After three decades, Smashing Pumpkins leader Billy Corgan still has a message for music fans who insist on labelling the four-piece a grunge band. On the band’s TikTok account, a post read: “A fact that people can’t accept? SP is not grünge, has never been grunge, not against grunge, but SP ain’t it.” Got that? Good. Forming in his native Chicago after a teenage stint in Florida with goth rockers The Marked and Deep Blue Dream (with future Static-X frontman the late Wayne Static), Smashing Pumpkins were somehow lumped in with the burgeoning grunge scene following the release of their 1991 debut album Gish. The artier cousins of their Seattle contemporaries, Corgan’s band – completed by bassist D’Arcy Wretzky, guitarist James Iha and drummer Jimmy Chamberlin – proudly wore many influences on their sleeve: goth, psychedelia, shoegaze, metal and, later, electronica.
Fronting a band dogged by rumours of in-fighting and drugand breakthrough follow-up
