Billy Corgan of The Smashing Pumpkins during a concert in North Carolina. Image Getty
At the beginning of January, the band, known for nineties hits such as 1979, Zero and Tonight, Tonight, announced via social media that it had room for an extra guitarist. The Pumpkins, as the band is also known, were founded in Chicago in the 1980s by Billy Corgan – the lead singer with a characteristic bald head – and guitarist James Iha. Later the band was supplemented with bassist D’arcy Wretzky and drummer Jimmy Chamberlain.
In this formation, the band made iconic albums such as Siamese Dream and Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. Together with other bands such as Nirvana and Pearl Jam, The Pumpkins are the standard bearers of grunge music, a melancholic rock genre that was especially popular in the 1990s.
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Hassan Bahara has been media and culture editor for de Volkskrant since 2021. Before that he wrote about (online) radicalization. One week a month he serves as a TV critic
The Pumpkins disbanded in 2000, only to make a new start six years later. The albums that the band made in this second phase were received moderately positively. Evergreens like The Pumpkins produced in the 1990s did not materialize. The Pumpkins’ last album, Atum, released last year, was dismissed in the Volkskrant as a ‘failed joke or a pretentious misfire’.
The Pumpkins regularly changed their composition. Last October, guitarist Jeff Schroeder – with the band since 2007 – left to pursue a different musical path. The rush to find a replacement was great: The Pumpkins will embark on a European tour next summer. On June 29, the band will give a concert in Ahoy in Rotterdam.
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2024-01-18 12:02:11
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