Review: Smashing Pumpkins, The World is a Vampire Festival Tour | Adelaide Entertainment Centre

Kudos to Smashing Pumpkins frontman-cum-wrestling promoter Billy Corgan for messing with the usual stadium rock show formula. It delivered – in spades, writes Nathan Davies.

• Gallery: Adelaide fans at the Smashing Pumpkins show

Stadium rock shows, as great as they are, can sometimes get a little formulaic.

You grab a $14 drink, watch the opening act, grab another $14 drink, watch the headliner, call for an encore and drive home – hopefully thrilled, or at least satisfied.

So kudos to Smashing Pumpkins frontman-cum-wrestling promoter Billy Corgan for at least trying to mess with that formula a little.

The World Is A Vampire, the travelling rock circus that rolled into the Adelaide Entertainment Centre last night, is Corgan’s mini-festival aiming to put the rock ’n’ roll back into rock ’n’ roll wrestling.

Four bands – fantasy-inspired metal shredders Battlesnake (hilariously excellent), Aussie punk powerhouse Amyl and the Sniffers (brutal, as always) and two of the more important bands of 90s alt rock in Jane’s Addiction and the Smashing Pumpkins. And wrestling.

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The wrestling, courtesy of Corgan’s NWA talent, was held in a ring at the back of the Ent Cent and never really captured the attention of the Wednesday night crowd, despite the suplexes and glistening muscles.

Most people seemed to stop on the way to the bar before wandering off with a slightly bemused look on their dial.

But sideshows aside, the crowd was there to watch Jane’s and the Pumpkins – and Jane’s and the Pumpkins delivered. In spades.

Billy Corgan of US alternative rock band The Smashing Pumpkins. Picture: Andrew Treadwell

Perry Farrell, who at an ageless 64 my well be the very vampire of the tour title, has lost none of his impish energy and led his charges through an hour of JA classics.

Mountain Song was nothing short of ferocious, Nothing’s Shocking was the slow burn-to-heart-lifting crescendo that Jane’s Addiction do so well, and Jane Says had the whole crowd in fine voice.

But it was Three Days, the 11-minute bass riff-driven psychedelic jam from 1990s classic long-player Ritual de lo Habitual that stole the show, for this reviewer at least.

Jane’s Addiction, who were so instrumental in dragging alternative rock into the mainstream in the late eighties and early nineties, have a classic formula and it was very much on display last night.

The whole machine is underpinned by the bass and drums combination of Eric Avery and Stephen Perkins, providing a rock solid foundation that lets Farrell’s vocals and Dave Navarro’s guitar (which on this tour is being provided by former Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist Josh Klinghoffer, filling in while Navarro recovers from long Covid) to swoop and soar over the top. It’s a thrill to observe.

Smashing Pumpkins fans at the Adelaide Entertainment Centre, April 26. Picture: Ben Clark

Then, after a short recovery, it was time for the headliner, Chicago’s own Smashing Pumpkins.

Boasting a line-up featuring Corgan, original members James Iha on guitar and Jimmy Chamberlin on drums, with Jeff Schroeder also on guitar duties, the band was completely on song.

Unlike their nineties contemporaries who raided punk and metal for grunge inspiration, the Pumpkins leaned more on classic seventies rock, psychedelia and goth to forge their unique sound.

Kicking off with Empires before dropping a big track just two songs in with Bullet With Butterfly Wings, it was clear from the start that the crowd was in for a journey.

We Only Come Out at Night was followed by a fairly heavy-handed cover of Talking Heads’ Once in a Lifetime, and an acoustic bracket with Iha and Corgan singing The Church’s Under the Milky Way and the ever-popular Ava Adore was a pleasure.

But it was in the back half of the set that The Smashing Pumpkins really let the crowd have it, building and shaping that unique wall of noise that’s unmistakably theirs.

Cherub Rock, from 1993’s Siamese Dream, was a face-melter, and the intensity only increased when the band rolled straight into Zero from their double-album magnum opus Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness.

The intensity is let up a little so everyone can sing along with 1979, before the whole show closes with bang – literally – courtesy of an epic rendition of Siamese Dream’s super-heavy closer Silverf--k.

So even if not every element of the mini-festival worked, the music worked very well indeed and that’s all that really matters.

Bravo Billy.

Smashing Pumpkins Adelaide set list

Empires

Bullet With Butterfly Wings

Today

We Only Come Out at Night

Once in a Lifetime (Talking Heads cover)

Solara

Eye

Ava Adore

Spellbinding

Under the Milky Way (The Church cover)

Tonight, Tonight

Cherub Rock

Zero

1979

Beguiled

Silverf**k