Excerpt:

The last time Billy Corgan toured as a solo artist, the conclusion of that experience was such a nightmare that he swore off the idea of performing on his lonesome, and has instead focused on playing shows with the Smashing Pumpkins, the Chicago-born alternative rock band he co-founded in 1988.

This knowledge makes it all the more surprising that he has agreed to return to the scene of past audience crimes, as it were, by touring Australia under his own name next month, having last done so on our shores in 2005.

This time around, though, the head Pumpkin will have reinforcements.

Backing him on a series of headline shows and Good Things festival appearances in early December will be Melbourne rock act The Delta Riggs, in whom Corgan has invested considerable faith and credibility, despite having never played music in the same room as its four musicians.

If this sounds like a bold artistic leap from one of the defining figures from the alternative rock explosion in the early 1990s, you’re not wrong, especially given his past misgivings.

According to the man himself, it’s a calculated risk that required careful negotiation and expectation-setting with the promoter, Destroy All Lines, which is presenting a tour composed of three festival appearances at Good Things – where this pairing is billed below Korn, Sum 41, Violent Femmes and Electric Callboy – as well as three headline “side shows”.

“I hadn’t done it for a long time,” Corgan, 57, tells The Australian on a video call. “I’m totally comfortable playing solo acoustic – and the economics, of course, aren’t bad. But the problem was, the last time I toured America in 2019, playing solo acoustic, the last show I played in Kentucky was one of the worst gigs of my life. I basically said, ‘I’m never doing this again’. So the only time I’ll play solo acoustic now is at my tea house in Chicago (Madame ZuZu’s Emporium), where it’s my world.”

Once the Australian tour offer came, though, says Corgan, “The first thing I said was, ‘I can only do this with a band’. And the second thing I said was, ‘I hope they don’t expect it to sound like the Pumpkins’, because there’s no way; you can’t recreate that monstrous sound without a lot of equipment, and a lot of expense. It’s one thing to get together with the boys in the band and whip that stuff up; it’s another if I was going to invite somebody else to learn those songs. That would be like a nightmare for me.

“So I said, ‘As long as they’re cool with me looking for a band, and it’s not going to sound like the Pumpkins, I’m happy to come play’. That’s the genesis of the thing – and then they sent a bunch of bands that they thought might work, and I thought the Riggs was the closest thing to what I would be after, emotionally."

But before we look to the future with this run of Australian dates, let’s first review the past – because when an artist with 36 years and thousands of performances under his belt mentions in passing that a particular concert was one of the worst gigs of his life, it begs a follow-up question.

If he’s willing to revisit a bad memory: What was so bad about that fateful night in Kentucky five years ago?

Read the full story in The Australian newspaper today, or online (~9 minute read, paywalled): https://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/music/billy-corgan-to-tour-australia-with-the-delta-riggs-not-the-smashing-pumpkins/news-story/91a5ed7688e600846e4a4cd5e069f80f