When Smashing Pumpkins split up in 2000 after 11 years of friction and fracas, American music lost one of the totemic alt-rock bands of the Nineties. Highly strung and high-achieving, Billy Corgan’s group were unlikely survivors of the “grunge” explosion — a lace-edged mélange of classic rock, psychedelic grandeur and poetic dysfunction who caught the imagination of gloomy teenagers everywhere.

As proof of the old adage “it takes one to know one”, Smashing Pumpkins were exemplary: Corgan, their singer, songwriter and controlling force, always gave the impression of a man who had never quite outgrown his inner adolescent.

When Sharon Osbourne took over the management of the band in 1999, she walked out after only three months, calling Corgan “a silly boy”. Billy, it seems, was Jack Osbourne before the public knew who Jack Osbourne was.

At the Pumpkins’ final gig in their home town of Chicago in 2000, Corgan, in a parent-baiting silver dress, was reported to have broken down and sobbed: “Welcome to the last gasp of the Smashing Pumpkins.”

Yet anyone who had followed his career would have been very surprised if this had been the last formal sighting of alt-rock’s own Nosferatu. Sure enough, he is now returning to the live arena with his new band Zwan, an opulent project that merges his quest for artistic credibility with ornate delusions of rock majesty — you don’t call an album Mary, Star of the Sea (out this week) if you fear pretension.

Corgan’s choice of musicians is equally telling: by recruiting the guitarist David Pajo, an underground hero who played in the mystically revered alt-rock touchstone Slint, and currently gathers critical adoration in Papa M, he has drafted in some unshakeable cool. Meanwhile, Jimmy Chamberlin, the Smashing Pumpkins’ drummer who was once sacked for heroin use after the touring keyboard player Jonathan Melvoin fatally overdosed, is the only member of the Pumpkins to remain. “He’s the love of my life,” Chamberlin announced wryly. “I never considered not doing it.”

It is the line-up you might expect from a man whose need for success has always been tempered by a need for credibility; a combination that resulted in his press image as a brattish prima donna aggrieved by the world. “Writing a song isn’t difficult — I could write a song about your shoes,” he once told a journalist, yet in the early Nineties this kind of posturing was at odds with the image of underground integrity maintained by Nirvana, his band’s eternal nemesis. When the Pumpkins released their debut album Gish in 1991 it was overshadowed by Nevermind, and Corgan never appears to have shaken off this slight. To make matters even worse, detractors crowed over his pretension and petulance, claiming that he was “faking it” in comparison with Cobain’s searing charisma.

It is easy to find the roots of Corgan’s dissatisfaction in his background. An obsessive baseball card collector who was moved from relative to relative after his parents’ divorce, he once said that he took up rock’n’roll as a way of reasserting his dominance when he was no longer the tallest kid in his class.

He grew up on a diet of classic rock — the Beatles, the Stones, Black Sabbath — and later, following the true path of the disenfranchised adolescent, became a fan of Fellini and William Burroughs. “Fantasy is devoid of emotion; it masks emotion,” he once declared. “We all know what reality is and that doesn’t get my rocks off. It’s the combination of the two where the lines are blurred that really appeals to me artistically.” Billy Corgan himself occupies a similarly blurred space: a man it is easy to admire but difficult to like, a bona fide mainstream rock star with a heart of art. And, as the genesis of Zwan shows, he is still not satisfied. It is hard to imagine he ever could be.



Zwan are at Shepherds Bush Empire, London W12,
Feb 12 (020-7316 4709)

CV: Billy Corgan

Born William Patrick Corgan Jr on March 17, 1967, in Chicago

Family His parents divorced when he was three years old and his musician father was mostly absent

Marital status Divorced from Chris Fabian, an artist

Inspiration Hearing an old Beatles 45 when he was five, an experience he later described as an “epiphany”

Big break The debut Smashing Pumpkins album Gish (1991)

Career high The huge-selling Pumpkins’ album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness (1995)

Career low Smashing Pumpkins splitting up in 2000. Corgan said that they had reached the end of the road “spiritually, emotionally and musically”.

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