Music
Review
The Smashing Pumpkins smash Halifax’s Piece Hall to pieces
With eardrums well and truly ruptured, The Smashing Pumpkins’ set will surely go down in the annals of The Piece Hall’s history
“This year is the 30th anniversary of our album the Mellon Collie and The Infinite Sadness,” Billy Corgan notes. “That album was released before many of you were born,” he continues, encouraging a few jokey boos from the sell-out crowd at Halifax’s Piece Hall before adding: “Maybe you all just have young faces.”
Based on the multi-generational fanbase piling into the venue tonight, it seems to be the case that The Smashing Pumpkins have been revitalised in recent years. Partly due to the addition of guitarist Kiki Wong whose effervescent social media presence has guided the band toward younger audiences, partly due to the former angsty Corgan’s softening in older age, and partly to do with him finding peace in his musical past.
Despite being called The Aghori Tour, Pumpkins’ setlist tonight only features four songs from their 2024 album Aghori Mhori Mei, serving up what was ostensibly a greatest hits set. Naming the tour after their recent record might suggest a reluctance to pigeonhole themselves as a legacy band, but The Smashing Pumpkins reminded everyone in Halifax exactly why they’re cherished as one of alt-rock’s most evocative bands, ever.
The Piece Hall has undergone a restoration of its own of late, underpinning a transformation in local fortunes. The Grade I listed former cloth hall dates back to 1779 and re-opened in 2017 after £19 million was invested into resurrecting the gorgeous building. Now a bubbling plaza by day and an eye-wateringly beautiful concert venue by night, The Piece Hall is a true spectacle when dusk deepens thanks to the fairy lights twinkling around the balconies and the awe-inspiring, illuminated steeple peering over the venue’s warm stone walls.
The surrounds compliment the Pumpkins’ crepuscular theatricality. Not before Corgan, Wong, and fellow bandmates James Iha, Jimmy Chamberlin, Jack Bates – whose dad Peter Hook was in attendance – and Katie Cole set about shattering the foundations of the historic venue’s perimeter with their opening salvo of metal adjacent tracks in ‘Glass’ Theme’, ‘Heavy Metal Machine’ and Aghori Mhori Mei’s ‘Pentagrams’. Donning his trademark clerical gown, Corgan orchestrates a sermon in alt-rock grandeur from then onwards, leaning largely into albums like the aforementioned Mellon Collie and The Infinite Sadness and Siamese Dream which established The Smashing Pumpkins as a generational act.
It’s quite the coup luring a band of the Pumpkins’ stature to Yorkshire. But the occasion isn’t lost on Corgan, who if anything, indicates his mutual adoration for the locals turning up, celebrating regional delicacies (well, fish ‘n’ chips) and inciting a crowd-wide war cry of “Yorkshire! Yorkshire!” He didn’t overdo it on the speeches, rattling through vibrant renditions of big-hitters ‘1979’, ‘Today’, ‘Bullet With Butterfly Wings’, and ‘Mayonaise’, conducting a-capella sing-a-longs as the audience’s throaty cheers seldom stopped throughout.
Corgan’s voice is as snottily nasal as hoped, but remarkably powerful, retaining his freakish pitch. The band play freely yet firmly locked in, balancing rumbling menace with aching nostalgia like few other acts from their era. Or any since. Case and point when they glide from the technicolour riffs of ‘Cherub Rock’ to ‘Jellybelly’, to ‘Ava Adore’ soon after with Corgan stripping himself of his guitar for the only time to lurk and loom along the front row. Met with pawing hands, he responds with a heartfelt: “we love you, we love you, we love you.”
The angrily eruptive Corgan of yesteryear is no more, by tonight’s account. The Smashing Pumpkins are all the better for it, learning to love their ever-solidifying legacy status. With eardrums well and truly ruptured after ‘Zero’, this set will surely go down in the annals of The Piece Hall’s history.
Click here for tickets to The Smashing Pumpkins’ remaining UK dates.
For tickets to TK Maxx Presents Live at the Piece Hall’s concert series, click here.
Header photo by Francesco Prandoni/Getty Images
