It was in 1993 that The Smashing Pumpkins made their big breakthrough with their second album Siamese Dream. It reached the top 10 on the US Billboard 200 and eventually sold in excess of four million copies.

But sudden fame wasn’t easy to handle for the four members of the band – lead vocalist and guitarist Billy Corgan, bassist D'arcy Wretzky, guitarist James Iha and drummer Jimmy Chamberlin. As Chamberlin says: “You have no tools and no skill set how to manage that level of success.”

In a new interview with the Go With Elmo Lovano podcast, Chamberlin looks back on that landmark year and describes his relationship with the most high profile band of that whole era – Nirvana.

“We played with Nirvana probably four or five times,” he says. “They were incredible.”

He recalls having a good connection with fellow drummer Dave Grohl. “We became tight. We had a lot of fun back then.”

But he admits that his interaction with Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain was more problematic.

“You know, I don’t think Kurt really dug me,” Chamberlin says. “I think he kind of stayed away from me back then, because… I was a pretty high octane individual, you know? And I don’t think Kurt really wanted to be around somebody who was resonating at such a high frequency.”

Chamberlin describes Cobain as “very introverted and introspective”.

He adds: “He was always nice to me, and I knew I knew him and Courtney. And we were friendly, but I wouldn’t say we were tight.

“I had a huge respect for him as a musician, and I wanted to be, you know, compassionate – to not be, like, inserting myself into his orbit like everybody else was. Because, honestly, it was like we were all peers. So it wasn’t a big deal.”

The making of Siamese Dream was complicated by difficulties in the personal lives of the four band members, with Chamberlin struggling with substance abuse problems. But this album transformed The Smashing Pumpkins into one of the leading bands of the alternative rock era, with powerful hit songs including Cherub Rock, Disarm, Rocket and Today.

Chamberlin says now that he treated Kurt Cobain with the same respect he afforded to other musicians he admired and toured with, such as Black Francis of the Pixies and J. Masics of Dinosaur Jr.

“There was a lot of people that we held in high regard,” he says, “but they were just in the same circus we were in, right?

“It doesn't matter if you were flying private or you’re taking a van – you’re still in the circus.”

Billy Corgan is falling out of love with guitar solos and social media is to blame – or, at least, the Smashing Pumpkins frontman believes that the ubiquitous spectacle of virtuoso playing on social media platforms has devalued the traditional guitar solo.

In a recent interview with Guitar World, Corgan argues that no one is impressed by technicality anymore, and it has made him rethink his entire approach to lead guitar. Catch the Smashing Pumpkins in concert and you might only see him play a couple of solos – and he is going to keep them brief.

“If you’re going to play a lead in an alternative rock band in 2025, what are you trying to say? No-one’s going to care that you can play good, because there’s 50 10-year-olds playing Eruption on YouTube,” he says. “There’s nothing actually that impressive about somebody being able to play the guitar at a decently high level anymore, so I think it’s the expressive quality that makes it interesting. So I’m more interested in creating a feeling than showing off.”

No matter how you slice it, “showing off” is incentivised by social media, and the phenomenon is hardly restricted to playing guitar – even making a sandwich has become a spectator sport for hungry algorithms craving our attention.

The effect it has had on guitar playing is remarkable. And, of course, it cannot just be social media’s incentives that are behind this rising tide of virtuosity. The great efflorescence of online learning resources means that it has never been easier to pick up an electric guitar learn how to shred, or to specialise in classical guitar. The answers to our every question lie just a lick away.

Add this to the incentives baked into the social media platform and you have an eco-system in which the gamification of guitar playing can thrive. Corgan gets it. He sees today’s cohort of players can play. But what he wants to see is more of them in bands, making music, because that is the point of playing guitar in the first place.

“I don’t see a lot of that great playing converting into popular music, whether it’s in popular metal bands or popular alternative rock bands,” Corgan says. “I want to see them making the Metallica songs of tomorrow or Megadeth or Slayer or something. I want to see that convert into music. I would wish for that crew of guitar players to convert those incredible abilities into the popular culture.”

In other words, Corgan wants the social media guitarists to step out into the real world, make some music, and reach a wider audience.

“It’s like if Clapton had just been a guitar influencer and hadn’t been in John Mayall and Cream and Derek and the Dominos,” he explains. “The reason everybody knows Eric Clapton’s name is not because he’s a great guitar player. It’s because he made some of the most popular music of the 20th century.”

And the great guitar playing was just part of the package. There are other dynamics at play. A counterfactual that sees Clapton born in 2003 and become an early adopter of TikTok and Instagram, playing for the edification of an online audience only goes so far.

Under such conditions it would have been unlikely that he would have immersed himself in blues guitar and become one of the architects of what we might call classic rock. But we see his point.

As for Corgan’s solos, he says it is the “kineticism of a lead” is what gets him excited, not the notes he’s playing. But maybe it was forever thus. Corgan can rip with the best of them but some of his best leads – on record at least – came from the manipulation of sound, like on Siamese Dream, when he made his Clapton signature Stratocaster sound like sounded like time and space had been ruptured during Cherub Rock.

Speaking to MusicRadar about recording the Smashing Pumpkins, Butch Vig revealed how they nailed the tone.

“We found a secret weapon on that record,” he said. “A little preamp in a pedal steel guitar. It wasn’t built for a loud guitar. It was built for a low output on a pedal steel, so it had this super high-end white noise gain that gave the guitar this sonic jet sound.”

Some old-school tape flanging applied the coupe de grâce. Maybe what Corgan told us back then rings true today with what he is saying about guitar solos. He said he never wanted to repeat himself, to be comfortable. It would be easier to cut loose onstage, to solo as he has done.

“I’m a person who tends not to repeat technique, which I guess is kind of suicidal in a way,” Corgan told MusicRadar. “Most people look at a recording career as a series of conclusions. I’ve always treated my recording career more like a journey. I think when an artist gets into a comfortable set of choices, that’s where the death of creativity lies.”

But maybe what Billy Corgan is saying with all of this is that the guitar solo, as traditionally composed, as it is now rehearsed and perfected then performed on social media – always on, always available in our pockets, with engagement metrics the currency of a solo’s ‘success’ – is taking us away from more musical moments, moments such as this…

...Moments that move popular culture at large, and not just guitar culture.

NAMM 2026: You can officially stop scrolling if you want to nail Billy Corgan’s electric guitar tone, because Laney Amplification has teamed up with Brian Carstens, the designer of the Smashing Pumpkins frontman’s signature tube amp, to effectively house his entire rig in a compact amp pedal, the Supergrace.

The latest in Laney’s series of Loudpedals, the Supergrace pairs the high-gain channel from Corgan’s Carstens Grace amp with the circuit of a 1969 Supergroup, offering a wholly analogue replica of Corgan’s tone – and it is so good that he used it when sitting in to play Pumpkins classic Bullet With Butterfly Wings in front of 60,000 My Chemical Romance romance fans in Chicago. That's confidence. Corgan left his "real" guitar amps behind and just rolled with this on the night.

It is all kinds of remarkable. So, too, is the origin story. Apparently Corgan had a sit down with James Laney, just walked into his office and asked him what he wanted.

“Give the average guitar player the chance to own my live rig,” he said. “My tone. The tone worth $100,000s.”

For that, Laney reached out to Carstens. You cannot get Corgan’s live tone without his input. Carstens was more than happy to oblige.

“Laney is a family-run company with an obvious passion for creating things that inspire musicians,” said Carstens. “That alignment matters. We wanted something that would be used night after night on the world’s biggest stages-not as a compromise, but as the real thing.”

The Supergrace has a lot going on but it looks user-friendly enough. Two amp channels, each with their own side of the pedal, each with their own Volume and Gain knobs. There’s a three-position Bright switch, a Dimed/Clean switch, three-band EQ plus Tone and Reverb dials.

Like many of Laney’s Black Country Customs amp-in-a-box pedals, there is a footswitchable boost, its level set by the bright red dial – red for danger. Besides the Boost footswitch, there is a footswitch for toggling between the channels and another for the reverb.

The Grace side is where you’ll access Corgan’s high-gain sound. Carstens design gave him as much saturation as he could ever need – but with definition. “It’s really solid,” Corgan notes. “There’s so much body to the notes.” The Supergroup channel, well, that gives us Tony Iommi vibes as much as it does Corgan.

Laney promises a “faithful recreation of the legendary Laney circuit that helped define early heavy metal… Gain here is organic and uncompromising. No digital modelling. No shortcuts.

“Push the input and power section and you’re rewarded with an uncompressed, wide-bandwidth response defined by clarity, punch, and visceral connection. Even the famous ‘transformer rub’ sub-note heard on countless vintage Laney recordings is preserved intact.”

Okay, you might still want an Electro-Harmonix OpAmp fuzz pedal just for that early Smashing Pumpkins vibe and because why not, right? Well, you, and anyone else with a pedalboard, is in luck; an effects loop is present and correct here, and it is transformer-isolated which should ensure a low-noise floor.

There is an aux in, headphones out, Laney’s Advanced Impulse Response (LA·IR) tech is under the hood, and the Supergrace comes pre-loaded with Corgan’s IRs. You can, of course, upload your own.

This is designed as a fly-rig but it could serve you well for recording, with USB-C connection offering latency-free performance when hooking this up to your DAW.

For more details, head over to Laney Amplification.

Yungblud had a pretty decent 2025 – a UK Number One in the shape of his fourth album, Idols, plus three Grammy nominations. Then there was his guest slot at the rock event of the decade, the Back To The Beginning concert. At it stands, he’s now, undeniably, the biggest British rock artist of his generation.

He’s also been talking the The Guardian about his gradual rise to prominence. Of that performance at the Ozzy tribute, he says he was “extremely nervous” beforehand. “About 50,000 people were there. 25,000 haven’t got a clue who I am, 15,000 think I’m a poser, and maybe 10,000, one of their kids has mentioned me to them.

“But the minute I got on stage, everything went calm. I grew up in a guitar shop (his father owned one), I’ve always been around older rock-heads – my dad, my uncles, the people who worked there and played in bands around Doncaster. It’s what I grew up with. I thought: ‘This is where I come from, this is going to bring me home.’”

The singer (whose real name is Dominic Harrison, of course) also explained what he thought the secrets to his rise have been. Initially, radio and the music press gave him a wide berth, so he turned instead to making DIY YouTube videos and using social media.

“People started sending me direct messages and I started hitting them back: no one gave a shit in England, it was kids in the Netherlands. I put a gig on there and we sold out 150 tickets in 10 minutes."

Harrison releases a new version of his hit Zombie this week in collaboration with the Smashing Pumpkins. It’s the first time the Pumpkins have ever had a feature slot with another artist and The Guardian also spoke to Billy Corgan, who was full of praise for the singer, saying: “Dom has one of the greatest voices in the history of music, and as grand as that may sound there is no hype in what I’m saying.”

“I truly believe when all is said and done, he will stand up there with the greats,” Corgan added, “And it’s worth noting that Ozzy believed this, too.”

Billy Corgan is to be honoured at the NAMM show early next year.

The 41^st annual NAMM Technical Excellence and Creativity (TEC) awards are happening in January (on Thursday, 22 January, to be exact) at the show in Anaheim, California. The Smashing Pumpkins leader is to be awarded the TEC Innovation Award for, well, his “transformative impact on modern, guitar-driven music and his forward-thinking approach to tone shaping and sonic architecture.”

Of course, Billy doesn’t need anyone to blow smoke up his backside, but his work on the run of Pumpkins’ albums in the 1990s, when they were at the forefront of the grunge scene, is worth celebrating, you'd have to admit. And one thing you could never accuse him of is creative timidity – concept albums, rock operas and diversions into poetry are all there on his CV alongside more leftfield preoccupations like his involvement in wrestling promotion.

“Billy’s fearless approach to production, imaginative pedal chains, analogue exploration, intricate layering and boundary-breaking studio techniques have influenced countless creators,” John Mlynczak, NAMM President and CEO said in a statement.

“His deep commitment to innovation and artistic evolution places him among the most distinctive and influential musical architects of the last three decades.”

It’s been a quiet year in terms of new music for Corgan, although last month he teamed up with the Lyric Opera of Chicago for an operatic ‘reimagining’ of the Pumpkins' 1995 album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, on the occasion of its thirtieth anniversary.

Other than that, he’s been mostly seen in 2025 talking to other musicians on his The Magnificent Others podcast. And in contrast to countless other podcasts out there cluttering up YouTube, it turns out he’s actually quite good at listening and coaxing interesting material out of his guests.

Anyway, he’ll be in good company when he receives the TEC Innovation Award in January. Previous recipients of the honour include Joni Mitchell, Paul McCartney, Stevie Wonder, Herbie Hancock and Pete Townshend, amongst others.

Apparently, there is no love lost between Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips and Billy Corgan, and it all stems from when they toured together during Lollapalooza in 1994.

It’s another nugget to come via the new oral history of the fest, LOLLAPALOOZA: The Uncensored Story of Rock’s Wildest Festival. We’ve already found out that Perry Farrell, who founded the event regarded Green Day as a “boy band”. Now it seems that Billy Corgan’s behaviour during the 1994 event, well, left something to be desired.

Kevin Lyman, who was an artist liaison at the time and went on to create the Warped Tour, recalled Corgan being mean to his guitar tech Billy Howerdel, who would go on to form his own band, A Perfect Circle: “Billy Corgan was treating (Howerdel) like such shit, throwing guitars at him, just being horrible.”

Howerdel largely backs this up. “I got fired off that tour working for Billy and (Pumpkins bassist) D’arcy (Wretzky) — the first and only time I’ve been fired from a job. I don’t remember guitars being thrown at me, but there were a lot of behaviours that just didn’t seem healthy, that you definitely didn’t want to be around anyway.”

This was noticed by other artists, including Wayne Coyne of the much-lower-down-the-bill Flaming Lips: “Billy Corgan was such a raging asshole, especially back then, that you didn’t want to stick around and watch them.”

“We liked a few of their songs, but we would just despise him after a while. So we’d leave right after the Beastie Boys played to avoid the traffic, because the audience was also starting to clear out.”

And the bad feeling apparently lingers more than thirty years on. “We’re still avoiding him to this day,” says Coyne. “We’ve played shows in the past couple years where he’s hanging around and you can tell he wants to come into our dressing room. And we’re like, ‘No, we’re not here!’”

For his part, Corgan admitted that he felt under pressure during the tour. Nirvana had originally been scheduled to headline, but after Kurt Cobain’s death, the Pumpkins were bumped up the bill. They faced hostility from audiences and were fully prepared to give it back.

“So we’re headlining what became historically the biggest Lollapalooza ever. And there they are. There are the same football players who used to bully us in the hallways. I looked at it as, like, ‘No. You’re the enemy and we are here to take you on.’”

He admitted that he still has strangers approaching him saying they “refuse to ever see the band or listen to the band” after seeing them at Lollapalooza that summer.

LOLLAPALOOZA: The Uncensored Story of Rock’s Wildest Festival is out now.

The Smashing Pumpkins’ leader Billy Corgan says that he sang one of his band’s classic songs at a karaoke club - and it did not go well.

Corgan talks about some of the key songs in his life in a new interview with The Guardian.

“The last song I did at karaoke was Zero by Smashing Pumpkins,” he says. “I thought it would be funny to sing my own song, but the longer it went, the more I performed it like I was on stage in front of 50,000 people, and the less people thought it was funny.”

Corgan also names the metal classic that helped him navigate a troubled time in his youth.

“Fade to Black by Metallica showed me the power of music when I was going through some hard times as a teen,” he says. “When you’re really down, a song really can save your life.”

The full interview can be read here.

The Smashing Pumpkins tour the UK in August.

Never shy of fighting his own corner, Billy Corgan has described the Smashing Pumpkins are “one of the most misunderstood bands in the history of rock ‘n’ roll.”

Corgan was a guest on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast and over the course of a long three-hour conversation, the pair touched on a number of topics including the ebb and flow of musical fashions.

“You’re about to see that Nickelback and Creed are about to go on a huge run of business,” predicted Corgan. “They survived (the hate), and now comes the inevitable moment of, ‘It was really good’...they wrote a lot of great songs.”

And he included the Pumpkins among those supposedly ‘unfashionable’ bands that will eventually be appreciated. “Time will tell my story much better than I did,” he reflected.

Corgan went on to say that it irritated him to be compared to peers who died and then ascended to ‘legend’ status.

“It bothered me because it felt unfair or it felt like I was being sort of made to pay for the sins of the people who are no longer here. Particularly, in Gen X, we’ve had so many great talents die.”

“We’re probably one of the most misunderstood bands in the history of rock ‘n’ roll,” he added, “That sounds like a wrestling statement, but it’s fairly accurate.”

Asked by Rogan why they might be misunderstood, Corgan said: “I think it has a lot to do with the issues of Gen X, and it has a lot to do with a relationship that I set into motion with the media when I was a very young person, playing kind of a funny game — like doing my own my own version of Andy Kaufman or Bob Zmuda. Because I thought it was all shitty, so I was just like, ‘I’m just going to play with this like a toy because I think it’s kind of funny.'”

He continued: “I didn’t realise that the coming culture was going to kind of almost be attracted to people who are willing to immolate themselves on the public stage. Most people who are attracted to fame, they want to run towards the shiny part of it. I was attracted to the non-shiny part, which is, ‘Okay, I’ll light myself on fire and let’s see what happens,’ or ‘I’ll light you on fire and let’s see what happens.’”

“So, it kind of worked in the 90s when everybody was rolling and moving along. Well, here comes Napster, the music business craters, then a bunch of people die, and there you are at 40 years old, you’re supposed to carry some flag for a generation that doesn’t even know who it is anymore.”

It sounds like Billy might be over-thinking all of this. Well...it wouldn’t be the first time, would it?

Billy Corgan and the comedian Bill Burr – well... are they related? Seriously.

It has been noted by many that they do indeed look alike. Now Corgan has claimed that Burr may actually be his half brother.

The theory came up when Corgan guested on the Howie Mandel Does Stuff podcast after Mandel had mischievously used an image of Burr instead of Corgan on the studio’s screen.

This prompted an anecdote from the Smashing Pumpkins man. “About 10 years ago, one of my brothers was having a birthday party, and my stepmother was there, who was obviously married to my father,” he continued. “And my stepmother said to me, 'Do you know who Bill Burr is?' Now at that point, I had never heard of Bill Burr; I didn’t know who he was. I didn’t know he was a comedian or anything. He could have been the guy down the street.

“And she said, ‘Well, he’s this comedian.’ And I think I even somehow called up a picture on the phone, and I kind of noticed right away, ‘Gee, he kind of looks like my father.’ Bill Burr looks more like my father than Bill Burr looks like me or I look like Bill Burr. So I said to my mother, 'Why are you asking me this?'”

He went on to say: “She goes, ‘I think it might be one of your father’s illegitimate children. Bill Burr might be one of the children that your father sired in his days being a travelling musician.’ This is a true story, I’m not making this up. There is no joke in this.”

He’s wrong - what makes the story funny is that Burr himself is clearly no fan of the Smashing Pumpkins. A few years back a video appeared on YouTube in which he rips into '90s grunge bands (albeit with a tongue in his cheek).

After running though Nirvana and Pearl Jam, he turned his attention to his doppelganger’s out: “...and when Smashing Pumpkins came out, whatever the fuck he was singing about... cats, siamese twins. What was that song? [Does a spot-on Billy singing Bullet With Butterfly Wings] I was trying so hard but by then I was 25 years old and I tell you, it’s over: music is for young people.”

So, was Bill Burr unwittingly cracking wise about his half brother when that video was published in 2017? What does Burr think of this new revelation? This one could run and run.

Billy Corgan has entered an auction to win Courtney Love’s handwritten lyrics to Violet, a Hole song that was long-supposed to be about him.

The Smashing Pumpkins mainman took to Instagram to announce that he has purchased three tickets, which is part of a fundraiser by the wildlife sanctuary Ellis Park, which is running until December 15. The charity, which is dedicated to caring for rescued animals in Sumatra was founded by Warren Ellis of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.

“Hello friends. I have a very special announcement. Check this out. I just bought my ticket for the Ellis Park Wildlife Sanctuary auction for the lyrics for Violet written by Courtney Love,” he began in the video.

“Now, it’s made a lot of press this week that this auction’s going off so I’ve actually bought my ticket because I’d like to win these lyrics because I think it’s about a guy I know a little bit and I’d love to put that on my wall,” he said, before adding that he was “in it to win it.”

You might think this is a bit strange. It’s long been thought Violet, which originally appeared on Hole's 1994 Live Through This album, is actually about Corgan – the pair were in a relationship around the time the song was first written in the early 1990s. And Love has often been disparaging about Corgan in the past.

When Hole performed the song on Jools Holland’s show in 1995, Love told all and sundry that it was “a song about a jerk, I hexed him and now he’s losing his hair”.

Except it seems it’s not that simple. In a statement given to the NME last week, Love explained that “It’s not just about Billy Corgan, as many might assume; it’s about sitting on the fire escape of his flat, sipping cheap wine and taking a Vicodin (oh, to be young!) while the Chicago sun sets, leaving behind a bejewelled amethyst sky.”

“Sometimes I just channel whatever comes,” she said. “I realise my comment on Jools Holland was a bit mean – I was just being bitchy beefy. But someone has to uphold the standards of good faith beef!”

Anyway, Billy doesn’t seem to mind now and it’s all going to charity, isn’t it? The Pumpkins guitarist shared an Instagram story of the NME article about the song, and captioned it by saying: “She forgot to mention that I wrote one of the heart-rending couplets contained therein. But I will always love this song. Love you Court.”

Billy Corgan has been at it again. Shooting his mouth off about his own brilliance, that is.

This time in a new interview with Premier Guitar, the Smashing Pumpkins leader has been boasting about how he can conjure up songs from any era of the band at will.

He began talking about why prefers to take a modernist approach to his songwriting. “I think it’s more trying to find something that seems to signify whatever’s happening at the moment, he explained. “It’s a truthfulness. You could say to me, ‘Hey, play me some ‘Siamese’-type thing that you would’ve done in ‘92,’ and in five minutes, I could write you something that would sound like a song that would’ve been a ‘Siamese’ song in ‘92.”

He continued: “I can dial in any era of the band or my writing at will, because they’re all based on methodologies and certain emotional templates. So, I’m trying to do that for today. What is the 2024 version of that that makes me feel something - anything at all?”

“If I pick up a guitar, I’m looking to play something that surprises me. It’s whatever comes out. And sometimes you hit the wrong chord and go, ‘Oh, that’s interesting.’ Or you find a new inversion or something that you never thought of before. You try to play a different scale run than you’ve played 10,000 times, always landing on the same note. It’s just looking for something just a little bit new.”

He concluded: “I find oftentimes, in that quiet solitude of just you and the guitar, this communication can happen that sort of expresses something about yourself that is surprising – an emotional feeling or a way of approach.”

Just last week Corgan was talking about how he thinks he is underrated as a guitarist. “Most people don’t even recognise my contributions as a guitar player,” he said before complaining about his absence from ‘Best Ever Guitarist’- type lists. “I usually don’t even make those lists,” he said. “Or they’ll put me behind somebody who I could play circles around. I don’t mean to denigrate the people in front of me… but come on, you know?”

Never mind. There’s plenty for Billy to look forward to. The thirteenth Smashing Pumpkins studio album Aghori Mhori Mei has been well-received by fans and it gets a physical release in a couple of weeks time. Then in December he heads out on a six date solo tour of Australia, which will give him ample opportunity to show the good people down under just how impressive a guitarist he is.

Billy Corgan has never been one for hiding his light under a bushel, has he? And he’s been at it again recently. In this case, he’s told Guitar World magazine about how under-appreciated he is as a guitarist.

In a new interview with the mag, the Smashing Pumpkins’ leader has complained that “Most people don’t even recognize my contributions as a guitar player,” Corgan tells the mag. “They don’t even assume I’m the one playing a lot of the guitar.”

He continued: “You have these silly lists that come out about the greatest guitar players; I usually don’t even make those lists. Or they’ll put me behind somebody who I could play circles around. I don’t mean to denigrate the person in front of me or the people in front of me, but come on, you know? I’m enough of a guitar player to know who’s a great guitar player.”

“Once you go beyond, let’s call it the Zakk Wyldes and Dimebag Darrells and the truly great Randy Rhoadses, there’s a lot of people who pretend to play guitar. I certainly have no problem believing I’m better than a lot of them.”

It’s a fair point that he tends to be under-represented in those sort of lists. But who really pays attention to them anyway? After all, what criteria are they based on – simple technical ability? Creativity? Innovation? Songwriting? And does it really matter?

Evidently, it does to Billy.

He also touched on what is obviously another sore point: “If I’m being frank about it – and maybe this isn’t the best way to do it – but if I’m being frank, people have a hard time understanding that as it pertains to the Smashing Pumpkins, I’m writing the songs, lyrics, melodies, arrangements and playing most of the complicated guitar. And that I’m capable of doing a solo on top of that. I think that’s hard for people to process.”

Smashing Pumpkins released their thirteenth album, Aghori Mhori Mei in August. It’s finally getting its physical release in a couple of weeks time, along with a new double A side single, Formosa/ Our Lady Of Sorrows.

Jane’s Addiction bassist Eric Avery has been talking about the time he auditioned for Metallica, his brief tenure with Smashing Pumpkins and how he believes he was never a good fit for either of those bands.

Avery was considered for the vacant bassist role after Jason Newsted left Metallica in 2001, but in the end the band plumped for Robert Trujillo. In a new interview with Guitar World, Avery was asked whether he thought his career would be different if he’d joined either of those bands full-time.

"I have,” he considered. “I've thought about what that would be like – and it's not all to the positive. Well, I shouldn't say that in both of those cases. For different reasons, I went into them thinking that I didn't hope to get the gig because I really thought that I wasn't right for them.”

"So I entered into them as experiences, like, 'I'm gonna have a life experience; I'm gonna create a memory.' Not every day does one travel to Santa Rosa (California) to play a few songs with Metallica, you know? I didn't see it as a job audition; and in that way, it really delivered. They were great to me, too. I came away with a great day from my human lifetime."

A few years later Avery joined Smashing Pumpkins for a couple of weeks. Regarding that time the bassist said: "In the case of the Pumpkins, at the time, I didn't know Billy Corgan, but I knew he wasn't the easiest person to work with. And because of my tendency to have trouble not speaking truth to power, if power needs speaking to, I just thought, 'This is not going to last, but it'll be interesting. It'll be an interesting week or two.' And it really was."

But he added: "I found Corgan to be quite an inspiring guy to work with for the two or three weeks that I did."

Avery has had a varied career outside of Jane’s Addiction. After the group’s original split, he and guitarist Dave Navarro teamed up on the short-lived Deconstruction, he has also been part of Alanis Morrissette’s backing band and an unofficial member of Garbage for their last three albums. Then there was also his Nineties solo project, Polar Bear.

As for new music from Jane’s, Avery said he was “guardedly optimistic” that they’d be a new album eventually from the reformed band: “The phrase that Dave and I were talking about the other day is: ‘If there is a Jane’s Addiction in 2025, then there will be new music for sure.’ But you just never know if there’s going to be a band at all.”

Billy Corgan has addressed a growing controversy - largely of his own making - about playing or not playing ‘the hits’.

In an interview with Kerrang earlier this month, the Smashing Pumpkins leader seemed to say that, unlike the vast majority of heritage acts, he wouldn’t play any hits he didn’t like, whether or not fans wanted to hear them. 

“I don’t play any songs I don’t want to play,” he said. “I don’t care if they’re a classic or not, if I don’t want to play it, I just don’t play it. I don’t put that on the audience like, ‘Well, I’ve got to play this one for you.’ I think that’s kind of cheese.”

Now in an Instagram post he seems to have gone back on that. “I want to address the elephant (rhinoceros) in the room – about [Smashing Pumpkins] not playing the hits or fan favorites,” he wrote. 

“Just going to leave this here – here is SP not playing the hits in Glasgow at @ovohydro.  Does anyone know any songs on this playlist?” Enclosed is a pic of a setlist that contains many of the band’s best known songs, including Today, Tonight Tonight, Cherub Rock and 1979, as well as a cover of U2’s Zoo Station.

“Super deep cuts/not fan favorites,” Corgan added sarkily. “But thank you Glasgow for being absolutely aff yer HEIDS last night. Spectacular audience. Will show more of SP not playing hits/fan favourites as the tour goes on!”

The band have just finished the UK leg of their European tour, which finishes up in Athens on July 16.

In a separate interview Corgan also defended the length of Taylor Swift’s latest album The Tortured Poets Department and described those who complain about album lengths as “childish”. Corgan is no stranger to sneaking huge albums past record companies. The Pumpkins most recent album ATUM was a three act rock opera that contained 33 tracks.

Speaking to the Irish Times, he said: “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... 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? 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.”

Los Angeles-based guitarist Kiki Wong has been announced as Jeff Shroeder's replacement in the Smashing Pumpkins as a touring guitarist, following an open audition process that began at the beginning of the year, prompting around 10,000 applications from around the world.

The guitarist with LA rockers Vigil Of War has a significant social media following with  674,000 followers on Instagram where she posts covers, collaborations and playing insights. 

"SP is excited to officially welcome highly-skilled veteran guitarist Kiki Wong," the band posted on Instagram. "Kiki joins the band’s touring lineup of Billy Corgan, Jimmy Chamberlin, and James Iha, along with mainstays Jack Bates and Katie Cole. Please join us in welcoming Kiki to the SP family."

Vigil Of War have released two EPs to date with the most recent, Reap What You Sow in 2022. The following year Wong gave birth to her son Jet Merrick Autry.

"It's been an absolute wild ride, but I am beyond honoured and humbled to be chosen to play alongside some of rock's greatest and most influential musicians of all time," said Wong in a statement.

"I never thought little ole 15-year-old me playing metal guitar in my bedroom would amount to this moment," she added. "It goes to show hard work and perseverance truly pays off if you're willing to push through the tough stuff, so never lose hope out there.

"I am so grateful for this opportunity and can't wait to share the stage with the legendary Smashing Pumpkins!"

Pumpkins leader Billy Corgan offered further insight to Wong's selection in an addition post on the Pumpkins' Instagram.

"Reviewing the work of these incredible musicians was herculean, albeit worthy effort," he reflected. "First off, I really want to thank everyone who submitted materials for consideration.

"It wasn't an easy decision with how much great guitar playing we were lucky enough to hear and see over the past few months," he admitted. "I was a fan of Kiki's before she submitted her name to be considered – and it's great that someone of her acumen will be part of our touring family. 

"I can't wait to hit the road with Kiki as a partner in our mad circus. It's definitely an exciting moment for The Smashing Pumpkins to be this busy with touring in 2024. We'll see you all this summer!" 

• "As good as D’arcy and James are, it was just going to sound better if Billy played it" – Billy Corgan, Jimmy Chamberlin, Butch Vig, Flood and more on the Smashing Pumpkins' recording history

"I'm sorry, I’m on a tangent,” he laughs. “See, I told you. I don’t interview anymore. I’m just talking like a normal person.”

It’s ten minutes into our first interview, and Billy Corgan has gone slightly off-topic. Nothing too outlandish, but he’s affable and apologetic nonetheless. The two of us are sitting on the patio outside a nondescript home studio in Los Angeles, where the audio is being mixed for a forthcoming DVD chronicling the Smashing Pumpkins’ 12-show run at the Fillmore in the summer of 2007. 

In two weeks he’ll travel to another studio to record G.L.O.W., a new Pumpkins track for the Guitar Hero World Tour video game. Corgan also went through facial scanning and motion capture at Neversoft to become a playable character.

“Digital me,” he smiles, right down to the sheen off his dome piece. There’s a lot on tap in Pumpkinland, but for the moment its chief resident is calm and centred. The loudest thing about him is a pair of bright orange socks peering over the top of his black-and-red high-top Nike Court Forces.

That anybody would announce the fact that they were talking like a normal person seems strange unless that person happens to be Billy Corgan. Frequently misinterpreted and misquoted, it’s understandable that Corgan is somewhat of a guarded interview, at least in regards to certain topics. Gear isn’t one of them.

“I love talking about that stuff,” he says. “I’d rather talk about that stuff than talk about emotional stuff. So yeah, as far as you want to go down the rabbit hole...”

The thing is, the further down you go, the more you realise that the emotional stuff and the technical stuff intertwine like patch cables. Personalities, playing styles, tension, harmony, exploration everything is interconnected.

Riffs and rifts. Tone and atonement. The collective dynamic among Billy Corgan, drummer Jimmy Chamberlin, guitarist James Iha, and bassist D’arcy Wretzky manifested itself in one of the most sonically diverse and emotionally-complex bodies of work in rock history. 

As individuals, they affected one another just as much with their absence as they did with their presence. They are torchbearers of the Alternative Nation, and their music resonates with hippies, shoegazers, goths, shredders, and e-music experimentalists alike.

“Thousands of songs have come and gone over the past 20 years, but we can count on one hand the iconic bands that are a staple in the format,” says Michael Martin, Vice President of Programming at 98.7 KYSR in Los Angeles. “We test thousands of records in a year, and Smashing Pumpkins are always near the top with multiple tracks. It’s beyond the single and beyond the album. It’s the band.”

With Corgan at the helm, the Pumpkins filtered their concepts through a gamut of accredited producers, engineers, and mixers, achieving unique creative and critical outcomes for each project. The motivation, whether conscious or subconscious, remained the same: Move forward, apply pressure, don’t fake it.

“Go back and read the press on us from 1989 to 1992,” says Corgan. “People had no clue who we were and where we were going. We were onto something and we followed it through, and it built up into something that sold and was popular. 

"It had its moment, but I think once we crested that wave it was back to a level of experimentation. What we didn’t understand were the ramifications it was going to have on the band commercially. You can’t build yourself into this superpower and then say, ‘I’m going to go back to being arty guy.’ They don’t want to hear that, and I wasn’t sophisticated enough to understand that. Now I am.

“The mainstream world only wants to hear you when you have your shit together. It may take us three years to get our shit together to a point where we can make that kind of level of work, and then we’ll show up and we’ll set the phasers to stun. I’m 41, Jimmy’s 44, we still have a good seven-plus years where we can play that kind of music that way. I think Superchrist is a good indication that we’re still willing to light stuff on fire.”

A blunt force psychedelic jam produced by longtime friend Kerry Brown, Superchrist is both a push to the future and a nod to the past. It’s the first fruit of a band no longer beholden to a label, Zeitgeist fulfilled their one-album deal with Warner Brothers and rekindles a raw, brazen energy that, to Brown, was a cornerstone of Gish-era recording.

Gish (1991)

The Smashing Pumpkins rose to prominence in the shadows of Wrigley Field on the North Side of Chicago in the late 1980s. Outfitted in cold weather thrift store threads, they delivered punishing body blows of bombastic, cinematic love-rock, their pop appeal perfectly shaded behind a treacherous wall of sound. Destiny handed them an alternative pedigree, but their cover material, Sookie Sookie (Steppenwolf), The Joker (Steve Miller Band), Venus In Furs (The Velvet Underground), exposed deep roots that would inform their future recordings.

“The Pumpkins looked like they were from Mars,” says producer Butch Vig. “To see how they looked and hear how they sounded was one of the reasons why people thought they were really special. If you ever saw that band play live, they could absolutely crush people.”

The band had already released a self-produced single for I Am One in the spring of 1990 before Corgan contacted Vig about producing a Sub Pop seven-inch for the song Tristessa. The strength of that partnership prompted Vig to sign on for their full-length debut, which was to be recorded at Vig’s Smart Studios in Madison, Wisconsin.

“Billy was very ambitious,” Vig remembers. “He wanted to make everything sound amazing and see how far he could take it; really spend time on the production and the performances. For me, that was a godsend because I was used to doing records for all the indie labels and we only had budgets for three or four days.”

The band loaded into the studio with a modest amount of gear, most of which can be seen in their first few videos. On stage, the band’s signature sound was rooted in Corgan and Iha’s mid-’70s Strat/’87 Les Paul combination, but the recording centred around Corgan’s rig: An early ’80s Marshall JCM800 2203, known as the Soul Head, run through Marshall 1960A cabinets, all purchased off “some stoner guy” in Chicago for $800. 

The KT88 tubes in the JCM produce a round, creamy tone that, when used in conjunction with an ADA MP-1 tube preamp, produced the Gish tone. Using the low input side of the JCM, Corgan would turn the master volume all the way up, and then use the preamp’s volume to make micro-adjustments. A host of effects, from the Fender Blender to the Phase 100, were folded in for extra fuzz and sweep comb filtering. The bass parts were recorded with Wretzky’s black Fender P-Bass, dubbed the “Rat Bass” for the scattering of white rat stickers all over the face and played through a Trace Elliot AH300SM.

“Billy was ‘green’ only in the sense that he didn’t necessarily have hands-on experience, but he knew what he wanted,” Vig continues. “He’s a big fan of Queen and ELO, and those records had big produced sounds, and as much as he didn’t know maybe from an engineering standpoint how to do it, I think sonically what he heard in his head, he understood.”

The band would collectively hash out the arrangements through exhaustive rehearsals, but when it came time to record, Corgan laid down the majority of the parts. This oft-talked about procedure became a standard practice.

“As good as D’arcy and James are, it was just going to sound better if Billy played it,” says Vig. “I think it probably caused some friction, but it was something they dealt with and accepted in the band.”

The drums were the one component of the Smashing Pumpkins that Corgan could not reproduce. A jazz drummer by trade, Jimmy Chamberlin paired swing and subtlety with a thunderous intensity reminiscent of legends like Keith Moon and John Bonham. 

Chamberlin has been a Yamaha endorsee since 1993, but back then his setup was a Pearl DLX Series kit with a 16x22-inch kick and a Yamaha steel snare. As Chamberlin remembers, the kit was miked with Sennheiser 421s on the toms, Shure SM57s on the snare, an AKG D112/Electro-Voice RE20 combo on the kick, and AKG C414s as overheads.

At the time, Vig didn’t have a tremendous amount of money to make significant cosmetic changes to Smart, but the shape of the studio’s live room, all odd angles and no parallel walls, made for an incredible sound, inspiring the live feel of the band’s studio performance. 

Gish was recorded onto a two-inch, 24-track Otari MX80, but few things were recorded through the studio’s newly acquired 56-input customized Harrison console (Vig relied largely on outboard Summit and API preamps) though he says that Harrison’s versatile EQ section and exceptional high- and low-pass filters made it easier to quickly carve out pockets in the mix for Corgan’s unique tone. When all was said and done, Gish cost around $20,000 to produce and took just over 30 days to record.

“For me, that was the equivalent of making a Steely Dan record,” laughs Vig who, two months after wrapping production on Gish, travelled to Los Angeles to record Nirvana’s Nevermind. “Having that luxury to spend hours on a guitar tone or tuning the drums or working on harmonies and textural things... I was over the moon to think I had found a comrade in- arms who wanted to push me, and who really wanted me to push him.”

But for all its sonic ambition, Gish couldn’t hold a candle to what came next. After touring behind their first record, Butch Vig and the Pumpkins spent five months recording their follow-up, Siamese Dream, working 14-hour days, six days a week. And towards the end of the recording process, after tours had been booked and a release date established, they worked a full seven days. Alan Moulder, whose history with dense guitar bands like Ride and My Bloody Valentine, was asked to mix. He booked two weeks at Rumbo Studios in Los Angeles.

Siamese Dream (1993)

“When we set out to make Siamese Dream, we wanted to go way, way over the top,” explains Vig. “We didn’t care if anybody thought it was overproduced.”

Tack a zero onto the Gish tab and you come close to matching Siamese Dream’s total cost. Through it all, the tenacity of the group’s work ethic was eclipsed only by the pressure to succeed. Along the way, Iha and Wretzky ended their relationship, Chamberlin developed what would become an acute substance abuse problem, and Corgan’s creative turmoil pushed him to the point of near suicide. 

His songwriting, as if voiced by a choleric yet optimistic teenager well beyond his years, hinged on defiance, acceptance, family, and alienation. Of the “hundreds of dumb riffs” they would play, the ones that stuck not only sounded good, they felt good to play.

“I’m a person who tends not to repeat technique, which I guess is kind of suicidal in a way,” says Corgan. “Most people look at a recording career as a series of conclusions. I’ve always treated my recording career more like a journey. I think when an artist gets into a comfortable set of choices, that’s where the death of creativity lies.”

Months of recording meant lots of time for experimentation and tweaking. To help minimise distractions, Vig and the Pumpkins checked into Triclops Studios in Marietta, Georgia, a cosy space that allowed the band a sort of temporary respite. Unlike Smart, Triclops’ ’70s style room had high, woody ceilings that made for a modest decay. 

Vig brought along his API Lunchbox loaded with modular pres for the bass and a few guitar overdubs, but most of the instrumentation was run through the studio’s Neve console onto Studer A800s. Corgan’s “Soul Head” and Marshall cabinet were still in effect, but he no longer used the MP-1. Instead, Corgan achieved Siamese Dream’s highly stylized tone with a litany of DOD pedals and a ’70s-era, silver-faced Big Muff Pi. As the guitar he’d used on Gish had been stolen, his go-to guitars became ’57 Eric Clapton re-issue Strats with Lace Sensor pickups.

“We found a secret weapon on that record,” says Vig. “A little preamp in a pedal steel guitar. It wasn’t built for a loud guitar. It was built for a low output on a pedal steel, so it had this super high-end white noise gain that gave the guitar this sonic jet sound.”

That pedal steel preamp, coupled with an old school tape flanging created by physically speeding up and slowing down the reel by hand is the sound behind Corgan’s otherworldly solo on Cherub Rock. Quiet features hard-panned left and right guitars running through the Big Muff with the tone turned all the way down, while the howling break in the chorus to Mayonnaise is nothing but pure feedback created by Corgan’s $60 pawn shop “Mayonnaise Guitar.”

But Corgan’s gear was only part of the equation. The endless overdubs, at least 40 in Soma are well-documented, but Vig says that proper mic configuration is what allowed the parts to congeal. Vig’s mic'ing technique was as follows: Corgan would crank up his amp to full gain, and then set the guitar down. After boosting the headphones send on all the mics, Vig entered the room to move around the mics, using the phase-shifting hiss from Corgan’s guitar echo as his guide. According to Vig, an AKG C 414 produced the widest spectrum of sound, a Sennheiser 421 accented the midrange, and ribbon mics were used to obtain a smoother sound with quick, yet mellow, transients.

“You can’t have 40 guitars that are all full range,” says Vig. “There have to be places for them to fit. You could have low-midrange, or you could have everything scooped out with a high-pass that’s cut at 300 or 400kHz.”

The miking tactic seemed almost drum-like, which, given Vig’s musical expertise, is a fair assumption. “Maybe from me being a drummer, that’s an aesthetic I brought to the table that I didn’t even really understand at the time,” he says.

The army of guitar signals would later make vocal tracking a strenuous procedure for Corgan. Vig didn’t much care for the midrange in Corgan’s voice, so to soften that particular timbre he used a Shure SM7 (generally regarded as a more “open”-sounding mic when its roll off and boost features are engaged simultaneously) through an API preamp and a Summit TLA-100 Tube Limiter, all fed back into Corgan’s headphones. Like everything else, vocal takes were abundant, with Corgan sometimes singing for eight hours at a time to make sure his tracks were pitch-perfect.

“My voice is really hard to record,” says Corgan, smiling. “It’s hard to record, it’s hard to monitor, and it’s hard to mix. I’m Irish, I’m meant to sing sad ballads! My voice isn’t really meant for rock, and I’m pretty sure many people out there would agree with me.”

He laughs again, and you can hear it a little clearer. His voice. That voice, lurking underneath his conversational tone. That unmistakable inflection that can shift from an airy lilt to a nasal, sandpapery growl at the turn of a verse. 

To some, it represents instant alternative rock salvation; a vocal uppercut to the face of the status quo. To others, Bruce Britt of the Broward-Palm Beach New Times, for instance, it’s the “most annoying voice in rock.” But Siamese Dream has gone four-times platinum on the strength of that voice because emotionally, it carries with it as much layered complexity and contradiction as the instrumentation that backs it. 

“Today” was the greatest day Corgan had ever known, not because it really was, but because it couldn’t get any worse. Somehow that was enough of a comfort to lure him away from the edge. Somehow, against all odds, the Smashing Pumpkins kept moving forward.

“People don’t always articulate their expectations,” says Corgan. “I think whenever we would work with producers, they would do their best to try and balance those forces between what somebody would want, what I would want, and what was best for the record.”

Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness (1995)

Before a single note was recorded, Corgan knew he wanted the next release to be a double album. Flood and Alan Moulder, friends since their early days at the prestigious Trident Studios in London, were tapped to co-produce. 

The band began rehearsing at Pumpkinland, their Chicago recording space, and Billy began funnelling cassette demos to Flood for review. Roughly two-thirds of Mellon Collie & the Infinite Sadness was tracked at Pumpkinland on an Otari MTR-90 MKII, while the remaining portion was tracked at the Chicago Recording Company on Studer A820s.

“I love recording at 15 ips NAB, but with Dolby SR, because it just adds a whole different dimension to the sound,” says Flood. “Apart from the obvious benefits of Dolby, if you tweak the Dolby unit really, really well, it’s a bit like adding an Aphex and a dbx sub-harmonic bass enhancer on every channel. 

Also, the way that tape changes the sound or modifies the sound, 15 ips is technically not correct, but I find it to be so musical, particularly on the bottom end. This was very much a conscious decision, and very much a part of the album’s sound.”

Another conscious decision was to change up the manner in which the group recorded. In the past, the band had only used one room to track, which of course meant only one thing could be going on at a time. Hours spent waiting for one person to finish up their part led to frustration. 

For Mellon Collie, Flood would generally work with Corgan in the A room on the Otari and an MCI board, while Moulder worked with Wretzky and Iha in the B room on a Pro Tools rig slaved to both Tascam DA-88 digital recorders and two-inch tape. 

The combination of analogue and digital opened up a world of recording possibilities and played to the creative strengths of Mellon Collie’s adventurous spirit. A track like Thru The Eyes Of Ruby, which contains approximately 70 guitar tracks, would have been nearly impossible to do with tape alone. Likewise, Porcelina Of The Vast Oceans contains roughly six sections that were all recorded at different times with different instrument and microphone configurations and then fused together, another beneficial byproduct of editing in Pro Tools.

Guitar and amplification choices were the key differences between Siamese and Mellon Collie. For the bass, Wretzky switched up from the P-Bass to a ’60s era Fender Jazz Bass reissue with Ampeg and Mesa/Boogie amps. For Corgan, what sounded great about the Siamese fuzz pedal set up in the studio made it sound horrible live. He still had his Marshall 1960A cabinets, but Corgan shifted to a Mesa Boogie Strategy 500 and a Marshall JMP-1 preamp (Corgan also notes that he used an Alesis 3630 to drive extra gain into a Marshall). As the ultimate goal for Mellon Collie was to capture the band’s live, unbridled sound, Billy largely used this touring rig to record.

“Flood felt like the band he would see live wasn’t really captured on record,” says Corgan. “So a lot of Mellon Collie was tracked by the band at deafening volumes. I mean deafening. There was so much SPL in the room that it was physically uncomfortable. Your ears, your emotional resistance, would wear down.”

Flood also discovered that Corgan was a much better singer pitch-wise when he didn’t use headphones, so he switched Corgan up to a Shure SM58 and had him sing in front of open speakers.

“My experience with U2 taught me that a lot of things you’d expect to become problematic with monitors in the room aren’t, and by careful use of screening, by positioning the monitors and what you put in the monitors you can actually get a lot of benefits,” says Flood. 

“For instance, Jimmy used to love having the kick drum and a bit of snare going through his wedges, which were directly behind him. So if you’ve got a kit that’s lacking a bit of bottom end, you pump the kick and the snare through the wedges and you start to tweak them to get extra weight. 

"We also developed this system whereby we had what was called ‘rehearsal mode’ and ‘tape mode.’ In rehearsal mode, everybody was on the floor, the amps were blaring, and you wouldn’t have to worry about spills. We had the speakers inside these big coffin flight cases in the back of the room and mic'd them close up, then mic'd them about six feet away. Then we’d close the lid. When you were tracking in tape mode, everybody could flick over at the flick of a footswitch and their amps would be quietly purring away in the corner. When you’d give a little bit back to them in their own respective monitors, automatically the sound of the room cut right back and you’d get the vibe of four people playing on top of each other.”

For the drums, Chamberlin’s core Mellon Collie kit was a Yamaha Maple Custom with a 16x22-inch kick, a 22-inch ride, 18-inch and 19-inch Zildjian A Custom crashes, 22-inch swish knockers, and 10-inch and 15-inch fast crashes. Because of his big band background, he frequently changed out his snares, building his kit around the snare and the ride as opposed to the kick. The familiar drum rolls all throughout “Tonight, Tonight” can be attributed to Jimmy’s classic 5 1/2x14- inch Ludwig Supra-Phonic.

“From there I go to microphones as far as how I want the drums to sit dimensionally in the track,” Chamberlin informs. “If I want the drums upfront and aggressive, I’ll use a lot of AKG C 414s so they sit in front of things dimensionally. If I want the drums to sit in a rhythm section configuration, I’ll lean back towards the 414s and maybe some Shure SM98s. Then maybe go for Shure 12As on the bigger drums.”

Mellon Collie debuted at No.1 on the Billboard 200 when it was released in October of 1995. Less than a year later it had crested $6 million in sales and was later nominated for seven Grammys. It was the most powerful statement the Smashing Pumpkins had made to date. Unfortunately, much-publicized events that took place during the group’s 1996 tour produced an equally powerful effect.

Death, divorce, and harsh life realizations “that have only recently probably finished playing out,” says Corgan, clouded the two years after Mellon Collie’s release. By the time Corgan saddled down to write Adore, Iha was focusing on his solo album (Let It Come Down), Wretzky was a sporadic presence, and Chamberlin was out of the band. Filter’s Matt Walker was brought in to replace Chamberlin for the remainder of their tour, but the hole left by the original drummer’s absence would significantly impact the creation of the new record.

“I thought I was going to do this really different album,” says Corgan. “So typical me, I didn’t use any of my gear. Like, any. I went out and bought new guitars and strange amps, a Fender Blackface and a Selmer combo, I think. Most of my memories with Adore have more to do with programming.”

Adore (1995)

The success of Eye, an industrial hip-hop crossover track that appeared on the soundtrack to David Lynch’s Lost Highway instilled much-needed confidence in Corgan. It was basic electronic production, but it proved to him that he could press on with more sophisticated fare. Corgan hooked up with Brad Wood (Liz Phair, Placebo) and began recording with the band in Chicago during the summer of 1997. Never one to do anything the easy way, Corgan decided to load into a new studio nearly every week. It was catch-as-catch-can recording. If something wasn’t working in a new surrounding or couldn’t get set up in time, it wasn’t used.

“He was trying to create a different environment, quickly and geographically, and trying to avoid certain things that happen when a band settles into a studio,” says Bjorn Thorsrud, who has engineered every Pumpkins record since Adore.

The material was recorded on a mix of analogue and digital formats. Already familiar with Studio Vision Pro for MIDI and audio editing, Corgan used ReCycle to chop up and manipulate drum loops. A Kurzweil K2500 and an Alesis HR-16, the same drum machine used to create the beat for 1979, were also used for additional rhythmic elements and sequences. Wood’s classic EMS VCS3 “Putney” was featured prominently on Ava Adore. 

As it was with Mellon Collie, experimentation was paramount. Boxes would show up in the post every other day, each one containing a new sample library, vintage synth, or rack module gobbled up from eBay or plucked from the pages of Keyboard magazine. Still, the pieces weren’t fitting together and, eventually, Corgan and Wood parted ways.

“It was a total crapshoot,” says Corgan, who soon relocated to L.A. to refocus his energy. “I was out of depth. There was no process, there was no system, and there was no go-to piece of gear. There was nothing. I learned a tremendous amount, but I couldn’t tell you what the hell I did.”

Billy reached out to Nitzer Ebb’s Bon Harris, who contributed additional programming and sound design with the aid of his Nord Modular, Oberheim Xpander, and massive Roland System 100M. But the songs didn’t come into full focus until Corgan reconnected with Flood, whose experience with bands like Depeche Mode and Nine Inch Nails made him the perfect candidate to help actualize Adore’s hybrid vision.

The dissonance was evident to Flood upon arrival. The mix of disparate Pro Tools sessions and one-inch tape created a textured canvas that proved difficult to homogenize, and the tension between band members was palpable. The band worked at Sunset Sound until reoccurring technical difficulties with the Neve console forced them to complete the project at the Village Recorder in Santa Monica. To further Adore’s maudlin, Goth-tech spirit, Corgan assumed a Max Schreck-like persona, emphasizing his shaved head with lighting and make-up and donning long, flowing garb that accented his 6-foot 4-inch frame.

“I did go around and proclaim rock to be dead,” Corgan laughs, “which was probably the stupidest thing I ever did. I was in my Adore personality saying things like ‘Fuck the electric guitar!’ And of course, 12 months later I’m playing The Everlasting Gaze.”

Many fans attributed Adore’s stylistic shift directly to Chamberlin’s lack of participation, and contrary to favourable reviews and another Grammy nomination for Best Alternative Music Album, Corgan insists “nobody got the record.” “To Sheila” pumped blood through its mechanized heart, “Ava Adore” flashed her crooked teeth, but the bite wasn’t as strong. Chamberlin’s raw power was replaced by reverberating, distorted 808 kicks. Shuffle and swing turned into quantized grooves and fills. Predictable ticks marched along in place of glittering cymbal embellishments.

“I don’t feel excluded from Adore,” says Chamberlin. “When I listen to that record, I hear decisions that I totally influenced because I wasn’t there.”

Machina / The Machines Of God (2000)

Chamberlin returned to the Smashing Pumpkins in March of 1999, but another absence would alter the face of the band’s fifth studio release, Machina/The Machines of God. Flood was once again asked to produce, but unlike Mellon Collie, where many ideas were mapped out before a single note was recorded, few were aware of Corgan’s creative intent: a concept album about a fictitious rock band fronted by a character whose life is forever altered after hearing the voice of God. As could be expected, the sonic subtext would prove just as esoteric.

The goal was to take the digital lessons learned from Adore and apply them to a rock environment. How does one create the sound of a band playing on another planet? Through tape degradation, synth-like mechanized guitars, soaring pads and effects, heavily-processed vocals, and of course, big drums. 

Chamberlin returned with a custom-made Yamaha green maple kit, but Machina marked Corgan’s first real departure from his fleet of Fenders, instead using a Les Paul Junior reissue with P90 pickups that often ran through a Crate practice amp. An SIB Varidrive and a host of Moogerfooger pedals were also used to add to Corgan’s sonic repertoire. The hazy shimmer in big choruses for Stand Inside Your Love and The Everlasting Gaze is another trademark Machina sound.

“I hope I’m not taking credit for somebody else’s work,” laughs Alan Moulder, “but I’m pretty sure I created it with a tape delay on a short, slappy guitar reverb going through an AMS Harmonizer. I think I ducked it with compression triggering off the drums.”

To help the band gel with the new material, Corgan decided to take the Pumpkins out for a few select club dates in April of ’99 while Flood went on holiday. They would return to the studio fine-tuned, ride that live momentum through a weeklong recording session, and then bring in Moulder to mix after another head-clearing break. When Wretzky’s commitment to the band began to erode, plans began to change. Though rumoured since late summer, it was publicly announced in September that she had left the band.

“Billy and I thought, ‘How are we going to do this?’” Flood remembers. “We decided that we were going to have to make a very different kind of record. They saw out their time on the tour, and after that we pretty much went back to the drawing board. Certain songs on the record are survivors from that first period, but it meant a shift in the way the songs had to be formed.”

The majority of the songs were recorded into Pro Tools through Corgan’s API Legacy board, but the band had multiple mixing consoles to choose from at Chicago Recording Company, so Flood performed a litmus test. He transferred two songs onto tape using a Studer A280, which as luck would have it, was found in each of the mix rooms. He then ran the tape through each console with all the faders at zero, no EQ, no panning and then into a DAT machine. When he compared the recordings, the differences were unbelievable. 

Of the Neve VR72, SSL 6056E, and the ’80s Neve broadcast console that Corgan brought in, the SSL won out. Its low-mid punch would help tighten up the record’s bright sound. Though Corgan wasn’t a big fan of SSL boards, the team found a workaround.

“Howard Willing, one of the mix engineers, knew a guy at Inward Connections who built an API simulation mix bus,” remembers Moulder. “The idea was that we were going to replace the mix bus in the SSL with this API one, which kind of ‘de-SSL’d’ it a bit.”

Machina was made with the understanding that it would be the Pumpkins’ final album. Machina II/The Friends & Enemies of Modern Music, originally intended to be the second disc on a Machina double album before Virgin vetoed the idea received an internet-only release, but a handful of copies were distributed on vinyl through Corgan’s own imprint: the befittingly titled Constantinople Records.

Zeitgeist (2007)

“I know a lot of our fans are puzzled by Zeitgeist,” admits Corgan. “I think they wanted this massive, grandiose work, but you don’t just roll out of bed after seven years without a functioning band and go back to doing that.”

A few key decisions had already been made before Corgan and Chamberlin set out to record Zeitgeist. Thematically, the record was going to bear down on the country’s sordid sociopolitical state, and blunt force analogue production would galvanize the ship. Furthermore, Corgan penned Zeitgeist knowing his new band members would be both qualified players and singers, which allowed him to expand the scope of his vocal parts.

Corgan and Chamberlin began demo-ing at a rented space in Arizona before moving to Kerry Brown’s studio in Los Angeles for further fleshing out. Though initial work began with Michael Beinhorn (Korn, Black Label Society), Roy Thomas Baker became the album’s primary producer.

“We were working purely on intuition as to what the overall sound should be,” says Baker, whose long list of production credits includes Queen’s A Night At The Opera. “It was supposed to be an analogue sound, but it wasn’t supposed to be old school. If you’re doing everything intuitively, there’s no such thing as old and new school. We were going for an audio uniqueness as opposed to sonic purity.”

Corgan’s new guitar rigs included Diezel Herbert and Einstein heads (the latter for overdubs) and a Bogner Uberschall, again run through his classic Marshall cabinet. He also began experimenting with different model Fenders in preparation for the release of his signature model Strat, but, as Baker recalls, “there were more guitars in the studio than at Guitar Center.” Recording at The Village on both a new Neve 88R console and a vintage Neve 8048, the goal was to capture the impenetrable truth of a live, organic performance. 

As Corgan isn’t generally a punch-in player, all the guitar parts had to be replayed from the top down, which at times put both Billy and Jimmy in even more visceral situations. Drums for the nearly ten-minute epic “United States” were recorded in one take.

“Jimmy is probably one of the most unique drummers I’ve ever worked with,” says Baker. “Even when he does something he considers bad, it’s still better than 98% of the people out there at their best.”

The drums were recorded in Studio A at Los Angeles’ Sage and Sound, a spacious room with 18-foot ceilings and a fully restored Neve 8048 console. The drum and overhead mic configurations didn’t change much from the Gish days, but the room was miked with an AKG C24. Chamberlin also switched to his now-favourite crash, a lush, dark 22-inch Zildjian Constantinople and downsized his kick from a 16x22-inch to a 14x22-inch to obtain more resonance and a different shell sound. Another tactic he used to employ fuller sound in his drums was to customise the bearing edges to 60 degrees instead of 45, which Chamberlin says pushes the sound around the drum instead up back to the drummer.

“Roy was the only guy that really noticed that phase cancellation,” laughs Chamberlin. “That guy hears things that nobody else hears! I learned more with Roy Thomas Baker in those four or five months than I have ever learned in my entire recording career.”

In addition to Baker, former Pantera and Soundgarden producer Terry Date assisted in the final stages of production. For Corgan, Dates’ straightforward approach to the songs “helped them resonate on a physical level,” and was a good foil for Corgan’s complex methodology. Mixing was also a very absolute process.

“Everything had sort of an on/off switch,” explains Baker. “So instead of having various degrees of volumes, we’d have the approach of, ‘It’s either on or it’s not.’ Billy would say things like, ‘I can hear it, but it should either be a lot louder, or a lot quieter.’”

Corgan, Chamberlin, and Baker took their methods even further during the mixing of the American Gothic EP. “We did everything by hand . . . multiple hands,” laughs Baker. “I was sitting on one end and Billy and Bjorn [Thorsrud] were on the other. Jimmy was maybe standing back and listening to the overall mix, leaning forward and turning something on—and everyone had different faders. Everything got progressively louder and louder, it was like a race to see who could reach peak volume the fastest! We had a good laugh doing that.”

The four-song American Gothic represents some of the Pumpkins’ best and most exciting material to date. It also signals a potentially new style of “bite-sized” recording that seems to fit with Corgan and Chamberlin’s current creative mindset: smaller packages, single producers, streamlined concepts. Corgan isn’t one to force the issue these days, and now that the Pumpkins no longer report to a label, anything goes.

“I know the next record is going to be really psychedelic,” says Corgan. “I don’t think the Sabbath influence is going away anytime soon, but I’m thinking more late ’80s/early ’90s English shoegazer mixed with ’60s psychedelia and ’70s funk. I can hear it in my head, but that doesn’t mean it’ll ever get out of my head.”

Fans can expect a Smashing Pumpkins 20th Anniversary Tour sometime in late 2008, as well as the Fillmore live DVD release. But spring of 2009 is when things should get really interesting. As this article is being written, SmashingPumpkins.com is petitioning fans for original photos from 1987–1992 in preparation for the release of a Gish box set, which may include everything from demos and B-sides to revisited versions of old songs. 

The group also has archived performances of their first 40 shows, warts and all. As they have no label contract in place, the size of the box set is to be determined, which is good news for superfans, as Corgan is no stranger to releasing Herculean sets of material. 

The Pumpkins will also embark on a small-scale tour to support the release, which means Gish songs, Gish gear, and intimate Gish-sized venues. Need more message board fodder? Corgan plans to give each and every Pumpkins album the same treatment. Does all this historical activity signal a break in fresh songwriting? Not a chance.

“This should now be where I prove what I’ve always felt I’m capable of,” says Corgan. “There’s nobody in my way, there’s no MTV not playing my video, there’s no gatekeeper. If I can truly do phenomenal work, it will be heard, whether it’s acquired for free or bought, it doesn’t make any difference. There’s nothing standing between me and an audience.

“Look, we hit massive homeruns,” he continues. “We never followed them up. We never took the safe, obvious next step, and I think that gets lost. We’re not a milk-it band. We never were a milk-it band. There’s that old saying, ‘If it’s on the cover of Time, it’s too late.’ By the time people got around to understanding what we were doing, we were gone. Now is the time to prove our mettle.”

Age Of Innocence: An 11-song journey through the Pumpkins' underrated catalogue

1. Tristessa (Gish)

Palm muted guitar chunks, extreme snare rolls, and a mellow break followed by a blistering solo, Tristessa is every trademark Pumpkins embellishment rolled into one track. 

Producer Butch Vig utilized light compression through a combination of Summit and API compressors to preserve headroom and accommodate the song’s extreme dynamics, but Corgan’s Gish-era, attack-style guitar still cuts through the mix like a blade.

2. Starla (b-side from the I Am One single)

An epic, mesmerizing track built up around extended solos, Starla was produced by Kerry Brown and recorded through a Soundcraft TS12 board onto a TASCAM MS16 one-inch tape machine. Brown used a Yamaha SPX90 for the reverb effect on Corgan’s voice, and an Eventide H3000 Ultra-Harmonizer is responsible for the backwards effect that runs through the first third of the song. 

“I remember that overdub guitar solo,” says Brown. “Just him, the headphones, and the cabinet. You don’t hear that much anymore. You can’t simulate what you can do with a cabinet in front of you. I mean, Billy was bending notes on a mic stand!”

3. Glynis (No Alternative compilation)

Though it’s rarely played live, Glynis is one of the Pumpkins’ finest non-album tracks, and can only (officially) be found on the 1993 No Alternative compilation. 

An old Speak & Spell “hello” starts the song, and the soupy solo in the middle is the result of double-tracked guitars fed through a vintage Electro- Harmonix Bassballs pedal. The song is a dedication to former Red Red Meat bassist Glynis Johnson, who passed away from AIDS-related complications in 1992.

4. Beautiful (Mellon Collie & the Infinite Sadness)

A result of digital/analogue synergy, Beautiful is a processional ballad featuring opening and closing orchestral-style arrangements created via MIDI. Corgan handpicked sounds that fit with the song’s psychedelic vibe, and then jammed to the track in MIDI, adding and removing notes as he went along. 

“There’s something about that visual connection to my brain that’s really good for me in terms of writing,” says Corgan. “But let me say this,” he continues with a laugh, “can we please get off MIDI? When you’re a guitar player, you plug it in. It works; it doesn’t work. If it’s the pedal, you change the battery. But then you’re sitting in front of a computer and you get that spinning wheel of death. . . .”

5. Eye (Lost Highway soundtrack)

Most people know Eye as the electro-rock crossover from the popular David Lynch film, but the track began as an instrumental for Shaquille O’Neal. The two were linked up by a longtime friend of Corgan’s. Being a big sports fan, Corgan was up for the challenge. 

He concocted the instrumental before speaking with Shaq, but the two weren’t able to meet up to seal the deal. Lynch, on the other hand, thought it was perfect for Lost Highway. The track relied heavily on a Kurzweil K2500 for its 808-styled percussion, a Waldorf VST for the synth line, and a 12-string acoustic lined in direct.

6. Blissed & Gone (Still Becoming Apart promo)

With radio samples and distorted percussion sliced and diced in Propellerheads’ ReCycle, Blissed & Gone is another product of Corgan’s Adore-era experimentation with loops and samples. “I remember playing the song for Rick Rubin when he came to visit me in the studio, and he didn’t know what to say,” Corgan remembers. “That’s the trip I was on.”

7. Untitled (Rotten Apples)

The final track recorded by the original Smashing Pumpkins line-up in 2000, Untitled was semi-acoustic home cooking that rekindled the vibes of Gish and Siamese Dream. 

The chain for Corgan’s solo, one of his favourites, features a DOD FX84 Milk Box compressor and a Shin-Ei Companion Fuzz Wah. “The song was our way of saying ‘f**k you’ to all those people who thought we’d somehow lost our minds and weren’t able to return home,” says Corgan. “We were in the studio for what appeared to be the last time, so it was very emotional, and we had only three days.”

8. The Everlasting Gaze (Machina/The Machines of God)

The Everlasting Gaze is the first track off Machina, a highly conceptual piece that marked the return of Chamberlin, but whose course was altered by the departure of Wretzky halfway through recording. The shiny, cosmic grunge that defines the album is encapsulated in this four-minute juggernaut. 

Corgan switched up to a Les Paul Junior ’57 reissue with P90 pickups, but the extra crunch came by running it through a little Crate practice amp, then going direct into the box from the amp’s line out jack. “When we really wanted to ‘go there’ we would plug into the headphone jack,” laughs Corgan.

9. Pomp & Circumstances (Zeitgeist)

When Danny Elfman had to bow out amicably of doing the string arrangement, Corgan opted to forego their second option for an internal fix. Using an E-mu Emulator II, they built up a shredded wall of sound that was then bounced down and tape degraded numerous times until it was virtually falling apart at the seams. 

The tonal disparity between the 8-bit E-mu (although it used a data compression algorithm that gave the equivalent of at least 12 bits), an inspired, bluesy solo, and Corgan’s soaring vocals, doubled nearly 30 times in true Roy Thomas Baker fashion give the song its uniquely operatic feel.

10. Again, Again, Again (The Crux) (American Gothic EP)

Another product of the Pumpkins’ tenure with Roy Thomas Baker. The exceptionally loud Gibson J-160E acoustic had such a distinctive punch in the lower midrange that it was paramount to pair it up with an electric that didn’t overshadow the tone.

 The solution: A 1973 Telecaster run through a ’60s Selmer amp and double-tracked. If Zeitgeist is the sound of a world pounded into dust, American Gothic is the sound of that world waking up to a new era of possibility.

11. Superchrist (Fresh Cuts, Volume 2)

Superchrist pairs the Pumpkins with longtime friend and producer Kerry Brown (Starla) for a 6/8 psychedelic jam. A custom API console in Studio 3 at Sunset Sound was used for tracking, with a fair amount of trial-and-error determining which instruments sounded best on what channel. 

With 18 analogue drum tracks thrown against the well-worn tone of a 1958 Fender P-Bass (run through an Ampeg SVT-VR head with an SVT- 810E cabinet and miked with an AKG D12), “ballsy” doesn’t even come close to describing the sound.

Following Jeff Schroeder's departure in October last year, we wondered if Billy Corgan and James Iha would return the Smashing Pumpkins' to a two-guitar lineup, but it seems Jeff's sonic shoes need filling and now they're opening up the opportunity for players to audition.

The decision to publicly launch a search for a new member is a surprising one for a band of the Pumpkins' profile and a call for applicants was made on their official Instagram. 

"The Smashing Pumpkins are in search of an additional guitarist," reads the post. "The application process is open to anyone who might be interested. Applicants may submit a resume and related materials to SPGguitar@redlightmanagement.com"

Whoever is picking up that inbox better be ready for the huge task of sifting through potential candidates. 

Jeff Schroeder's 16 years with the band saw him carve out a role as a dark horse in the band – a hugely versatile and creative player to follow and support Billy Corgan's ambitious visions. 

The band has also followed up its post to reiterate it's only looking for a guitarist, seemingly confirming Jack Bates will be remaining in his role as a touring member. "SP is looking for a guitarist, not a bassist," they commented. 

Smashing Pumpkins guitarist Jeff Schroeder quickly cemented himself as a vital part of the lineup he joined as a fan in 2007 and went on to record five albums with. But the Los Angeles musician, 49, has now announced his decision to part ways with the band.

"It's easy to say now that when I joined the Smashing Pumpkins 2007 I had no idea what I was getting into," he wrote in a statement released on 24 October. "The opportunity seemed to have come out of nowhere. I was at UCLA working on my doctorate in comparative literature when a close friend messaged me and said the Smashing Pumpkins were looking for a guitar player. Being a huge fan of the band, the audition was something I threw myself into. It was one of the best decisions I've made in my life. 

"The amount of incredible memories created over the last 16 years with the band are almost too numerous to quantify," Schroeder added. "Although it was a very difficult decision to make, I've decided to leave the band to make some space to explore a slightly different path. I want to thank Billy, Jimmy, James, and Jack for being both wonderful bandmates and even better friends. I will absolutely miss sharing the stage with you. I wish the band all the success in the future. I will be watching and listening."

Schroeder's most recent Pumpkins recording was this 2023's triple album Atum: A Rock Opera in Three Acts with his 2012 album with the band, Oceania, held by fans to be amongst their strongest releases.

"What it really comes down to for me is writing unique guitar melodies that complement what Billy is doing vocally," Shroeder reflected with us in 2021 on his approach to the Pumpkins. "That’s what I’ve found the most rewarding, what I try to do is think melodically and try and create a conversation between what Billy is doing, and the keyboard parts or what James is doing. It’s really about good melody, and it’s been fun.”

Schroeder's departure now reduces the three-man guitar lineup of the Pumpkins back to the original two of the first lineup. It remains to be seen whether a replacement will be sought. The guitarist released his debut solo single Haenim in 2021 and has been moving into production too, recently with the band Livingmore.  

"We thank Jeff for his ceaseless dedication to the band and our great fans," wrote William Corgan, Jimmy Chamberlain and James Iha in their own statement. "Words can not express our gratitude and appreciation for the friend he is, and being there for SP in the good times and the tough times, too."

Rick Beato has done it again and produced another unmissable musician interview – this time with Billy Corgan. A 90-minute deep dive into the recording and songwriting mind of the Smashing Pumpkins chief that touches on the classic songs and iconic producers he's worked with. And early on, he talks guitar solos in particular.

"We didn't feel we were that different, so when people reacted to us almost as if we were heretics or something, it was strange to us," says Corgan on some of the early feedback to the Pumpkins' debut album Gish in 1990. 

"And there was the whole playing solos, which was verboten in alternative circles at the time," he continues. "And if you even think of Kurt [in] Nirvana, he would play ironic solos – they weren't real guitar solos." 

Corgan suggests he was coming at things from a different perspective, even when Beato rightly points out that most of the big alternative / grunge bands of the Pumpkins eras had guitar solos, contrary to the strange idea they were actually anti-solo.

"Kim Thayil would play [solos], but they weren't solos played by people who were necessarily trying to play like Ritchie Blackmore. I was trying to play like Ritchie Blackmore. And my father was a guitar player so I came from that route that if you're going to play a solo, you better play a good solo. There was a pressure [on] me for that."  

We're not sure if that holds true for Jerry Cantrell, who we call 'Grunge Gilmour' around these parts, but the theme of Corgan wearing his classic seventies influences on his sleeve comes up again later in the conversation. Namely two classic Pumpkins tracks that Corgan says contain very clear nods to Rush and The Who, respectively.

"A song like Cherub Rock, that's basically us doing Rush… basically the beginning of Cherub Rock is ripped off from By-Tor And The Snow Dog by Rush… it's a straight rip off of Rush."

When Beato asks him about the tempo mixing in the Pumpkins' Tonight Tonight, Corgan reveals the Townshend influence.

"We saw that as The Who. If you listen to the backing tempo of Tonight Tonight without the strings, it's just like The Who. We're basically doing a poor imitation of The Who."

Aside from the UK shoegaze influences like My Bloody Valentine that Corgan goes into in the interview, he was also one of the only guitarists from the grunge era to namecheck '70s rock players that weren't regarded as 'cool' at the time.  Corgan explains it was a reaction to the claims in some quarters that 1993's breakthrough second album Siamese Dream was 'overproduced.'

"We got a ton of shit in reviews when Siamese came out because it was 'overproduced'," reflects the Chicago musician. "In 1993 terms it meant we were trying too hard… so of course I double down in interviews and said we were trying to do Boston and Queen, which by the way is not something you're supposed to say in alternative circles in 1993.  

"And it was true," Corgan continues, warming to the theme. "Because if I'm gonna make a record, I'm going out like Tom Scholz. I'm not going out like Kurt, I'm going out like Tom Scholz. In my mind, that made sense to me but we took a lot of junk for that because layering guitars wasn't something you were supposed to do, or using strings." 

It's interesting that Corgan should mention Scholtz and Kurt Cobain here because both musicians come up again later. Corgan again repeats his claims from last month that Nirvana and Pumpkins producer Butch Vig was hugely influenced by his sound on Gish for the Nevermind record. And when Vig first played him a preview of Nirvana's second album, he was not only struck by how much Smells Like Teen Spirit sounded like Boston's song More Than A Feeling, but something else too.

"I've told this story a few times but we were sitting with [Butch] on a Wisconsin lake on July 4, whatever the year would have been," remembers Corgan. "He says, 'Do you want to hear the new Nirvana?' He's got a boombox and he presses it, as the sun's going down on a beautiful Wisconsin summer day.

"I had two reactions," continues Corgan. "First of all, he ripped off Boston More Than A Feeling, and then when the song kicked in I looked at Butch and said, 'You ripped off my guitar sound motherf*****'. And he kind of was like, 'I guess I did', because everything he took into that [album] was stuff that I taught him. Butch didn't need me to mic up a cabinet but the way I would layer guitars, Butch was like, 'Oh I'll take that.' 

"So now Nirvana is on the radio 18 seconds and of course every time I hear the guitar I'm like, 'There's my guitar sound'." 

Check out the full interview above, and our own interviews with Corgan, Vig and more below on the Pumpkins' recording history.

Classic interview: Billy Corgan, Jimmy Chamberlin, Butch Vig, Flood and more on the Smashing Pumpkins' recording history

Smashing Pumpkins have announced a sprawling new triple-album rock opera. Titled ATUM, which is pronounced “autumn”, it is described as a sequel to classic albums Melon Collie And The Infinite Sadness and Machina/The Machines Of God, and the Chicago alt-rock luminaries have shared the first of its 33 tracks, Beguiled.

It is a song that finds frontman/guitarist Billy Corgan leaning into a syncopated electric guitar chug for a tight and focused verse motif that pares the Pumpkins sound back to the essentials. Beguiled is tight and buttoned down. There is no squall of fuzz pedal, no orchestral largesse, though there is a sense of metal theatre that calls to mind Ghost, and some pitch-shifting weirdness to throw us off-centre.

The ATUM rock opera will be spread over three releases, months apart, and took Corgan four years to write and produce. Speaking to the NME, Corgan said this was a project he had wanted to do for years, but it was not until the pandemic that he had the time, and that the band, who welcomed co-founder and guitarist James Iha back to the fold in 2018, had the inclination to take it on.

“I actually wanted to do it about four years ago, but there wasn’t a lot of energy in the band for it,” Corgan. “It was when James was coming back and there was a lot of different things going on, including a big tour.

“So there was some feeling that trying to put a concept record on top of all of that was a lot to take on right at the start of that process. But once Covid hit and I found myself sitting here with nothing to do, I thought, ‘Right, I’m gonna do it now’.”

This being the Smashing Pumpkins doing a three-part rock opera, it would only be fitting that the band make such an announcement with a little theatre, and duly filmed released a live video to their TikTok channel that saw Corgan, flanked by Iha and guitarist Jeff Schroeder with his custom Yamaha Pacifica. 

Corgan, wearing a dress for his part, evoked Kate Bush, and it bodes well for those looking to full-on theatricality from the Pumpkins when they perform ATUM live. 

• Guitar lesson: learn to play Smashing Pumpkins song Mayonaise from their classic album Siamese Dream

In related news, Corgan has a new podcast, Thirty-Three with William Patrick Corgan. His first guest is David Bowie pianist Mike Garson, and in each episode Corgan will unveil a new track from ATUM, and of course discuss all things Pumpkins .

ATUM will be delivered in three acts, the first of which will be released on 15 November, with second arriving on 31 January 2023, and the third and final act on 21 April 2023. ATUM will be collected in a special vinyl box-set, featuring 10 additional tracks spread across five 7” discs, and as a special autographed edition. That is available to pre-order now, shipping 21 April 2023.

The video for Beguiled debuts on the Smashing Pumpkins YouTube channel at 5.33pm UK time. See Smashing Pumpkins for more.

The omens have been promising that Smashing Pumpkins were ripe, just fit to burst with new material, and now the harvest has borne fruit with the release of Cyr and The Colour Of Love.

Back in May, guitarist Jeff Schroeder sat down with Yamaha's Senior Guitar Designer and Luthier Pat Campolattano for a long and fun conversation about electric guitars, music, life and so on, when he revealed that Pumpkins frontman and creative driving force Billy Corgan was working on new material.

And there was a lot of new material: 20 tracks written for the double album expected for a 2020 release, and enough music for another album after that.

Today we can hear the first two tracks. Cyr is described by Billy Corgan as "dystopic folly, one soul against the world sort of stuff, set against a backdrop of shifting loyalties and sped up time. To me it stands as both hopeful and dismissive of what is and isn't possible with faith."

The video [below] was directed by Linda Strawberry.

The Colour Of Love, meanwhile, is a propulsive work of synth-pop that belies the fact that today's Smashing Pumpkins is a three-guitar band, with guitarist James Iha and drummer Jimmy Chamberlin joining Corgan and Schroeder.

There are no other titles, release dates or any of that jazz. Just two tracks, light on guitar, but with much more to come. The guitars will come. All in good time. 

• Classic interview: Billy Corgan, Jimmy Chamberlin, Butch Vig, Flood and more on the Smashing Pumpkins' recording history