Music

Billy Corgan won't play your favourite Smashing Pumpkins albums live

by Jesse Locke

Today might not be the greatest day Smashing Pumpkins fans have ever known after Billy Corgan’s latest interview with Rolling Stone.

Though last October marked the 20th anniversary of their classic double cassette Melon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, the band isn’t celebrating with a reissue or reunion tour where they play all 28 songs live in full. Corgan explains why, as only he can:

“The only way that would happen for any album is if we staged it almost like a Broadway show, where it involved visuals and the music rewritten into a particular form. The idea of getting up and playing an album that was never meant to be played live in that sequence smacks of consumerism. That stuff is the dregs of the music business, and I have a hard time believing that anyone out there doing it really wants to do it. Fans are bored with it. That’s nothing disrespectful. I’m proud to have made such an album that’s important.”

Get on it, Broadway producers! Can you imagine Melon Collie given the full American Idiot treatment?

Corgan admits that a certain segment of his fans probably have some nostalgia for the band’s 1993 album Siamese Dream, but he’d rather keep looking to the future.

“The millennials love Siamese Dream. Who would have guessed that!? No one is harder on the millennials than me. But they love Siamese Dream? Great! But I’m not gonna go out there and hack around just to reclaim some light that I don’t feel has gone out. The light is still in my eyes. I’m still more than capable of producing new work. I wrote a new song this morning.”

These quotes make the Smashing Pumpkins’ 2014 album title Monuments to an Elegy suddenly sound tongue in cheek. They’re also slightly confusing considering the fact that Corgan has recently been playing medleys of songs from the band’s 1991 album Gish. It’s hard to know what to expect on their “In Plainsong” tour, but you can find out at its sole Canadian stop at Toronto’s Massey Hall on April 12th.