The Smashing Pumpkins

Adore
EMI, 1998

In 1995 The Smashing Pumpkins released a bloated double album called Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness and became, at least for a year or two, the biggest rock band in the world. Older fans and critics chose sides over whether the album was brilliant or indulgent (it was without a doubt both) and more than a few hung up their Siamese Dream T-shirts because the group had allegedly "sold out". Mellon Collie sold in the millions, the videos for singles '1979', 'Tonight, Tonight' and 'Bullet With Butterfly Wings' were played to death and there were so many songs from the sessions still left over that they filled a five-disc, 33-song box set called The Aeroplane Flies High.

The band, led by Billy Corgan in his silver trousers and freshly shaved head, went on a world tour to capitalise on their success. What was meant to be a victory lap became the beginning of the end. Before a show at the Madison Square Garden in New York, touring keyboardist Jonathan Melvoin overdosed and died while shooting heroin with drummer Jimmy Chamberlain in a hotel room. Chamberlain was fired and the band resolved to go on with the show. Corgan later said it was the worst decision they'd ever made. Whether or not he was right, the band that came home from the tour was a very different creature indeed.

The first new song to be released after Mellon Collie, two years later in 1997, was a creepy electronic track called 'Eye' which appeared on the soundtrack to David Lynch's film Lost Highway alongside cuts from Marilyn Manson and Trent Reznor. It was followed by the first single from Mellon Collie's successor Adore, an album recorded with a rotating cast of guest drummers that did away entirely with the alternative rock format that had made the band famous. In the video clip to 'Ava Adore' Corgan sang in a full-length black outfit like a camp version of Nosferatu's Count Orlok, weaving in and out of scenes from asylums and porn movies. The rest of the album was a gorgeous but unusual mix of gothic orchestra-pop, haunting acoustic melodies and electronic sounds. It sold about one tenth of the copies its predecessor did and the band started to fall apart a few years later.