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BILLY CORGAN is to make a cameo appearance as a wig-wearing doctor in video director JONAS ACKERLUND's debut movie.

Corgan, who wrote the film's soundtrack at the request of Ackerlund, requested a role in 'Spun' in return for providing the music.

"We had worked together before many times, so I gave him the script because I wanted to see what he thought about it," Ackerlund said. "And he came back and said, 'I'll do the music.' So I said, 'OK.' But he had one condition. He wanted a role in the movie, so he's got a brief scene where he's this doctor under this wig."

Ackerlund added that Corgan's music was essential to the film, which stars John Leguizamo, Mickey Rourke, Brittany Murphy and Debbie Harry. "His music really added to the overall impression. The weaknesses I have in the film, he helped with his music."

The director also criticised MTV for failing to support new music: "It's harder than ever to be different and get your video on MTV. MTV was supposed to be, like, this new media, showing new bands breaking through, but now advertising is running it."

Corgan's new outfit Zwan make their UK debut at London Shepherds Bush Empire on February 12, following the release of their 'Mary Star Of The Sea' album on January 28.

article courtesy of www.nme.com.

PARK CITY, Utah -- Jonas Akerlund wanted an opinion and landed a composer.

Akerlund, one of the most sought after and visually distinctive music video helmers of the past decade, was considering making Spun his feature-film debut, though he passed the script onto friend and former Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan.

"We had worked together before many times, so I gave him the script because I wanted to see what he thought about it. And he came back and said, 'I'll do the music.' So I said, 'OK.'

"But he had one condition. He wanted a role in the movie, so he's got a brief scene where he's this doctor under this wig."

Corgan ethereal sonic landscape has been winning praise as a haunting juxtaposition to the graphic drug-induced horrors depicted on screen.

"His music really added to the overall impression. The weaknesses I have in the film, he helped with his music."

Akerlund says he hasn't quit shooting videos, although he says breaking new ground with them has become virtually impossible.

"It's harder than ever to be different and get your video on MTV. MTV was supposed to be like, this new media, showing new bands breaking through, but now advertising is running it."

article courtesy of www.blamo.org.

By ROBERT EVERETT-GREEN Thursday, January 23, 2003 – Page R5

Mary Star of the Sea - Zwan Reprise (Warner) Rating: ***

The rock industry is so full of geezers living from the avails of their youth that any millionaire veteran who chooses to do otherwise is deemed crazy or brave or both. Crafty might be a better term for Billy Corgan, whose new band Zwan may be almost as well-positioned for success in the zero years as the Smashing Pumpkins was in the nineties.

It would have been easy for this prolific writer, singer and guitarist to invite some friends into a studio, throw a dozen new songs at them, and call it a band. Instead, Corgan and four partners (guitarists Matt Sweeney and David Pajo, bassist Paz Lenchantin, and Pumpkins drummer Jimmy Chamberlin) holed up in a small Chicago club and spent months working out a new sound, the way people do with their very first groups.

These labours, guided by some careful strategic thinking, have produced a debut album (out next Tuesday) whose sunny pop outlook couldn't be more unlike the Pumpkins' melodramatic gloom. If the world was a vampire for Corgan in his first incarnation, it's more like a teddy bear now.

Of course, nobody in his 30s can bring his old teddy down from the attic without some bittersweet feeling. These songs bear the stains of experience, though in each case, light prevails over darkness. Settle Down kisses off the emotional homelessness of adolescence with a promise to "never lose that feeling," while basking in a blissful tangle of polyphonic guitars. The single Honestly throws aside relational game-playing for a big pop affirmation that suggests Corgan paid close attention to U2's monstrously successful Beautiful Day,and to the Red Hot Chili Peppers' recent discovery of sincerity.

El Sol and Endless Summer are luminous evocations of the season of no worries, though the past tense separates El Sol from the perpetual present of true summer pop. Baby Let's Rock launches a well-tooled party tune from a hornet-buzz instrumental introduction, though even here there's room for mature second thought. "Baby, I'm the greatest thing you've got," Corgan sings in his odd Jaggerish yowl, "in a good way, I hope."

This is a tight, intricately layered album, with few of the fat solo breaks or epic song forms characteristic of the Pumpkins. The exception is Jesus, I/Mary Star of the Sea, a 14-minute ramble that feels like an almost unwilled breakout from the pressurized order of everything else. It can also be read as a straight profession of Christian faith, which may cast light on Corgan's album alias, "Billy Burke," which is also the name of a prominent Florida evangelist.

The DVD portion of this double-disc set offers a desultory program of video footage and live-performance clips, with one-minute responses from each band member to the question, "What is Zwan?" "Music being our King," answers Corgan in his best hungry-pilgrim manner, "we're just serfs, looking for a wave we can ride for a while." Who but a rock star could get from Calvary to Malibu in one sentence?

article courtesy of www.blamo.org.

Clark Street feels like the epicenter of the rock world this week, with Billy Corgan's latest band, Zwan, on stage with something to prove at a sold-out Metro for five shows.

Corgan's never been accused of making small plans, and Sunday his ambitions were evident, greeted with full-throated enthusiasm by an audience that sounded like it had been waiting for this moment since the singer's old band, the Smashing Pumpkins, fell silent in December 2000. He's got the artillery in place for another, Pumpkins-like push: a record label, Reprise, with a new president hungry to make amends after the previous regime let one of its best bands, Wilco, get away; a high-profile manager in Elliot Roberts, who has overseen Neil Young's career for three decades; and a new band of accomplices, plus one crucial holdover in drummer Jimmy Chamberlin, that is versatile and muscular enough to go toe-to-toe with any of today's rock giants.

Zwan fit a stadium-size sound into the 1,100-capacity club, and for anyone who appreciates the roar of guitar-bass-drums rock it was a night to celebrate.

The band's debut release, "Mary Star of the Sea," is still a week away, but Corgan and Zwan were already in some ways looking beyond it.

article courtesy of the chicago tribune

The Smashing Pumpkins' last official studio album, Machina: The Machines of God, opened with the line, "You know I'm not dead."

What a difference two years make.

The first verse former Pumpkins' leader Billy Corgan sings on the debut from his new band, Zwan, Mary Star of the Sea (January 28), immediately sets a more positive tone. "Lyric" blasts off with the line, "Here comes my faith to carry me on," as Corgan's voice is shadowed by bass player Paz Lenchantin's while former Pumpkin Jimmy Chamberlin drives the rhythm with jazzy torrents of drumming. The song ends with, "A lyric, a time, a crusade, a line/ One minute, a friend, a road without end."

The sunnier tone is just one of the significant changes made by Corgan, as well known for his ferocious guitar-playing and singing as for his singular musical vision. Less than a year after the Pumpkins' swan song, Corgan had already assembled the initial lineup of Zwan, which reunites him with powerful drummer Chamberlin, and adds former Chavez guitarist Matt Sweeney and former Tortoise bassist/guitarist Dave Pajo into the mix. In April they were joined by classically-trained cellist and bassist Lenchantin, a onetime member of A Perfect Circle.

The formidable three-guitar lineup of the band is one of two significant changes from the Pumpkins. The other is Sweeney and Lenchantin's strong backing vocals, which give the group a richer sound than the Pumpkins, whose vocal attack was nearly all Corgan's. The results are clear on the band's first single, "Honestly."

The straightforward rock song features a syncopated drum rhythm from Chamberlin and some airy, chiming psychedelic guitar lines, as well as seamless vocal interplay between Corgan and Lenchantin. The simple lyric about love, "I believe you mean the best that life can bring/ I believe in it all, honestly/ You can try, your heart is just as long as mine/ Is it ours to let go?" is more hopeful than much of the darker material from the Pumpkins' later albums. The video for the song was partially filmed at the Integration, a mystical "rejuvenation and time machine" building erected in Joshua Tree, California, in the mid-50's by George Van Tassel, a former test pilot for Howard Hughes and host of annual UFO conventions.

The "Honestly" single will feature two bonus cuts, a cover of the Iron Maiden classic "Number of the Beast" and the non-album track, "Freedom Ain't What It Used to Be."

While Corgan's lyrics for the Smashing Pumpkins were often concerned with the search for transcendence, spirituality and love in dark hours, his Zwan lyrics are even more focused on messianic visions of love, but with a more uplifting vibe. Corgan is billed as "Billy Burke" in the album's liner notes, a possible reference to a golden-haired Florida preacher of the same name, which gives the songs an evangelical feel.

But more than a preacher, Corgan acts as a spiritual cheerleader on tracks such as the swirling, psychedelic power pop song "Declarations of Faith," in which he sings, "I declare myself/ Declare myself of faith."

Whether or not the inside joke billing is religious in nature, Corgan clearly has salvation and tribute-paying on his mind. He gives a nod to his lifelong heroes, New Order, on the bouncy, new wave-y "Settle Down" and "El Sol." Again driven by the combination of Chamberlin's aggressive drumming and Lenchantin's throbbing bass line, "Settle Down" is another ode to devotion, sprinkled with the kind of wailing, fuzzed-out guitar lines familiar to fans of the Pumpkins' 1993 breakthrough, Siamese Dream.

The hard-driving, mythological "Ride a Black Swan" and Zeppelin-esque "Endless Summer" verge on classic arena rock, with their combination of distorted guitars and aggressive drumming. "Baby Let's Rock!" lets Corgan exorcise his Queen jones, with a funky backbeat, squiggly guitars and soaring, multi-tracked, angelic choruses.

The dreamy ballads "Of a Broken Heart" and "Heartsong" are classic Corgan tales of romantic woe, the former flavored with weepy slide guitar and cello, while in the latter Corgan slyly admits, "I use the same words to say the same things."

Corgan keeps his more grandiose side in check until near the end of the album, at which point he unleashes the 14-minute religious epic, "Jesus, I/ Mary Star of the Sea." The song begins with just Corgan's nasally vocals ("Jesus, I've taken my cross/ All to leave and follow thee") over a repeating guitar line, then explodes into a kaleidoscopic barrage of guitar solos. The solemn middle section leads into a majestic coda for an archetypal Corgan rock song of redemption, in which salvation is found in the character of a female savior.

Zwan are in the midst of celebrating the album's release with a sold-out, five-night stand at Corgan's favorite hometown haunt, the 1,100-capacity Metro in Chicago. Zwan took to the stage of the club on Sunday and Monday nights and will continue their residency with shows on Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday, according to the venue's owner.

The group played a three-night stand at the Metro's cross-town sister club, the Double Door, in April of last year. This week's shows mark the first time Corgan has returned to rock the Metro stage since he laid the Pumpkins to rest there with a cathartic, three-hour show in December 2000 (see "Pumpkins Circus Folds Up With Epic Show"). (He was part of a multi-artist benefit show last year during which he performed solo).

Following the Chicago shows, Zwan will jet over to Japan for four early February dates and then finish out the month in Europe with shows in Paris, London, Hamburg, Berlin, Milan, Lisbon and Madrid.

—Gil Kaufman

article courtesy of www.mtv.com.