What is Billy’s obsession with having a fit bird on bass? As for the bloke – he might as well be my dad.
What is Billy’s obsession with having a fit bird on bass? As for the bloke – he might as well be my dad.
Why The Smashing Pumpkins are now fuckin’ AWFUL
I worshipped The Smashing Pumpkins from about 1998 to the day they split. I came to them late – I was a little girl when they released their debut Gish. On their last UK date at Wembley in 2000 I was on a compulsory school Geography trip, which involved analysing the ecosystems of the Norfolk Broads and slurping soup that tasted like piss. I attempted running away but got about 100 metres. My teachers knew I was miserable and kept going on about pumpkins. To this day I wish I’d gone, as it was at the height of my fandom and the band’s ridiculousness.
They all wore eyeliner and big black Queen Victoria-style ball gowns and played a Machina-heavy set. Since this experience, or lack of experience should I say, I have exercised a distinct disregard for authority. Here below are my reasons why the Pumpkins are now total fucking shit.
No James Iha or D’arcy. Ok ok, Iha went a little nuts and Darcy turned into a crack whore, they both hated Billy, they weren’t allowed to be part of the creative nucleus of the band whereas Jimmy was – but what kind of a reunion is this? Especially since its only seven years since their demise and no one’s dead apart from that speedballing touring keyboardist. Who are these hired hands? What is Billy’s obsession with having a fit bird on bass? As for the bloke – he might as well be my dad. I have no idea who the fuck he is. It’s the Billy and Jimmy show. At least in the Machina touring days you still had Iha, and Melissa Auf Der wotsherface was authentic in that she was originally a hardcore fan and fucked Billy or something.
Ticket prices. Excluding the festival shows, the average price for their smallish venue comeback gigs (which admittedly are about two hours plus long, or so I hear) is GBP37.50. Fuck that shit. I think Billy and Jimmy are one of the great creative musical duos of modern rock, they’ve got a wonderful back catalogue (yes, even Machina – which I hasten to add is my favourite Pumpkin album despite the muddy production and Corgan’s pseudo-martyr posturing) but 40 smackers for a rock concert?! We’re not talking Bowie or Dylan here.
As much as I love Billy, he’s taking the piss. The prices are a reflection of him trying to forcefully establish the Pumpkins brand as part of the rock canon, nowt else. (There’s no pyrotechnics or dancing midgets or anything – from what I’ve heard the main spectacle is Corgan wearing some sort of bed sheet-based costume). He couldn’t wait for the Mojo/Uncut reappraisal. And he forgets that most of his fans are twentysomethings with not the most disposable incomes around. They’re not bloody Barbara Streisand fans. The band was born out of the slacker generation, a bunch of brain-fried mongs in ZERO t-shirts indulging in hazy protests against The Man & Machine. Machina itself was an epistle on how the band had been coerced (or so we were led to believe) in becoming a heavy metal corporate machine. Utter bollocks. There’s a great anecdote about how Kurt Cobain used to drag his bags onto the tour bus, while Billy, in the height of his Mellon Collie fame, had a bell-boy to do the job.
They were both riding the gravy train, but while Corgan relished it, Cobain felt all guilty ‘cos it messed with his phoney punk credentials.The new album Zeitgeist, (argh – title alert! – ed); is being released on three (or is it four?) different formats, with an exclusive track on each one. This is worse than when Michael Jackson released his last album in six (or was it eight?) different colours. At the time I was working in a record store, and I actually sold a handful of fans every version. I expect most Pumpkin fans will take advantage of illegal file sharing, but the completists are fucked, especially if the thing’s a bit sub-standard. Billy’s approach will be nothing like Adore, where he took an artistic risk, smashing his successful song-writing formula into something more accomplished and nuanced, but commercially unsuccessful. Obviously he was bitter about this and retreated up his own arse for Machina 1 and 2, but this was no bad thing in my eyes.
With the Zeitgeist writing process, I bet you a fiver they went back through every album to find the essence of why the Pumpkins were great: namely, which ones sold loads of records. This means two things – Siamese Dream and Mellon Collie. In terms of what the new songs will be like, everything bar these albums will be deleted from memory. It’ll all be bombast, shredding, expansive fills, and maybe the odd mongy lullaby. Which is great, but they won’t dare try anything new. I guess that’s the point of reunions. Heh. After all this gassing, I have three words to say: BRING BACK ZWAN. (Disclaimer: I haven’t heard the new album).
Words: Julie Reverb