The Smashing Pumpkins will kick off their co-headlining tour with Marilyn Manson this week on July 7 in Concord, California. Prior to arranging the tour, Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan hadn't spoken to Manson in several years. Then the pair ran into each other in Berlin, and Manson had an idea.
"We started talking and he said we should really do some shows together and it just seemed really natural," Corgan tells ABC Radio. "We'd sort of fallen back into our old friendship which had been sort of set aside for a while, and we've been in touch essentially every day since. It's great to have him back in my life as a friend and somebody I really respect as an artist."
That reignited friendship will be represented on stage. Following full sets from both bands, Corgan and Manson will play a few songs together to close out the show.
"We want to present unity in spirit and that ultimately it's music that brings us together," says Corgan.
"Unity in spirit" will be one theme on the tour, but it won't be the only one.
"The tour smells like danger," Corgan says. "That's why people go to see rock shows. I don't mean danger like somebody's going to die, of course, we want every one to have a good time. But we still represent something counterculture that actually means something, where every other facet of counterculture has been appropriated by people who don't give a s**t about counterculture."
Part of that danger comes from the trek's official title: The End Times tour.
"From a biblical perspective we basically are in the 'end times,' a lot of what's going on seems to be alluded to in the Bible," Corgan tells ABC Radio. "Does it mean it's the actual 'end times'? No, but it sounds good. And honestly I've said for years that if there was a band to play during the apocalypse it would be the Pumpkins, and I guess you could add Manson to that bill. So we are the bill for the apocalypse."
The bill is also one populated by two icons of the '90s, but Corgan beleives that he and Manson share one key difference from the rest of the bands of their generation.
"I think we're both proud of the fact that we still have something to say," Corgan says. "It's been a good many years that we're out there, and there aren't a lot of us left. Which is surprising, because you see where people have been going on forever now into their 70s, and yet when we look at our generation there really aren't a lot of viable people left. They either dropped off the radar or they just play the same music to where they become irrelevant."
Copyright © 2015, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.