30.07.2024 at Parco della Musica, Segrate (Mi)

At the end of July I finally saw The Smashing Pumpkins live in Milan, my first time experiencing a band I have admired for so long. It felt both strange and inevitable: their music has been with me in fragments for years, always orbiting around my listening habits, never quite center stage, and yet deeply familiar. Seeing them on stage was a reminder of how enduring certain sounds can be, and how much of ourselves we tie to the bands we admire from afar.

As a teenager, what first drew me in wasn’t only the distortion or Billy Corgan’s voice, but the bassist. She was the only female bass player I knew at the time, and that image left a mark. For someone whose bass-player myth has always been Paul McCartney, the presence of a woman on that same instrument felt like a door cracked open. I didn’t fully realize it then, but it gave me permission to picture myself holding a bass without it feeling out of place.

The concert itself was a wall of sound, dark and luminous at the same time, with the kind of drama you expect from the Pumpkins but also moments of “softness” (the cover of take my breath away by Berlin was an unexpected yet absurd yet an interesting-choice moment) that carried me straight back to teenage afternoons spent with headphones. I left with ears ringing, but more than that, with the satisfaction of having closed a small circle: the band I once looked at from the outside was finally there in front of me, and I was part of their audience.

Setlist

Glass’ Theme
Heavy Metal Machine
Where Boys Fear to Tread
Pentagrams
Today
Edin
Bullet With Butterfly Wings
Muzzle
1979
Porcelina of the Vast Oceans
Sighommi
Mayonaise
Take My Breath Away (Berlin cover)
999
Disarm
Tonight, Tonight
Cherub Rock
Jellybelly
If There Is a God
Bodies
Ava Adore
Stand Inside Your Love
Zero
The Everlasting Gaze
(tour debut; preceded by a tease of Black Sabbath’s “N.I.B.”)