Smashing Pumpkins announce first tour since 2000

Smashing Pumpkins have announced their Shiny And Oh So Bright Tour, their first since 2000 to feature the founding members Billy Corgan, Jimmy Chamberlin, and James Iha.

The band’s bassist, D’Arcy Wretzky, will not be joining the North American tour, but three-fourths of the acclaimed alt-rock group will be on hand when the tour kicks off in Glendale, Arizona, in July.

The Pumpkins, formed in Chicago in 1988, have been teasing the possibility of a tour for quite some time now, first with an Instagram post from Corgan in January, in which he said the band was in the studio with the producer Rick Rubin, and then later with a countdown clock on the band’s website. Last week, Wretzky gave an interview with the website BlastEcho claiming Corgan had approached her with a contract offer but later rescinded it, saying it “wasn’t a real offer”.

In a January statement to BlastEcho, Wretzky said: “I only just found about yesterday that the band has decided to go with a different bass player.”

The tour coincides with the 30-year anniversary of the band’s formation. The Smashing Pumpkins burst on to the scene with their 1991 album Gish and then, two years later, with Siamese Dream. Their third studio album, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, was released in 1995, selling 21m copies in the United States alone and spawning the single 1979, the Pumpkins’ highest-charting song. Well-chronicled infighting led to their disbanding in 2000. In 2006, Corgan and Chamberlin reunited to record Zeitgeist, and the band toured through the following year.

The Shiny And Oh So Bright tour will feature material mainly from the band’s pre-2000 music, from Gish through their high-concept double-record Machina/Machina II.

“Some 30 years ago, as The Smashing Pumpkins, James Iha and I began a musical journey in the cramped rear bedroom of my Father’s house,” said Corgan in a statement about the reunion tour. “And so it’s magic to me that we’re able to coalesce once more around the incredible Jimmy Chamberlin, to celebrate those songs we’ve made together.”

“This show and staging will be unlike any we’ve ever done, and will feature a set unlike any we’ve ever played,” he continued. “For if this is a chance at a new beginning, we plan on ushering it in with a real bang.”

On the reunion tour, the two-time Grammy-winners (for best hard rock performance in both 1997 and 1998) will switch “to a three guitar lineup to better emulate the signature tones and textures of their albums”, according to a press release. Jeff Schroeder will be taking part in the tour, which wraps up in Boise, Idaho, in September.