And Finally Beef Of The Week

CMU Beef Of The Week #44: Billy Corgan v Pavement

By | Published on Saturday 20 November 2010

It’s all a bit too like the 80s at the moment; the Conservative government is cutting everything, there’s a royal wedding coming up and there’s loads of synth music lying about the place. Why not take a break from that with a little bit of 90s alt rock in-fighting?

Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan yesterday took to Twitter to lambast US indie heroes Pavement, after he learned that he would be appearing together at a festival in Brazil. Corgan’s gripe is seemingly that Pavement are screwing their loyal followers over by reforming and then insisting on only playing the songs that the fans want to hear. 

Said Corgan: “Just found out SP is playing with Pavement in Brazil. It’s gonna be one of those New Orleans type funerals. I say that because they represent the death of the alternative dream, and we follow with the affirmation of life part. Funny how those who pointed the big finger of ‘sell out’ are the biggest offenders now… yawn. They have no love. By the way, we’ll be the band up there playing NEW songs because we have the love”.

Billy Corgan has, of course, been wowing fans with his new material on recent tours. A quick trawl of gig reviews from recent shows throws up the phrases like “boring”, “mind-numbing” and “impossibly self-indulgent”, while at one gig in Australia recently, Corgan berated the crowd for cheering when he played the intro to one of the band’s most popular songs, ‘Today’.

”It’s not very nice to cheer more for this song”, he told them. Billy knows what the audience wants, even if they don’t.

This Beef Of The Week comes from this edition of the CMU Weekly. Subscribe to the CMU Weekly here.



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