Billy Corgan recently chatted with Wall Of Sound before his Good Things Festival appearance and talked about how the band and their current song came all together. “One thing I’d say in self-interest is a lot of people through the years are confused by the way we’ve attacked or done our version of rock and roll. Part of it came we had such a deep reverence for the bands that came before us, Rush, Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, The Cars, whatever. We just felt like we couldn’t be better than them.”
The rocker revealed: “So in an alternative mindset, it was almost like, ‘Well, what if we just take the things we like about those bands and just smash them together in a way that no one would ever think?’ It’s like if The Cars had Tony Iommi on guitar but Dale [Bozzio] from Missing Persons singing. We just did like a weird Frankenstein thing.”
Corgan continued: “To people outside of our world they find it very confusing because especially in the ’90s if you were in the metal lane you were in the metal lane.”
While the singer didn’t have a certain genre in mind to begin with, he admitted that he wanted to be like Yngwie Malmsteen. “Now it’s understood that people are cross genre artists but back then it was like alternative playing heavy guitar with solos, like, heretical. It’s like it’s always the famous Kurt Cobain would play the weird [stuff], he was like taking the piss solos yeah it’s all good because he was a great guitar player. But that’s sort of with the mindset where we were like, ‘I want to be Yngwie, I don’t give a f*ck.’ I didn’t care what any alternative person thought I just wanted to play as fast as Yngwie,” he added.
Like many other rockers, Corgan is also aware of Malmsteen’s effect on the industry. In another interview last year, he named the guitar virtuoso as the ‘most prominent’ of many guitarists.
“Ritchie Blackmore, I think, is one of the greatest guitar players of all time. And, what I think what’s amazing about Ritchie Blackmore as a guitar player is his transition from a kind of blues guitar player to a hard rock guitar player to a melodic guitar player,” he said before mentioning Malmsteen. “Not only did he influence an entire generation of guitar players, of course, Yngwie Malmsteen being the most prominent among them,” Corgan added.
Before performing at the Good Things Festival, Corgan went on a short tour, playing three shows in Australia.
