Okay, excuse the dramatic title: charming though the lovely Mister Gerard Way was, the romance was all about his legions of sobbing followers. But I get ahead of myself…

At Forbidden Planet, I’ve played host to some high profile guests; to Andy Serkis, to Simon Pegg, to Terry Gilliam, to name but a few. I’ve seen queues that stretched from the back door of the store to the far end of the road and beyond; I’ve seen fans come through that door and catch their breath at the sight of their icon.

I’ve never seen anything like the reception that awaited Gerard Way.

My colleague Leesa, who ultimately ran the event, has a great deal of experience with ‘A’-list heart-throb pop stars – we can be thankful for her knowledge and her insistence that the business took the signing seriously. In spite of the huge crowds and high-running emotions, everything ran like clockwork.

She told us what to expect; I understood it academically (I once had the misfortune to be on security detail when Jason Donovan played a small Norwich nightclub in the late 1980s) but it wasn’t ‘til I faced the full frontal that I began to believe.

There were thousands of them.

We had private security, we had police, we had every member of staff that could be spared… what we needed was a truant officer. Five thousand love-struck and starry-eyed teenage girls had bunked off school (some of them had stayed overnight on the street) for the chance to give Gerard their declaration of love.

And they did.

Notes, letters, paintings; in their chilled hands were clutched pieces of their souls. Outside, the crowd was tripping on its own anticipation – they were six deep, seven deep, eight – both sides of the street and pushing forwards to get as close the hallowed halls as they could. As Gerard’s car arrived, they surged and cried and sobbed and their excitement fed upon itself and redoubled, exploded.

Gerard himself, accompanied by his band members and personal security, was quiet, softly spoken, very likeable, remarkably unpretentious. He’d made only two requests – no bags or coats (for security reasons) and a ban on all photography. I found myself shifted sideways from press liaison (a certain large rock publication turned up anyway and I chased them off twice) to security guard – gathering the shaking, crying girls as they left the signing desk, making sure they’d retrieved their belongings and chasing them out into the main body of the store.

How strange, to have queued for all that time for just that brief moment of contact.

They came in utterly wired, shivering with thrill; some of them couldn’t look him in the face until he asked them to smile. Then – whoosh! – it’s all over and they’re breaking down in shuddering sobs as I herd them away.

The strangest thing of all? They weren’t all girls. My Utter covers this, but there were a scattering of thirty- and forty-something women, as completely besotted and overcome as the teenagers around them. That, I have to say, baffled me – it was the most surreal thing about the whole event.

Even after Gerard had gone, after his car had been mobbed on the way out, his fans were still there – pale, black-eyed faces pressed against the glass like something out of a zombie movie. They were chanting, pleading – denial rising and breaking against the front of the store. When the surge calmed and we tentatively reopened, they flooded in to grab every piece of My Chemical Romance merchandise they could find.

In the aftermath, Leesa, Jon and I walked back to the South Bank and Titan House swapping amazements at what we’d seen. Jon, my boss, has teenage daughters and was aghast at the idea of fourteen-year-olds skipping school and camping overnight on the street; I was still reeling over the behaviour of the thirty-something ladies. Leesa was most amused by the Mum who’d turned up with her daughters at lunchtime and been politely turned away – and who had then been found rallying an annoyance of fellow Mums on the ground floor. ‘We’ve come all the way from Croydon!’ she was stating indignantly. ‘Just to be treated like this!” Seems she had even less experience of these things than I did.

Anyway, a conclusion to this is almost impossible – we all know this stuff goes on, but it’s not until you’re right up with your nose in it that you see the love and lust and anguish these girls go through. It’s startling, horrifying – and yet, as I was herding them away from Gerard’s presence, I found myself remembering what it’s like to be fourteen.

Maybe experiences like that one are just a part of contemporary growing up.