Billy Corgan is on tour with his new band The Machines of God, revisiting Smashing Pumpkins classics as part of the ‘A Return to Zero’ tour.
The set leans heavily on Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, Machina/The Machines of God, and the more obscure Aghori Mhori Mei.
But it was a special guest appearance in Montreal on Friday night that had longtime fans buzzing.
At Théâtre Beanfield, Corgan was joined onstage by his former bandmate and fellow Pumpkins alum Melissa Auf der Maur. The former Hole bassist, who played with the band from 1999 through to 2020, made her entrance during the encore, greeted by massive cheers from the hometown crowd.
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Before they launched into the final track of the night, Machina’s “The Everlasting Gaze”, Auf der Maur shared a memory that took the crowd back more than three decades. First speaking in French, she then turned to Corgan and asked, “Do you remember the first words we ever exchanged, on July 23rd, 1991? I walk to the side of the stage, after you played ‘I Am One.’ And you were packing up your gear, and do you remember what I said?”
Corgan joked, “I love you, never leave?”
“Very close,” she laughed. “I said, ‘On behalf of Montreal, Canada, I apologise for the broken beer bottle that was thrown at you. I am Melissa from Montreal and I will follow you ‘til the end of time.’”
Auf der Maur originally joined the Pumpkins as a touring bassist after the departure of original member D’arcy Wretzky and stuck around through various incarnations of the band until 2020.
Corgan, meanwhile, recently explained to Rolling Stone why he’s touring without James Iha and Jimmy Chamberlin for this run. “We weren’t in agreement about what the purpose of such a thing might be for,” he said. “And we have this agreement, which has been really helpful over the pasts seven or eight years, that says if we’re not in alignment about something like that, nobody is going to pull rank and say it has to be done. That was very much the way the business worked back in the day, and solved a lot of problems.”
The ‘A Return to Zero’ tour wraps in Minneapolis on June 29th, before Corgan links back up with the full Smashing Pumpkins lineup for a European tour through July and August, with stops in Asia and the Middle East to follow.
