Sometimes odd but never dull
Having rolled out the fan favourites in spectacular fashion at last summer’s Reading and Leeds Festivals, this was always likely to be a night when the Smashing Pumpkins approached their setlist from a different angle. Anyone seeing them for the first time, and there will certainly have been a few in that situation on Saturday night given their comeback after seven years is still less than twelve months old, may have left the O2 Arena feeling slightly underwhelmed. This gig featured a few from recent album ‘Zeitgeist’, a smattering of lesser known album tracks and interesting covers. Crucially for the first timer, classics such as ‘Disarm’, ‘Cherub Rock’ and ‘Zero’ weren’t included on this occasion.
This said though, there comes a crossroads point when any band restarting their career has to decide what they want to be back in the game for. They either join the nostalgia club, where people turn up expecting to and knowing they’ll hear the same few hits, or mix and match in order to justify their return as more than a money maker, as well as keeping it interesting for both band and fan, and capitalizing on what for the Pumpkins is a vast back catalogue of songs. It was the latter route taken, which for the Pumpkins regular was at worst fragmented and self indulgent but in a good way, and at best, a great opportunity to hear songs off the beaten track, in a venue where the sound quality kicks any other arena I’ve visited squarely in the balls.
Smashing Pumpkins played for over two and a half hours, delivering a set that had enough hard rock and acoustic variety to keep things interesting throughout. They set the tone for the night by opening with two older album tracks, ‘Porcelina of the Vast Oceans’ (‘Mellon Collie & The Infinite Sadness’) and ‘Behold! The Night Mare’ (‘Adore’), but it wasn’t long before the first two major fan favourites arrived; ‘Tonight, Tonight’, complete with lounge music style intro, and ‘Mayonaise’ which is such a highly regarded classic you wonder why it never earned single status.
The album tracks continued with ‘Machina: Machines Of God’ song ‘Try, Try, Try’ and ‘(Come On) Let's Go’ from recent release ‘Zeitgeist’. There were several surprises along the way too, few would have been expecting ‘Lily (My One and Only)’ from ‘Mellon Collie’ or ‘Drown’ which appeared on the soundtrack to a film called ‘Singles’.
After a quiet start, Billy Corgan turned in a performance that saw him engage well with the crowd, he also played a few acoustic tracks during the set, including ‘Perfect’, ‘1979’, ‘That's the Way (My Love is)’ and ‘My Blue Heaven’. We also got a brief solo blast of Girls Aloud song ‘Call The Shots’, although I can’t be certain if he genuinely does “love that song”. If you count Girls Aloud we had four covers. Uriah Heep’s ‘Easy Livin’ and a cracking heavy rock rendition of ‘For What It's Worth’ (Buffalo Springfield) appeared near the end of the set. Strange choices for songs to build for a big climax it could be argued, especially given some of the absentees from the setlist, but both passed the decent cover version test.
Having highlighted the songs that weren’t played, it’s worth noting that we did get ‘Today’, ‘Tarantula’, ‘Stand Inside Your Love’, ‘Ava Adore’ and the enormously popular ‘Bullet with Butterfly Wings’.
The marathon set reached its conclusion with a thunderous version of ‘United States’. Those who had read messageboard comments regarding other dates on this UK tour would have wondered if that was it once the band had left the stage. London did get an encore though, another cover, this time Echo and the Bunnymen’s ‘Lips Like Sugar’ with Billy Corgan gaining a massive cheer when he told the crowd this was by “one of the best bands England has produced”, which is of course correct.
Performance-wise this gig couldn’t be faulted. Anyone prepared to brave the cold outside the O2 would have found a survey of fan opinion to be mixed as to what was played. You can’t expect to get the same classics every time, and you can’t please everyone. Your own show, be it in an arena or not, is obviously a better place to showcase lesser known tracks than main stage headliner of Reading and Leeds, so they’ve judged this one right.
So the question now is, what next? A recent Radio 1 interview has thrown up the possibility of shows focusing on certain albums or points in their career, think along the lines of what Iron Maiden have been doing in recent time. This would be something well worth checking out if it happened, a ‘Mellon Collie’ only gig would be rather special, just make sure the “but we wanted ‘Disarm’ and ‘Cherub Rock’” grumblers are warned about that one. Whatever the next move, the world’s certainly a better place with the Smashing Pumpkins back on the road.