Smashing Pumpkins, it seems almost cute all these years down the line. But believe me. They're well worth writing about. Because I was there. In the Nord-Rhine Westfalen region of Germany at the height of Grunge in late 1993. Dortmund to be precise. This gig came at a highly emotional point in my life. I was twenty seven and not doing very well in terms of love. But I did have a very good set of friends with whom I worked and socialised. And I went to this gig with one of the best. He's no longer with us. Died last year in fact.
That was a good time. I'm sure each and every one of that small community of expat teachers would look back from this twenty five year remove and say that was a good time. It may not have seemed so great then. But the heart of what made it so was the people. We went out together, every day it seemed, and drank and ate, but mostly drank and drank and smoked and smoked and talked. And laughed. A lot. Such times in life are rare, although you don't necessarily realise it while you're going through it. But you have the right people around you. That's the key to it all.
So where do Smashing Pumpkins fit into all this? Like I said it was the moment of Grunge. Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Tad, Alice in Chains and various bandwagon jumpers and also rans. Half the male world seemed to dress in plaid.
Matt, the friend I alluded to earlier, was a good person to meet just then because he was very, very much into Grunge. He had grown his hair into a pony tail, not coincidentally I would say. I met him at about the time when I first arrived in Dortmund along with the rest of the teaching circle that I worked with. They were immediately accepting and welcoming to me when I arrived and so was he. A short while later he started to invite me round to his flat on Friday nights with a couple of other blokes from the community. To drink, and talk, and watch TV, and listen to music. And smoke dope. Then go out and meet the most of our circle, mostly women, for drinks. Me generally pretty zombified, Matt much less so.
It's difficult for me to separate the time I spent with Matt from smoking dope. Because he did an awful lot of it. In company and on his own. It fed into his sense of humour which was dry and idiosyncratic but always funny and life-affirming and is one of the things that I'll miss most about him. So we, either just the two of us, or Adrian or Charles, or whoever else was with us would sit and talk and smoke and listen to a whole range of music which the dope almost invariably made sound better.
Smashing Pumpkins arrived almost a year into my time in Dortmund and strangely I discovered the band, not Matt. They had started their rise a little after the other major Grunge bands and were on the cusp of releasing their second album Siamese Dream, the one that broke them. I read a gushing review of them in Melody Maker I remember, and thought there might be something there.
Me. One one of those Friday evenings.
We both pretty immediate converts, saw that they were playing pretty soon in Dussledorf an hour away from Dortmund on the train and resolved to go. It was a sunny Sunday in late August over a quarter of a century ago. We drank beer, we talked, about a slight tiff Matt was having with his girlfriend of the time, we had some wurst and chips at a Greek takeaway and made our way to the venue.
The Verve, who were labelmates of Smashing Pumpkins played a support slot. A few years down the line they rode their own wave and had their own moment but it was not that night. They tried to conjure up their own spell, make their own atmosphere, but their charms were largely lost on an audience that was not there to see them. A short break to set up the stage and the Pumpkins took to it.
And were utterly mesmirising. From the moment they set up Cherub Rock, as good an opening track as any album has ever had, to the moment they left after a couple of euphoric, draining encores. They, the classic line up of Corgan, Iha, D'Abo and Chamberlin, did a set that made them seem like you were witnessing the very best band on the planet. They did quiet. They did blisteringly, beautifully loud. Billy Corgan did the most excrutiatingly extravagant rock moves and made them seem like the best ideas imaginable. People talk about bands experiencing an imperial phase and it seems like a cliche, but that was a band at the absolute peak of their imperial phase and I saw them. Words are actually insufficient to explain how good they were.
We were both almost nonplussed by the experience. We took the train back to Dortmund and went for a couple more beers to a seedy run-down bar in the red light district which we came to call Smashing Pumpkins pub ever after. I got into an argument with a beer soaked regular for putting a Borussia Dortmund drinking song on the jukebox when they'd lost that weekend. Those are my memories of that night.
So, to now. I'm sitting at the laptop on my desk in Newcastle reliving it, all these years down the line. I have a picture of Matt facing me, on a card that the partner of his last years sent me at in November to invite me to his funeral in Holland where they lived and he'd spent the last fifteen years of his life. I couldn't make it, to my regret and am belatedly writing this instead.
Close male friendships are a strange thing. Non demonstrative and mostly lived out through humour, beer and discussions about music, football, film and politics. Life doesn't necessarily intervene too often. But Matt was an irreplaceable friend and that Smashing Pumpkins gig was an irreplaceable experience. He'll be missed. By more people than he would have known. And certainly very much by me.
As for Smashing Pumpkins. I don't really listen to them anymore...
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