Happy 25th birthday to Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness. "Mad, mercurial and massively indulgent" (as I described it earlier this week), Smashing Pumpkins' third record is a magnum opus in every sense, a double album that I got happily lost in for about six months and continue to love in all its endless, ridiculous glory - despite all that has happened since.
With the benefit of hindsight, the record was a heavy hint of things to come: the "insufferable" Billy Corgan losing grip of any degree of quality control and descending further into egomania, among other things releasing an eight-hour-long adaptation of Herman Hesse's Siddhartha (first performed in his Chicago tea shop Madame Zuzu's) as a box set for $375 and comparing "social justice warriors" to the KKK in conversation with that paragon of common sense Alex Jones.
So Corgan's announcement that the band will be marking the anniversary by releasing a 33-track concept album next year - following hot on the heels of another double album, CYR, due out at the end of November - doesn't really come as much of a surprise. Needless to say, I won't be buying it. Far better just to revisit the original and try to pretend the last quarter of a century didn't happen.
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