Billy Corgan was introduced to music at an early age by his father who was a musician. At 14, Billy was sent to psychiatrist by his stepmother who believed he suffered from a persecution complex. It was assumed that the intelligent Corgan would pursue a career in law, but after leaving school, he got a job in a record store. Billy began playing in a rock band called the Marked - named because of the birthmarks Billy and the drummer had which they'd been hugely self conscious of when they were young. Billy then met James Iha, a Japanese American who was playing in a college band called Snake Train, and the two began performing as a duo.

       The Smashing Pumpkins debuted in 1988 in Chicago in a Polish bar with Billy Corgan and James Iha. Later, after meeting D'arcy Wretzky by accident in an argument, they gave her a tryout and even after a miserable performance, they hired her out of despair. As a trio, the Pumpkins performed to 50 people at the Avalon with a drum machine for back-up. The manager of Chicago's Cabaret Metro, Chicago's biggest venue, who said he'd book them as support act if they employed a human drummer. In came Jimmy Chamberlain, who completed the band. They were still far away from mainstream alternative rock.

       Jimmy almost left the band because all of the players were struggling to keep up with him, but stayed because he was impressed with their songs. Billy once said "The Smashing Pumpkins was never meant to be a small band. This band was either going to be a big band or a no-band. The Smashing Pumpkins played there first show together as a band opening for Jane's Addiction at the Cabaret Metro, a popular Chicago club. Shows became more and more frequent and the band became better as a whole. The members were able to relate to each other and their playing styles. Billy once said about their early club dates, "The band would start off playing to a hundred people and by the end of our set there would only be thirty, but for whatever reason, people always seemed to pay attention to us. I have no idea why- the band was not that good and the songs were not that good. We had a local following within six months. When we got to the stage where we were playing in front of 800 people, that is when I realized how far it could go."

       Their next big job was to make a recording that was available to the public everywhere. The Smashing Pumpkins were being pursued in 1990 by such record companies as Sony, Warner Brothers, and Geffen. The band, however, decided to go with Caroline Records, a part of Virgin Records and immediately began recording with Butch Vig. They began their recording at Smart Studios in Madison, Wisconsin in December 1990. After six months of grueling recording, mixing, and overdubbing, their first album, Gish, was completed. The name Gish actually came from the last name of a silent film star and D'arcy did the layout cover. On the inside cover is a picture of Bugg Superstar, James Iha's dog shown in the later 1994 Vieuphoria video. Siva and Bury Me were classic early Pumpkins - all pummelling bass lines and squealing, pyrotechnic guitars - but Daydream and Rhinoceros offered an open window to Corgan's startling genius that would become the Pumpkins unique sound. After Gish was released in May of 1991, The Smashing Pumpkins embarked on a gruelling 18 month world tour that nearly split them up.

       In September, they made their UK debut at the Camden Underworld, which sold out despite very little press. Meanwhile, The Pumpkins were gaining a reputation as an fantastic live act. By this time, Billy was dating Hole's Courtney Love, and Billy found that a jealous Kurt Cobain, shadowing the Pumpkins as Nirvana's tour also hit Europe, was penning graffiti about the couple on dressing room walls. Billy felt that this album would be good because he believed in it. Billy was right--the Pumpkins would be a hit. Even though they were the best in Chicago, they were not well known around the world. By mid-1992, though, the strain of touring was taking its toil. Jimmy was had turned to drinking, D'Arcy and James - having been an item and then splitting up - finding life in the band intolerable and Billy was slowly going mad. Matters reached a head at the Reading Festival in 1992, when a wigged-out Billy smashed up his equipment during an ill-tempered set. To make things worse, Courtney Love was now married to Kurt Cobain. Dejected, Corgan thought of splitting the Pumpkins. He returned to Chicago, split from his girlfriend, and entered a dark phase of self-reassessment. The pressure was on for a follow-up to Gish, but he couldn't write. And then the inspiration came: "Today is the greatest, days of the year" went the opening lines of the song that dragged him out of the mire. There is a rumor following this, whether true or not, that Billy was suicidal and was holding a gun to his head as he wrote these famous lines. The rumor...probably untrue sheds a different light on the meang of the song though.

       Now early 1993, Corgan shunned his bandmates, went into Triclops Sound Studios in Atlanta, Georgia and recorded the album Siamese Dream again with Butch Vig. If "Gish" revealed glimpses of Billy's curious, compelling world view, then "Siamese Dream" proved he was among the best - and most versatile - songwriters of his generation. Cut during a period when, by his own admission, Billy "wasn't a very nice person" (he insisted on playing virtually everything on the record, bar the drums), the album was a thoroughly modern rock masterpiece, with a raft of nagging melodies, subtle acoustic and string passages, superb arrangements and a violent undertow that bullishly re-staked the Pumpkins' grunge credentials, had they ever been in doubt. While "Silverfuck" was a monumental axe blow-out, the later singles "Disarm" and the dreamy "Today" were sufficiently melodic and immediate to propel them chartwards, their lightness-of-touch providing a sublime counterpoint to other, more visceral crowd pleasers like the indie-scene bashing "Cherub Rock", and "Spaceboy", written for Corgan's younger brother Jesse, who suffered from a genetic disorder. On its completion, Jimmy was checked into rehab, and Billy sought professional psychiatric help, part of a process of spiritual renewal that saw him reuniting with his girlfriend, Chris, getting married to her, and buying a house in Chicago. The immense success of "Siamese Dream" - which reached No. 4 in the summer of 1993 - meant another succession of punishing tours. The album was promoted herewith an acoustic show at Raymonde's Revue Bar in Soho, before the group returned for two shows at Brixton Academy in October, during which Billy took the stage for the encore dressed as a clown. They then jetted out for more overseas dates, including triumphant homecoming gig at the Chicago Avalon, followed by a Christmas break and an appearance in January 1994 at the two-week Big Day Out festival in Australia, with Nirvana, Violent Femmes and Henry Rollins. The group's March 1994 British dates culminating in four :sell-out shows at the London Astoria.

       During that same visit, the group were banned from Top Of The Pops, after refusing to change the line "cut that little child up inside of me" in "Disarm", which had been declared offensive. The Pumpkins didn't care: one thing they were never about was artistic compromise. Between that British tour and the group's - next visit to these shores, to play the Reading Festival in August, an event occurred which had an unfathomable impact on Corgan. In April, Kurt Cobain took his own life, crushed by the contradictions of being a idealistic songwriter caught up in the enormous, cynical machinations of the music business. Corgan refused to discuss Kurt's death, but his death seemed to add a punctuation mark to the dark, self-searching days of grunge. Though Billy had cited "dysfunction" as his chief creative impulse, he now seemed happy and relaxed, chatting to journalists about the therapy he'd had to confront the demons of his childhood. He was still wary of giving too much away, though. "After what happened to Kurt, opening up to the press seems even more ridiculous," he said. After headlining the U.S. touring festival, Lollapalooza, in July (Nirvana had been scheduled to top the bill), the Pumpkins returned to play a blinding get at Reading. With "Siamese Dream" topping critics polls the world over, the Pumpkins retired to Chicago to work on their third album, "Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness".

       Corgan had always been a prolific writer, but his new-found stability seemed to inject him with even more creative energy. Within a few months it became clear that the album was going to be a double, possibly even a triple. (It ended up as a two-CD and three-LP affair.) His paymasters, Virgin, didn't seem to object: "Gish" had sold 350,000 copies while "Siamese Dream" had reached double platinum status; even "Pisces Iscariot" the B-sides collection issued in the States in 1994 and here only last year had peaked at No. 4 in the album charts. Whatever the Pumpkins touched, it was bound to sell. With half of the songs written on piano, and the other half on guitar, "Mellon Collie" ended up with 28 tracks, with an astonishing breath of styles in evidence, from the lush orchestrations of "Beautiful" (which apparently came to Corgan in a dream) to the full-on rush of "Tale Of A Scorched Earth". The album was at its most itchingly intriguing when Billy forsook the guitar pyrotechnics, and Either trundled along with a lo-fi, hypnotic pop sensibility, as on"1979", or experimented with delicate, singer-songwriter arrangements; as on the aching "Farewell And Goodnight", co-written with Iha. In fact, it was by far the Pumpkins' most egalitarian work, with Corgan willingly loosening his creative monopoly. "I want to get the others more involved this time," he'd admitted to Melody Maker. "I want James to sing on some of it and I want D'Arcy to sing. I mean, it will still be my vision, but I want to create surroundings with it that will be conducive to their ideas too." Issued in November 1995, "Mellon Collie" proved that Corgan's vision had been as astute as ever, and the album - produced by Corgan, Flood and Alan Moulder - became their most successful yet, selling over ten million copies to date.

       Yet with the success came the inevitable pressures of touring, and with that, the tragedy of Melvoin's death, and the upset of Chamberlin's dismissal. Perhaps it was the inevitable pay-off for the Pumpkins' astonishing success, the dreadful price of the kind or pressures only fame can bring. The incident occurred during the early hours of 12th July 1996, while the group was in New York to play the first of two sell-out concerts at Madison Square Garden, the scene of triumphant performances down the years by such rock myth-makers as the Rolling Stones, the Who and Prince. Melvoin fatally overdosed on a lethal Combination of alcohol and an exceptionally pure form of heroin, known as 'Red Rum', in his Manhattan hotel room. Chamberlin, who was at the scene, was charged with illegal possession of a controlled substance (a syringe with traces of heroin on it were found in the room), and booked into a special clinic. The incident followed the death two months earlier of a 17-year-old fan, Bernadette O' Brien, crushed in a wild crowd at their otherwise euphoric Dublin concert. It was a terrible time for the group, and Billy Corgan eat back to consider the Pumpkins' plight. Initially, he saw no other option but to await Chamberlin's recovery, and then go straight back out on the toad. But then it dawned on him that there as another option, far harder to take, perhaps, but ultimately more beneficial for his precious group. He phoned the Pumpkins' manager With these instructions: "sack Chamberlin", "The subject [of drugs] gets so romanticised in rock'n'roll I that 'elegantly wasted' thing, James The told Mojo. "But it's totally a disastrous, selfish thing to do. We just couldn't go on that way, trying to get around it. Basically, Jimmy overdosed every time we went on tour. What were we meant to do, lock him in his room every night?"

       On 27th August, the tour restarted in Las Vegas, with replacement drummer Matt Walker (ex-Filter) and keyboardist Dennis Fleming (the Frogs). In September, they returned to New York to play the rescheduled Madison Square Garden dates.This time, the rhythms behind the Pumpkins' incendiary guitar white-outs weren't quite so confident, the understanding between the musicians not so intuitive. But at least the Pumpkins were back where they should have been - at the top. 18 months later, the Smashing Pumpkins have consolidated their post-Chamberlin line up, and have a new album scheduled for 1998. After a fresh mini-album "Zero", including a medley of excerpts from some hew Corgan compositions, and their Contribution to the Batman & Robin soundtrack, the chilling "The End Is The Beginning Is The End" (Teitbite), the future looks bright. In October news broke that Billy had formed a Gary Numan tribute group, the Replicants; though that same month the group were successfully sued over the death of Melvoin. The Smashing Pumpkins are still fighting. Their hard work has paid off in the past and they will continue to struggle as long as they are a band.