Latest news with #SmashingPumpkins
USA Today
21 hours ago
- Entertainment
- USA Today
Billy Corgan talks Machines of God tour, Smashing Pumpkins reissues and Howard Stern
Billy Corgan talks Machines of God tour, Smashing Pumpkins reissues and Howard Stern Show Caption Hide Caption Live from Cleveland: It's 'Saturday Night' at the Rock Hall "SNL: Ladies & Gentlemen...50 Years of Music," a new exhibit at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum looks at the NBC show's influence on music. Onstage, Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan cuts an imposing figure. His towering, bald-headed frame shrouded in floor-length coats and a distinctive voice that meshes a bellow with a whine are forever linked with the alt-grunge-goth-rock that thundered through the '90s. In conversation, Corban is soft-spoken and thoughtful as he chats from his historic 1920's home just north of his native Chicago. He's readying his new solo project, Billy Corgan and The Machines of God, which also includes recently recruited Smashing Pumpkins guitarist Kiki Wong, drummer Jake Hayden and bassist Kid Tigrrr (aka Jenna Fournie). The quartet will hit the road June 7 in Baltimore for the monthlong A Return to Zero tour, where they will commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Pumpkins' seminal 'Mellon Collie and The Infinite Sadness' album. Along with the many hits spawned from the diamond-certified release ('1979,' 'Tonight, Tonight' and 'Bullet with Butterfly Wings' among them), The Machines of God will also tackle songs from the double album 'Machina/The Machines of God' and 'Machina II/The Friends & Enemies of Modern Music' – both being remixed and rereleased this summer – as well as 2024's 'Aghori Mhori Mei.' Along with prepping for the 16-date tour, which will hit cities including Detroit, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati and Minneapolis, Corgan has stayed busy with his Madame Zuzu's tea shop in Highland Park, Illinois and his popular "The Magnificent Others" podcast. He's also energized about the Nov. 21-30 pairing with Chicago's Lyric Opera Orchestra and Chorus for 'A Night of Mellon Collie and Infinite Sadness.' Take a deep breath and he'll tell us more about all. Question: Last summer you were playing to 50,000 people with Green Day on a stadium tour and now you're heading to small theaters. Where are you more comfortable? Answer: I'm fine with a stadium full of people. There's the economy of, more people equals more money and more T-shirts, but honestly it's the economy of time. It's hard to communicate in such a complicated digital world. When we would play a small show in the '90s, even in early days of internet, it felt like you were doing this secret club thing and people would find out about it and tell the world. Now, if you don't operate at scale, it's like it never happened. I laughingly call it the digital tree that falls in the forest that no one hears. And obviously this won't be stadium-style staging. Any small tour you have to make a series of choices and mine is supreme sonic quality and production. I made the joke that you'll see me with a swinging light bulb behind me because I can't afford to bring a full Pumpkins light package. But my sense from the fans I've talked to is they're excited to see these songs in this context, so the set list is really what they're interested in. Why did you want to go on the road with this band configuration? For years I've pushed my bandmates to take a different approach to touring that would require a different mindset, which is, there is value in us playing deeper shows past our expected greatest hits reign. Unfortunately, we're not in agreement on that and we've had a gentleman's agreement since James (Iha) came back (to Smashing Pumpkins) that we wouldn't do anything unless everyone was on the same wavelength. But they're totally cool with what I'm doing. So James and (drummer) Jimmy (Chamberlin) were asked to be part of this project? Oh, yeah. But to be fair, I've been pushing for this conceptually for more than five years so I reached a point – I'm 58 years old – of, like, OK if you're not into it I'm just gonna do it because I'm a proof of concept guy. It's something I want to do and there's a host of reasons for why it will matter once you do it. One thing I found with operating the tea house is there is a way to make small, big. Speaking of the tea house, how involved are you in its operation? Every day. My wife runs it, but I hear about it every day. We have the huge archival 'Machina' box set version with 80 songs coming that you can only get from the tea house (or its website). It's also the 30th anniversary of 'Mellon Collie and The Infinite Sadness.' What do you most remember from that period? I think the good news is 30 years is enough time to let it all work itself through – the good, the bad, the heartache, the regrets. I think within the group we look at the period very fondly as far as, wow we achieved something magical forever. If there is any regret it's that we weren't able to put Humpty Dumpty back together in the same way. (Success) creates such a force that you're swept on a river that you never know where it goes. Maybe we were in sort of a spell and like a lot of beautiful dreams, once the spell was broken, you then you get down to the business of how to get out of Oz. Let's talk about the podcast, but I also want to talk about how great you are every time you're on Howard Stern's (SiriusXM) show. Howard is one of my great inspirations for the how I do the podcast. The greatest people I've been interviewed by are Charlie Rose and Howard Stern. It feels very conversational and that's something I've tried to emulate. Howard has been one of the biggest supporters of me, one of the biggest to mock the fact that we're not in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and one of the biggest defenders of me as an artist. I have a lot of loyalty to Howard You've had a really eclectic lineup of musicians on the podcast – Pat Benatar and Neil Giraldo, (Missing Persons frontwoman) Dale Bozzio, Carnie Wilson, Gene Simmons. What are you looking for when you're booking? My number one goal is I want to talk to people who I think have tremendous value and their value in the culture is not properly understood. Dale is one of the most influential artists of the last 40 years, and yet most people would not know her band or her unique story, like that Frank Zappa saw something in her and that's a direct line to Lady Gaga and the pop stars of today. A lot of artists with long careers struggle with being overlooked or underappreciated. It's not a crusade, but a way to tell the world, do you know you've overlooked a true treasure here? I think it's criminal there is a wide open space of stories to be told and nowhere to tell them.
Boston Globe
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Billy Corgan on playing Smashing Pumpkins songs solo, and Pope Leo XIV being a White Sox fan
'I think that's the great hubris of a creator,' Corgan said on a Zoom call from his home in Chicago. 'You feel these are your sculptures and your paintings, and you have the ability to once more reframe and re-illuminate why they're attractive to you.' Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up His 'A Return to Zero' solo tour begins this weekend in Baltimore, then heads to the Paradise Rock Club on Advertisement Altogether, Corgan will draw from a pool of over 100 songs for the tour, although he won't necessarily cull enough material for a grandiose three-hour performance, as he's done in the past with the Smashing Pumpkins. Advertisement 'I'm 58 now, so I do have to temper myself,' he said with a laugh. To Corgan, enmeshing the different eras in one setlist felt like 'coming home,' and 'more resonantly consistent' with the band's first era, before their — in his words — 'quote-unquote breakup' in 2000 and quasi-reformation around 2007. Following a rotation of lineup changes over the years, the band currently performs with three of the four founding members. Guitarist James Iha and drummer Jimmy Chamberlin are back in the saddle with Corgan, while original bassist D'Arcy Wretzky has not rejoined. From an outside perspective, Corgan's claim to the Smashing Pumpkins' two album anniversaries might look like a catalyst for another fallout within the band. But the frontman said he's been chatting with his bandmates 'for years' about how to honor anniversaries in a way that was personal, rather than an opportunistic cash grab. 'One thing we've done successfully, I think, in this decade of our knowing each other, is if there's not an even consensus, we don't persist,' he said. 'That was some of the problems in the '90s — not taking into account, let's call it, a balanced view of everybody's take.' So when the band had unspecified 'differing views' on the two upcoming anniversaries, Corgan took the reins with his new solo group, which includes the Smashing Pumpkins' touring guitarist, Kiki Wong. Advertisement 'The fact that these significant anniversaries were going to go by with no particular unified voice of how to present them, I said, 'Well, I'm just gonna do it myself,'' Corgan said. Add that to the list of sizable projects that Corgan has taken on in recent years. Directly prior to this interview, Corgan described himself as occupying a '12-year-old brain space' while working on his memoir. (Per his wife Chloé Mendel Corgan, he said, he's tried to write it on four separate occasions since they met, and 'as far as I'm concerned, this [time] is the last.') Corgan has also owned the National Wrestling League since 2017, and this year launched a podcast called 'The Magnificent Others,' in which he interviews fellow cultural bigwigs like Gene Simmons and Sharon Osbourne. Corgan's extracurriculars involve his local community, too. Alongside his wife, he runs a plant-based tea shop and cafe called With a daily routine that typically involves 12 to 14 hours of work across his various projects — fueled by an average of six hours of sleep — Corgan has continued to expand his identity as an artist and cultural figure. But that complexity sometimes gets muddled within the public's narrower perception of Corgan and his role in the Smashing Pumpkins. Advertisement 'One has to deal with the complication of, I'm so closely identified with the band that most people don't really understand who I am without the band,' he explained. 'The band's history after 2001 is rife with incredible external pressures on who the band needed to be in, let's call it, this second era: a greatest hits band, an artistic band, a mixture of both,' he added. 'Not that you'd want to, but you could find a voluminous treasure trove of material of people criticizing me for not being the band that people want me to be in. And me saying, over and over again, 'The band you think I was in, I was never in. So why would I be in that band now?'' To Corgan, the name under which he performs is 'sort of inconsequential.' But in this case, performing with the Machines of God — especially to revisit some of his older work within the Smashing Pumpkins — casts off many of those notions about how he and the band should operate. The freedom is the ultimate trade-off for any nitpicks the public might have about him striking out on his own. 'It's very attractive to me to present this material without dilution — meaning, I don't really care in this setting for that pressure,' he said. 'If you don't embrace the freedom, then you're kinda wasting, let's call it, 'the upside of the downside,'' he concluded. BILLY CORGAN AND THE MACHINES OF GOD With Return to Dust. At the Paradise Rock Club, 967 Commonwealth Ave., Boston, June 9, 7 p.m. Tickets available on the secondary market. Advertisement
Perth Now
28-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Perth Now
Yungblud bonds with The Cure and Smashing Pumpkins over tackling high ticket prices
Yungblud has bonded with The Cure and Smashing Pumpkins over fair ticket prices for fans. The 'I Think I'm Okay' hitmaker - who is set to headline his second annual Bludfest event at the Milton Keynes Bowl on June 21 - is keeping ticket prices for the festival down at £65, and he's opened up on how his friendship with The Cure's Robert Smith and Smashing Pumpkins' Billy Corgan has been inspired by a desire to keep things affordable. He told the Daily Star newspaper's Wired column: "Me and Robert have such a mutual fire in us to be pioneers in making a change on ticket prices. "We've become really close and, whenever we meet up or email, we try to make a difference in any way we can. "Billy Corgan has become a good mate in changing how tickets operate too." Yungblud - whose real name is Dominic Harrison - insisted his concern is his own "community", rather than keeping ticket prices hiked up simply because it's how the industry works now. He added: "I was sick of being told, 'This is just the way things are' and have to accept that if that was how I'd have to live out my dreams. "I have no interest in that. All I care about is my community. I hate the apple-for-teacher mentality that's ingrained in British culture. "I can't be a**** with it." Meanwhile, the 27-year-old star still has lofty goals for Bludfest, as he aims to transform it into a global touring festival taking inspiration from Ozzy Osbourne's Ozzfest. He's already been speaking to venues in France and other countries, while he'd love 'Boys Don't Cry' singer Robert Smith to join the lineup one year. He said: "It's going worldwide, and it's going to be wild. It's amazing what you can do if you shout a mad idea into the void and a load of people shout back. "If The Cure can play it one day, that would be a dream, just unbelievable."
Sydney Morning Herald
28-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
A playful meditation on the hellscape of contemporary literature
FICTION I Want Everything Dominic Amerena Summit, $34.99 Ern Malley. Helen Demidenko. Norma Khouri. Wanda Koolmatrie. Australia has a rich and storied tradition of fakers, forgers, frauds and fabricators. For his debut, Greece-based Dominic Amerena offers us a worthy addition to this gallery of fiasco-mongers: an insecure, craven, sickly and mercifully unnamed narrator. Peddling his blood and body at a hospital while attempting to succeed as a writer, his existence is dreary. He envies his 'Melbourne-famous' writer partner, Ruth, who has found acclaim selling a story about her mother. The family betrayal benefits her career and introduces a new term to the world: daughter-boarding – 'hit pieces by young women against their mothers'. Given the precarity of the artistic landscape, only a fool would not take an opportunity for advancement, and the narrator is no fool. Swimming at the Victoria University pools, he encounters Brenda Shales. A Whitlam-era luminary – part Thea Astley, part Helen Garner – she wrote two novels, won a cult following and promptly vanished into the only dignified position available to a self-respecting literary author: obscurity. The work speaks, as they say, for itself. Only that's not enough for an unnamed narrator looking to make his name. Who better to provide prestige than a recluse with some flesh to offer the biographical mill? It's not quite spotting Christ on the boulevard, but it will do. He sets about writing a tell-all account of what happened to the celebrated author. He will be her witness, her confidante. The Boswell to her Johnson. He will bask in the secondhand shadow of her literary light. He will build his fame upon hers. Coy, winking, spritzy, this is a scurrilously funny meditation on ambition and economic insecurity. It satirises the commercialised hellscape of contemporary literature, if not life in general: no pleasure, no heart, just product. Take Shales' reputation-solidifying second novel, The Widowers. Passed around Carlton share houses 'like some graven object', its publication results in courtroom wranglings and the advent of questionable legal precedent. It is, we are told, controversial in a way that Amerena calls 'unimaginable now'. It's a telling detail. It suggests not only changing social mores, but a shift in how literature is received. What was once epoch-making is now merely content. Debase yourself for the algorithm or die trying. 'The world is a vampire,' the Smashing Pumpkins sang. Even if it were untrue, you would have a hard time convincing Amerena's narrator.
The Age
28-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
A playful meditation on the hellscape of contemporary literature
FICTION I Want Everything Dominic Amerena Summit, $34.99 Ern Malley. Helen Demidenko. Norma Khouri. Wanda Koolmatrie. Australia has a rich and storied tradition of fakers, forgers, frauds and fabricators. For his debut, Greece-based Dominic Amerena offers us a worthy addition to this gallery of fiasco-mongers: an insecure, craven, sickly and mercifully unnamed narrator. Peddling his blood and body at a hospital while attempting to succeed as a writer, his existence is dreary. He envies his 'Melbourne-famous' writer partner, Ruth, who has found acclaim selling a story about her mother. The family betrayal benefits her career and introduces a new term to the world: daughter-boarding – 'hit pieces by young women against their mothers'. Given the precarity of the artistic landscape, only a fool would not take an opportunity for advancement, and the narrator is no fool. Swimming at the Victoria University pools, he encounters Brenda Shales. A Whitlam-era luminary – part Thea Astley, part Helen Garner – she wrote two novels, won a cult following and promptly vanished into the only dignified position available to a self-respecting literary author: obscurity. The work speaks, as they say, for itself. Only that's not enough for an unnamed narrator looking to make his name. Who better to provide prestige than a recluse with some flesh to offer the biographical mill? It's not quite spotting Christ on the boulevard, but it will do. He sets about writing a tell-all account of what happened to the celebrated author. He will be her witness, her confidante. The Boswell to her Johnson. He will bask in the secondhand shadow of her literary light. He will build his fame upon hers. Coy, winking, spritzy, this is a scurrilously funny meditation on ambition and economic insecurity. It satirises the commercialised hellscape of contemporary literature, if not life in general: no pleasure, no heart, just product. Take Shales' reputation-solidifying second novel, The Widowers. Passed around Carlton share houses 'like some graven object', its publication results in courtroom wranglings and the advent of questionable legal precedent. It is, we are told, controversial in a way that Amerena calls 'unimaginable now'. It's a telling detail. It suggests not only changing social mores, but a shift in how literature is received. What was once epoch-making is now merely content. Debase yourself for the algorithm or die trying. 'The world is a vampire,' the Smashing Pumpkins sang. Even if it were untrue, you would have a hard time convincing Amerena's narrator.
