The Impossible is Possible: Billy Corgan
Just over twenty years ago Billy Corgan fronted the most impactful band in the world. The Smashing Pumpkins, though just shy of Pearl Jam and Nirvana’s commercial success, stood apart from their grunge peers. While the others had an undeviatingly stark approach, the Pumpkins funneled their melancholy through boundless orchestration and a wider, more varied sonic picture. Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness, the band’s magnum opus, perfected this standout approach and solidified Corgan’s mythic status as a rock legend.
Few successes followed in the two decades after however. It saw the band’s general disintegration, but not before some spliced regenerations. The unimpeachably cool Corgan, who had headed the cult of teenage melancholia, swiftly settled into a middle-aged grumpiness. He is now a strange duality; an artist who we respect, but can’t help but laugh at. Once considered a wholly maudlin figure, he’s since bought a wrestling company, dated Tila Tequila, and starred in a furniture commercial – and these are only the headlines. He fits perfectly into our absurd, neo-dadaist sense of humour, because everything he does seems to be beyond meaning. If you’ve seen those photos of him at Disneyland, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.
And that’s where we’re at with Billy Corgan. Just a name change later, William Patrick Corgan is here with his solo album Ogilala – and both are facts that can be laughed at. As I’m sat in a room with 69 other attendees (another fact you can laugh at if you must) who are waiting to see Billy Corgan, the anticipation is palpable. We’re sat in a very small theatre under the RSA in London, ready to watch Pillbox, the film which accompanies the new album. With every shuffle, each head turns towards the noise, knowing that at any moment this tiny room could have Corgan in it too.
The film begins, and with no sign of the man himself, our attention is fixed. It’s in black and white, with title cards and Corgan’s distinctive voice rowing back and forth. A squeaky clean guitar is his main accompaniment as the music soundtracks the scene of a man off to war. It’s suspiciously conventional. Our expectations are soon met when the hero descends into a bad acid trip underworld, where he finds himself at an Indian prince’s dinner party. Long story short, he gets his eyes pierced out by a clawed woman, meets a man and his dwarf, fights death, and then loses. The final cards question whether love is worth anything when that thing will one day die. It’s a concern that I imagine a now 50-year-old, settled down with wife and kid, Corgan shares. The film ends, with all of us forgetting the feeling of impatience. “I don’t think I moved once during that” I heard other audience members say.
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