Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan: ‘Taylor Swift is one of the most gifted pop artists of all time’

Billy Corgan remembers it clearly: Dublin Bay half in shadow, his breath catching in the cold, an excited Bono sharing a new song as dawn tinged the horizon. “I had gone to visit Bono at his house. I think I stayed the night. Or we were up all night. It was one of those types of things. And I’m an old-school fan: I saw U2, I think, in 1982 – the Unforgettable Fire tour, whenever that would have been,” the Smashing Pumpkins singer says.

“He starts talking about the new record. Okay, great – we’re just two chums talking about music. And he says, ‘Would you like to hear some of it? Because we’re having a bit of a problem with it.’ I go, ‘Sure.’”

At this point, Corgan says, Bono “pulls out a CD or tape” and explains that they need to leave the house. “We’ve got to go out in the car because he doesn’t want to wake up the family. And it’s one of those cold Dublin mornings where you’re freezing. And we’re listening. I’m listening to early versions of Beautiful Day. He’s explaining where they’re caught up and having an issue with the music. They can’t turn a corner with something.”

Months later, in October 2000, Corgan was surprised to receive a thank you in the credits to U2′s comeback LP, All That You Can’t Leave Behind. “I gave him some advice, from a guitar-player perspective – ‘Here’s what I would do to solve the problem.’ U2 is so unique, I’m not assuming my version would work for them. He asked for my advice, and I gave it.”

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Corgan, one of Gen X’s biggest rock stars, shares the memory from his home in suburban Chicago, where he is caring for his five-year-old daughter, Philomena, and eight-year-old son, Augustus.

It’s a busy time for the singer: as well as the Smashing Pumpkins’s upcoming European tour, which includes an imminent sell-out date in Dublin, he has just debuted a reality show, Billy Corgan’s Adventures in Carnyland, about his parallel life as head of the National Wrestling Alliance, a sort of underdog rival to the mighty WWE. And the band have put an often volatile past behind them and just recorded an album that Corgan, their lead singer and songwriter, believes connects with the spirit of the early 1990s, when they became generational touchstones with smashes such as Today and Cherub Rock.

“There’s the old saying ‘You can’t go home again,’ right? But I thought, what if you try – would that be interesting?” he says of the as-yet-untitled LP, which was assembled by the core Pumpkins trio of Corgan, the guitarist James Iha and the drummer Jimmy Chamberlin.

“So I tried to re-create, in myself, this inner psychology that made the original records. To see if that voice was still within me to write new material. Not to try to re-create the old material but to re-create the circumstances that created some of that material. And it took a while. It was a lot of experimentation. Somehow I turned a corner somewhere along the way. I’m very excited for people to hear this record,” he says. “People who have heard it, they kind of have this almost jaw-dropping thing on their faces.”

The Smashing Pumpkins materialised in the early days of grunge, but they were never part of the gang – never comrades-in-arms to Nirvana or Pearl Jam. They were from Chicago rather than Seattle, and their music had none of grunge’s performative angst. Rather than shrieking from the bottom of their souls, their 1991 debut, Gish, drew on 1970s stadium rock and shoegaze. Listening to protean bangers such as Rhinoceros was like watching Led Zeppelin shape-shift into My Bloody Valentine right before your eyes.

In 1993 they released their commercial breakthrough, Siamese Dream, a hazy, heady alternative masterpiece, overseen by the producer of Nirvana’s Nevermind, Butch Vig. Two years later Corgan went full prog messiah with the two-disc Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, a grand gesture that his label trenchantly opposed but that became their biggest hit, selling 10 million copies and yielding the singles 1979 and Tonight Tonight.

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“They fought tooth and nail against the concept of the record. I had to fight hard to get that made,” he says of a project that he likened at the time to a Gen X version of Pink Floyd’s The Wall.

The story is “sort of typical. ‘I want to do this record.’ ‘No, that’s dumb. Why would you do that? You’re on a roll. Do the same thing. What do you mean, you don’t want to work with the same producer? What do you mean, you want to change your image? Why would you consider anything that could possibly risk the success that you earned?’”

His answer was that he had always taken risks. Why stop now? “I’m on a roll. I’m a gambler at a table. It will keep betting.”

The Smashing Pumpkins were always a fractious enterprise. Corgan, who had started the band in 1988 while working at a record store, had a natural ally in Chamberlin, but where the singer was focused and ambitious, his friend was an agent of chaos with an out-of-control drug habit.

The combustibility … it was not musical. It was personal. We were four completely different people. And, of course, it’s worth noting that two of the four of us were in a relationship at one point

Then there were D’arcy Wretzky, the band’s bass player, and Iha, her ex-boyfriend, with whom Corgan had a rare chemistry on stage – just listen to how their guitars intertwine at the start of Cherub Rock – yet with whom he could not seem to get along in real life.

Conflict was baked into the Smashing Pumpkins’s DNA. Corgan and Iha would row or stew in silence. In 1996 Chamberlin was fired when he and Jonathan Melvoin, the band’s touring keyboardist, overdosed together mid-tour and Melvoin died.

Four years later the band split. When Corgan put the Smashing Pumpkins back together, in 2006, he did so without any of the original members. It wasn’t until 2016 that Chamberlin (now clean and sober) and Iha rejoined. Wretzky is a different matter: although there have been reports over the years that she and Corgan were about to patch up their differences, nothing has come of it.

“The combustibility ... it was not musical. It was personal. We were four completely different people. And, of course, it’s worth noting that two of the four of us were in a relationship at one point – albeit not in relationship any more. The relationship between them pitted me on the other side with my closest musical collaborator in the band, which was Jimmy,” he says.

“You have this constant tension about ‘Where are we going?’ It was contrasted by the fact that then we would go in the other room and we would play for six hours and work on these sprawling pieces of music. The musical part was our serenity and our way to make peace. Then we walk out of the room and we’d start fighting about the food we were ordering. It seemed like we fought about everything but music. That wore the band down internally. So now, being older and having a greater appreciation of what we are good at, we just keep to the music.”

Corgan has played in Dublin several times in the past few decades, most recently at a solo show at the Olympia in Dublin in 2019. But he hasn’t headlined at what is now 3Arena since May 1996, when the Pumpkins cut short a tragic gig after Bernadette O’Brien, a 16-year-old from Co Cork, was killed in a crush.

It was “one of the saddest things I’ve ever experienced. And I think it’s something you never get over,” says Corgan. “And, of course, when I say that, I can’t even imagine what it was like for the family. My heart is always heavy when I’m there. That’s one of those days I’ve replayed 1,000 times in my head. I think you dishonour those that have passed if you [don’t talk about it] ... Something terrible [happened]. A young woman lost her life and her opportunity because of a crazy set of circumstances. It still hurts.”

Back in Chicago, Corgan later got to know Sinéad O’Connor, who lived for a while with a mutual friend, the drummer Matt Walker, in the suburb of Wilmette. He had a ringside seat when the singer went missing in 2016, sparking a huge search.

“Matt played for years with Morrissey,” Corgan says. “Somehow they got to know Sinéad. And Sinéad ended up living in their attic.” He remembers O’Connor as very shy. “I’d met Sinéad once at a show. We talked a little bit, but I can’t say I knew her. So now she’s living at my friend’s house, where I go for Sunday dinner. Four or five, six times I was over for Sunday ham and Sinéad would come down and have dinner. And then I finally got to know her as a person. We talked about her children a lot and relationships in life and her struggles.”

O’Connor, he says, held nothing back. “She was very, very honest. I mean, almost to a fault. This bare-your-soul honesty. Such a beautiful woman, such an incredible talent – just in awe of her talent. Of course my friends were calling me on the side, asking me for advice on what to do with the rock star living in their attic. They love her and they’re trying to support her through a very difficult time.”

In May that year she went for a bike ride at 6am and did not return until late the following day. Police became involved in the search.

“My friends are calling me, freaking out, because they don’t know what to do ... I had an interesting inside perspective into this critical time in her life. It was hard to watch, because, you know, her struggles were real. Sinéad was honest. And if you can take anything from her passing, it was to see this incredible outpouring of love and respect for her.

“Sometimes it’s [sad] it takes a passing for people to come into contact with how they feel. People realise now that we lost someone who probably should have gotten more attention and support when she was here. Because her gift was so rare. And her gift had a lot to do with her pathos. Her incredible gift of singing had a direct line to her heart. That’s so rare in singers. Most singers are actors. Sinéad was not an actor.”

Corgan is amiable but battled hardened. He has had his own struggles in the public eye, and in the 1990s he became a punching bag for the music press. Where Kurt Cobain of Nirvana – whose widow, Courtney Love, he would later date – and Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam were revered, Corgan was lampooned as an egotist.

People complained about the length of my last album, Atum. I thought, Well, just go make your own playlist. Just listen to the record one time – rag over the six or 10 songs you like and make your own record

It was bad enough when the Smashing Pumpkins were clocking up hits. The vitriol increased when they tried something different, such as going synth-pop on the wonderful Adore, in 1998, or doom metal on Machina/The Machines of God, in 2000. Corgan recalls inviting diehard fans to attend Machina sessions only for several to then castigate Corgan’s new direction on a Smashing Pumpkins forum. He was being savaged online before the internet was even fully a thing.

“The advantage was we were ahead of the curve. The disadvantage was I got my heart broken on this thing a lot earlier than most people. I used to work with a spiritual teacher, and she used to say, ‘Be careful who you let on your stage.’ Social media in its early inception, I didn’t realise who I was letting on my stage. I didn’t realise that ‘angry pumpkinfan437′ lived or died on whether they could goad me into a fight. The book is well written now on the lack of social grace on the internet.”

The abuse means he can empathise with Taylor Swift, who faced a backlash from some when she released a two-hour, 31-track version of her latest LP, The Tortured Poets Department. To be hauled over the coals for a gesture of artistic ambition is something Corgan is all too familiar with.

“Let’s go back to Sinéad for a second. Now that Sinéad’s gone, would it be a bad thing if somebody turned up tomorrow and said, ‘Hey, I just found this tape, and there’s enough for 20′ – or 30 or 50 – ‘Sinéad songs.’ Would that be a bad thing? Taylor Swift is one of the most gifted pop artists of all time. How is it a bad thing that she’s releasing more music? I can’t follow that ... You can go on Spotify and just skip it.

“People complained about the length of my last album, Atum. I thought, Well, just go make your own playlist. Just listen to the record one time – rag over the six or 10 songs you like and make your own record. Why is this such a strange concept?” He shakes his head. “Have some sense of proportionality. This hyperbolic thing – ‘They ruined Star Wars. My God, this is all too much for me to process’ – it’s all a bit childish.”

The Smashing Pumpkins play 3Arena, Dublin, with Weezer on Monday, June 10th