BILLY CORGAN FOLDS his face into a frown. He is a big man, so it is a big frown. He leans forward on his chair - one that is far too small to comfortably contain his sprawling six-foot three-inch frame - and delivers a terrifying stare. To suggest that he is not in the best of moods is to understate matters somewhat. "Man... your preconceptions of me are so off," he informs Q. "You are so offbase, it's ridiculous." He then issues what will, over 75 minutes, become a trademark chuckle, the kind designed to paint the person opposite him as someone of minimum intellect and maximum stupidity.
"You are trying to use your intuition to guide you through this interview but, if I may say, it's not guiding you very well. Youre not listening to what I'm saying. You are trying to look into my eyes to see my soul." He sighs. "Well let me tell you, you wont find it."
Outside, on a bright winter's day at the end of the last century, Chicago's famous wind is as sharp as a slap to the face. But, with Corgan in attendance, it's no warmer in this city-centre recording studio. Smashing Pumpkins have a new album out - it's called Machina/The Machines Of God, and it's loud - but the singer is reluctant to talk about, well, anything.
The band's line-up has changed. Drummer Jimmy Chamberin, sacked over his persistent heroin abuse in 1996, is back in the fold, and, as of just a few weeks ago, bassist D'Arcy Wretzky is out. Her replacement, Melissa Auf Der Maur, used to play in Hole, whose singer, Courtney Love, has had a long~running war of words in the press with exboyfriend Corgan, some of the bitterest exchanges revolving around Corgan's alleged role in the writmg of Hole's 1998 album, Celebrity Skin. The band have become a lurid mini-series and, perhaps keenly aware that if the story were ever to become a TV movie, then Joan Collins would be perfect as the Pumpkins Führer, Corgan now wants to down play the pronouncedly tabloid angle of the band.
"Here I am again," he says, thrust back into the world of materialism. And I'm not keen on it ' " He shrugs his oversized shoulders. "I've taken truth-telling into new realms of art in the past, and I've exhausted it. Truth means nothing to me any more. I will no longer be indulging in it."
HE ARRIVES IN the studio, on time, clad in a black roll-neck fleece top, an ankle-length black skirt, and black hobnailed boots. Give him a scythe, and he'd look just like the Grim Reaper.
"Nice skirt," says Q, by way of friendly introduction. "It's not a skirt," he replies gruffly, pulling back the long flap to reveal two trousered legs. "It a Gaultier." Of course it is.
He leads Q into a windowless, airless room, closes the door and sits down. Spotlights overhead bounce off his bald pate and cast the top half of his face in shadow. He fidgets in his chair, clearly uncomfortable, and doesn't know what to do with his enormous legs. The room's Feng Shui is all off and Corgan feels it. Having opened his heart one too many times in public before, he now views the media much like one would a deadly disease. Clearly here against his will, he remains wilfully obstinate, taciturn, and mocking.
"Go ahead and ask me any thing you want” he says, "but you won't get it. I know what you after: the story behind the story. Which is a shame. Everyone has lost sight of the real story, which is the music itself. Its like a train - music is the engine, but people appear more interested in the other carriages."
The other carriages, he explains, contain chocolate, peanuts, naked women, paintings and heavy metal fans with mullet hairstyles, all of which everyone seems to find far more fascinating than the engine itself. "I'm very dismayed with people’s obsession with the salacious," he says. "But hey, go ahead anyway, give your best shot."
Which is difficult, when the target keeps on shifting. But let's try anyway.
IF ADORE, THE band's pretty and peculiarly unbombastic last album, was what Smashing Pumpkins sounded like in a power cut, then the clunkingly-titled Machina/The Machines Of God is what they sound like with the electricity fully restored. It's a searing, seething record, alive with bile and purpose.
"To create the energy and the symbolism necessary to move people," he says, between long contemplative gulps from a bottle of Evian, we had to go further, farther, harder. Adore was like an ageing Hollywood superstar. She’s 55 years old, and she's had three facelifts. She looks in the mirror one day and suddenly realises that she can't sustain the energy anymore. That record was all about dreams dying. This new album, on the other hand, finds that superstar with all energy restored. Its classic Smashing Pumpkins mentality: destroy, obliterate, rebuild, then destroy again." He shifts awkwardly in the chair. "That's what I will tell you about it," he says, the implication being, that there is a whole lot he won’t.
He won't, for example, discuss the album's theme - "work that out for yourself, which may be difficult because I'm an artist ahead of rny time" - and he won't tolerate a single question regarding the return of the drummer who, he explained to Q in 1998, was kicked out of the band because we’re not going to let the bad apple spoil it for us". "But I will tell you this," he says, like a master throwing the dog a bone. "If you want to know what Jimmy brings back to the band, then listen to Adore and this new record back-to-back. It speaks for itself."
When Q broaches the subject of Chamberlin again, Corgan willl extend a long index finger, and commence stroking it with the same digit of his other hand. And what, pray, does that mean? "It means that you are a bad, bad boy," he says. "And it means, drop it." On the subject of D'Arcy's somewhat sudden departure, he is similarly unforthcoming. "I'm not going to talk about D'Arcy," he says. Why not? "She left for reasons more complicated than any single answer could hope to cover. So I'm not going to get into that. Its a private matter."
He will talk briefly, however, about the band's new addition who, he claims, he met several years before she joined Hole, and that it was he who first recommended her to Courtney Love. "She's told me that Gish (Smashing Pumpkins' 1991 debut) was the reason she picked up a bass in the first place," he says. "And so when we needed a new bassist, there was only ever one candidate." And she was thrilled to join? "Of course. I guess it would be like if I received a telephone call from a reformed Beatles asking if I wanted to sing all of John Lennon's parts." That good an offer? " For her? Absolutely."
How has Love reacted to the news that her former band member has now joined forces with her nemesis? Corgan leans forward and begins to mime digging. He grins. "You're digging up old ground here," he says. "lf you dig much further, you'll probably find a penny from 1882." He falls silent for several moments, then reconsiders. "Anyway, if anyone has claim on Melissa it's me, not Courtney." And what about the rumours that D'Arcy is now in LA collaborating with Love? "I'm not going to talk about Courtney," he harrumphs. "I thought you came here to discuss my band, no one else's." If only it were that easy.
"Look," he says, impatiently. "You're coming to the table with all these preconceptions about me, and that's not healthy. Youre trying to find out who I am today by what has gone in the past. You shouldn't be doing that." So has Corgan himself come to the table with no preconceptions? "Oh, sure I have," he says, nodding. "My experience with journalists tells me not to trust you. I did give you a chance initiately - the glass was empty when you first came into the room, but you filled it within 15 minutes." It is a bit rich, is it not, to criticise someone for something that you yourself are guilty of? Corgan's cackle is loud and long. "One cannot justify one's wrong actions by pointing the finger to other people who are doing the same thing " Yes, but..."Don't try to absolve yourself of your failings by unloading them on me." But... "Look, OK, we're both fucked, how’s that?" Rude?
IN AN ATTEMPT to lighten the mood, a frivolous question-and-answer session is next suggested. Despite telling Q to "go right ahead", he is unwilling to respond to any of them, deeming them lame. When asked if he drinks, he snorts and looks away. To the question of whether he is undergoing therapy, he makes a fist and looks ready to punch, and when Q wonders whether there is more or less tension in the band these days, he looks particularly piqued "That's a misconception. There has never been tension in this band." In previous interviews, however, he often spoke of nothing but. "I was lying," he grunts. Is he lying now? "What do you think?"
It is the final question, though, that ultimate pushes Corgan over the edge. Responding to query, Who dresses you?, he suddenly flares, and the frown becomes a scowl. "What do you mean who dresses me? I dress me. What do you take me for? A drooling fucking idiot?" So no stylist, then? "That's right, no stylist." But there is a stylist waiting for him in the other room... "She," he intones with deadly seriousness, “is here for the photos, that's all.”
AT WHICH POINT, everything dries up. Q reluctantly calls it a day - unless of course Billy Corgan has anything else he wishes to add? The interviewee stares up the ceiling for two utterly mute minutes. The only sound is of the tape recorder whirring pointlessly onwards. Then he gets up, a walks away. At the door, he turns around. "And by the way," he says, his voice a low growl. "I don't drink."