Now, that sounds like something a famous rock star would say. But Corgan says it playfully, with such self-awareness that he gets away with it: implying that he knows this is absurd, but that’s how he feels, and in fact it’s even appropriate for his stature. that he would rather risk ridicule than minimize his feelings. Some version of this dynamic repeats itself continuously over the next hour. Irony may not always be a healthy coping device, but having fun with an interview seems like the least a rock star should do. I wondered how differently many of his previously controversial quotes – about social justice warriors, a fast-food pizza chain, the Shrek soundtrack – might be read in the context of their tradition. In any case, talking like this never seriously hindered the Pumpkins in the 1990s, when they released a handful of classic records, collected awards and had hit singles in the US and UK. The Pumpkins showed their “refusal to choose” the Gen X environment, shifting between noisy and tender musical styles that bridged intense grunge and soulful indie rock. After their wildly popular 1995 double album, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, they suddenly turned to an electronic-inclined sound on their next LP, Adore, a bold change that repulsed some critics, but grew in stature in the years that followed. Smashing Pumpkins in 1991… (clockwise from left) James Iha, D’Arcy Wretzky, Jimmy Chamberlin and Billy Corgan. Photo: Paul Natkin/Getty Images The Smashing Pumpkins were a bold and wonderful band. But even though no one seemed to care about the Gallagher brothers’ bragging, something seemed to feel right when Corgan did it. Was it his incandescent baldness, a look he adopted before turning 30? His easily parodied adenoid braille? The fact that he wasn’t “the cute one,” which he was known to complain about in interviews? Whatever it was, it hung over Corgan from the moment the Pumpkins broke up in 2000, and certainly when they reformed a few years later with drummer Jimmy Chamberlin as the only other member of the original lineup. Slowly, Corgan became written about far more for the things he said and did – pictured grimacing on a roller coaster, say – than for the music he went on to make. Corgan arrives for our interview in black jeans, a quilted jacket, a colorful scarf and a Chicago Cubs hat. He’s dressed up from the Pumpkins’ show at Madison Square Garden the night before, where he looked like a techno vampire. Playing alongside Chamberlin and the band’s original guitarist James Iha, who returned in 2018, Corgan exuded a good-natured theatrics you could attribute to his continued investment in pro wrestling: he owns and runs the National Wrestling Alliance since 2017 and has worked in the business for more than a decade. During a performance of their latest single, Beguiled, a pantomime wrestling match took place on stage between a shirtless, muscular torso and a scantily clad biker girl. Plus, it looked like Corgan was having fun. Did his involvement in professional wrestling change his relationship with acting? Immediately Corgan launches into a full-blown reflection on his public reputation over the years and how he recently realized he was no longer interested in playing the villain. “I don’t see the value in it anymore, frankly,” he says. “Actually, I think it’s the opposite: I think people need to feel inspired, and so if you want to talk about a narrative, the story for the band as a whole is just a story of coming together and surviving.” The Pumpkins are about to celebrate their 35th anniversary, and while that anniversary comes with some caveats – they broke up between 2000 and 2007, the line-up fluctuates wildly (bassist D’arcy Wretzky remains out) – it’s hard to rave when he was watching three-quarters of the line-up that channeled the LP Siamese Dream the explosively bad content of its debut, Cherub Rock. That’s a wrestling trick in itself: to believe that a good narrative can wash away the minutia if you tell it with enough conviction. “I used to see it as kind of a funny game,” Corgan says of playing a troll to the press. “But things like that work best as they do in wrestling, when you have a dominant position. If you win, and you’re a heel, it’s fun. But if you’re not winning, then the heel turns into white noise and whatever comes out of your mouth, someone rolls their eyes.” Was there a specific moment when that came into focus? Corgan reveals the truth. “When you get to the point of killing yourself. And it’s not because the meta-narrative doesn’t work. Your life is just not happy, and then outside of you is this noise that has nothing to do with your reality, your achievements, who you are as a person. You become a kind of pincushion.’ Corgan in 1992. Photo: Gie Knaeps/Getty Images Perhaps unsurprisingly, the past few years have welcomed a handful of profound changes in Corgan’s life. Now 55, he recently got engaged to his longtime girlfriend, Chloe Mendel, whom he notes – in another ironic look, like the one you remember from the backseat of the video for the single in 1979 – he met through his divorce lawyer. (She was married to art conservator and artist Chris Fabian from 1993 to 1997.) She and Mendel have two children, six-year-old Augustus and four-year-old Philomena. And Corgan’s father died last December after years of health problems. “When you start having kids, it’s like – OK, now you don’t have to repeat all the mistakes you’ve been complaining about in your songs for 20 years. Now, you have to be the guy you want your father to be,” he says. “He has a way of turning you on. I’ve never had a drug or alcohol problem. it was more like the classic: I guess I’d better grow up now.’ Corgan ruefully admits that it took until he was 48 for these changes to take root. “I defer adult responsibility as much as possible, outside of work. It was always my internal rationalization – “I’m working, so everything’s fine.” But that turned out not to be the case.” “When you start having kids, it’s like now you’re the guy you wish your father was” …Corgan with his daughter. Photo: Ali Smith/The Guardian This adult responsibility has resulted in a more grown-up period for the reformed Pumpkins, where everyone accepts that they’re older and that it’s still a privilege to play full shows at an age when many of their peers are divorced or dead. “I was able to rebuild the inner health of the band and for the first time prioritize the things that matter – the inner life of the band, not the outer life,” says Corgan. In the band’s heyday, Corgan admits he placed too much weight on his childhood dream of becoming a rock star. “Music was my savior,” he says. “He would fix all my problems. All of a sudden, the stupid thing that happened in second grade makes sense because you’re on MTV.” What he found was that the older the Pumpkins got, the more problems piled up – and, as band leader, it fell on him to solve everything. (To be fair, some of these problems were of his own making.) “You get to the point where you realize this game only works if you participate, and part of participating is the emotional need to prove yourself. Once you stop having to prove yourself, you just go back to what you know, which is: I’m a good musician, I’m a good producer. Why am I not making quality music to the best of my ability?’ That mindset led to Atum, a new 33-song LP to be released in three tracks. Act I is out this month, with the remaining tracks arriving in January and April. Conceived as the final part of a trilogy that began with Mellon Collie and continued until 2000’s Machina/The Machines of God, it’s a concept record that Corgan presents as a film, about artists exiled in space, whose isolation is also two beautiful (from Earth, their spaceships look like stars) and a warning to the human race about the dangers of exile. Admittedly, it’s hard to get all that from music. And even Corgan seems ambivalent about the concept, which he noted was initially met with “a big shrug” by his teammates. The general idea was a recent invention, as Mellon Collie and Machina were never intended to be completed as a trilogy. “Some of my own sentimentality, I find unbearable — like, ‘Oh, hey, get off the hearts and stars,’” she says. “But sometimes I find myself striving for something that gives me the same je ne sais quoi feeling as when I watch the old silent movies.” Smashing Pumpkins in London in July 1993. Photo: Paul Bergen/Redferns The Pumpkins’ debut album was named after silent film star Lillian Gish and the indelible video for 1995’s Tonight, Tonight – in which they wore vintage costumes against a backdrop inspired by Georges Méliès’s silent film A Trip to the Moon – plays on the iconography of that time. The passage of time gives new meaning to old concepts, says Corgan. “You can say the same thing every year and it changes because you just get older.” Sometimes, he says,…
