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE singer told the crowd. "Anyone can be a dictator, but not everyone can be a king. The funny thing is, about not being British, also, like, when you go to England, if you're American, you can't be a knight, so what-fucking-ever. I don't care about that. This guy's a king. He don't give a shit."
That set up the ending. As "Mama" finished, Way and his bandmates crouched down and King knighted them one by one, with flames bursting behind the group.
The dictator line was not a throwaway. MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE are performing "The Black Parade" in full on this tour, and rather than staging the album's story about a man dying of cancer literally, they have built the show around Draag — a dystopia ruled by a "Great Immortal Dictator" who appears in video segments as a pencil-moustached figure in a black cowboy hat, seated on a throne. A guest monarch handing out knighthoods fits that production exactly.
For King Diamond, the appearance lands in an unusually crowded stretch. Last week he spoke publicly for the first time about losing guitarist Andy La Rocque after forty years, describing it as "a gradual thing that's just been building". A documentary about him has been filming in secret for three years. MERCYFUL FATE, meanwhile, play their first concert in over three years at Spain's Leyendas Del Rock and headline Bloodstock in 2027.
Way used the same night to hint at new music of his own. "Just know that, like, we've kind of really always wanted to make another record, so we hope that life allows us to do that," he told the crowd. "'Cause you guys, honestly, you guys kept us alive so long. You guys deserve another record. I don't know when it'll be. But it'll be awesome." It would be the band's first album since 2010's "Danger Days: The True Lives Of The Fabulous Killjoys"; since reforming they have put out one standalone single, 2022's "The Foundations Of Decay", and otherwise concentrated on touring.
An expanded 20th-anniversary reissue of "The Black Parade" arrives October 23 via Reprise Records, with six bonus tracks — three of them live recordings from a 200-capacity club show in Hoboken, New Jersey in 2007, plus the never-released B-side "Someone Out There Loves You".
Fan-filmed video of King's appearance is below.