By David Farrier
The Smashing Pumpkins was one of the biggest bands of the ‘90s, selling tens of millions of records.
After a rather bumpy last decade, frontman Billy Corgan is the only remaining original member.
That's not stopping him, as the Smashing Pumpkins play Auckland tonight.
Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan had a pretty good start today when he noticed the lyrics of his song ‘Today’ tattooed on the arm of a gold medal-winning cyclist.
“It's such a cool thing,” he says. “It's like ‘wow’, to think that something I've done would inspire an athlete to a gold medal, I'm not saying directly, that amazing. That's a really cool thing.”
Corgan is hardly the doom and gloom many make him out to be.
He just tells it like it is, even when he's talking about his bread and butter – the music industry.
“Economically, as a business model, it's a waste of time,” he says.
He says his music is about the art, like it always has been.
With his latest record Oceania receiving great reviews, he's glad to see new fans in the audience.
“Seventy percent of our audience is in their 20s. It's amazing, all these kids there.”
He hopes to see that tonight at Vector Arena too.
He has survived drugs, divorce, depression and band breakups to end up here, and it's almost as if that thought struck him as we finished our interview.
“It's crazy, it's crazy. It's like this moment has made all the crap leading up to it worth it. It has been an interesting journey.”
You can't really argue with that.
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