The Smashing Pumpkins appeared on ABC's late-night talk show Jimmy Kimmel Live last night, performing their new single Sighommi, from this year's 'surprise' album Aghori Mhori Mei.
But Billy Corgan's band actually performed a five-song set for the audience assembled in the parking lot behind the show's Los Angeles studio, incorporating three classic tracks from their epic 1995 double album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, plus a cover of U2's Zoo Station, from the Irish band's 1991 album Achtung Baby.
The fact that the Pumpkins' mini-set pivoted around their mid-'90s out was in keeping with Billy Corgan's intentions for Aghori Mhori Mei, which was released with little advance fanfare on August 2.
Announcing the album release in mid-July, Corgan stated: “In the writing of this new album I became intrigued with the well-worn axiom, ‘You can’t go home again.’ Which I have found personally to be true in form but thought, ‘Well, what if we tried anyway?’
“Not so much in looking backwards with sentimentality but rather as a means to move forward; to see if in the balance of success and failure that our ways of making music circa 1990 – 1996 would still inspire something revelatory.”
Watch the Chicago alt.rock stars play Sighommi on the show, plus fan-filmed footage of their Mellon Collie-era anthems 1979, Tonight Tonight, and Jellybelly below:
In a recent interview with The New Yorker, Billy Corgan expressed his disdain for the “New York hipsters” who sneered at his band at the peak of their success in the '90s, pointing a metaphorical finger at Sonic Youth vocalist/bassist Kim Gordon, who he called a “snob”.
“The New York hipsters would make fun of us,” he said. “And what were they making fun of? That we cared too much about our music. We worked too hard. What does it mean to tell someone they are trying too hard when they have fucking nothing? You would encounter snobs like Kim Gordon. Well, I didn’t grow up in the same social strata she grew up in. It’s easy for her to pass judgment on people like us.”
