“We were a really weird punk band that came out of hardcore and were shot into this vortex”: Fall Out Boy came out of the US hardcore scene. So how did they become poster boys for 21st century emo?

Fall Out Boy posing for a photograph in 2008.

Patrick Stump was in full panic mode. The sign in black marker on the front door said ‘SOLD OUT’, and he had found himself in the middle of a mosh. Surrounded by bodies, tumbling, screaming and pushing in every direction, he couldn’t move, he couldn’t breathe… and he had a camera pointed at his face.

A gig at Knights Of Colombus, a venue in the Chicago suburb of Arlington Heights, where Stump’s band Fall Out Boy were filming the video for their very first single, Dead On Arrival, had got completely out of hand. Three songs into the set, the police turned up and shut the show down. “I thought I was going to die,” the vocalist and guitarist later told Chicago music TV show, JBTV.