Billy Corgan’s favourite Black Sabbath album: “Heavier than God”
Among the wieldy array of genre stylings that Smashing Pumpkins took their fancy to, from their dreamy-grunge beginnings to the dystopian tech silliness of 2000’s Machina/The Machines of God and across their double LP, musical smorgasbord magnum-opus Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, there’s always been a potent dose of heavy metal consistently bubbling away among their work, even hovering over their ‘comeback’ tours and recent LPs.
Frontman and songwriter Billy Corgan is still a metalhead fanboy when reflecting on the movement’s importance to him. “For the most part, musicality is really embraced in heavy metal. A lot of us ’alt people’ have stolen vigorously from that musicality,” Corgan told Artist Direct.
He continued: “Then, of course, those guys go and name-check Radiohead as their influence and they fail to mention Mercyful Fate—it’s a band that makes his list with their album Melissa an album which nearly severed friendships! This album so freaked out the drummer in my high school band that he forbid me to listen to it in his presence. Super prog.”
All metal roads lead to one Brummie gang who, while they have the debatable claim of ‘inventing’ heavy metal, certainly perfected it and established its enduring aesthetic and sonic identity. “If you think of quintessential Smashing Pumpkins, that’s the sound, I make no bones about it. I got it straight from Black Sabbath.”
It’s quite a statement from Corgan to credit his Siamese Dream heydey with imitating Tony Iommi’s fretwork. With such an affection for Black Sabbath and their classic run of albums, you’d think picking a ‘best’ would be like selecting a favourite child.
Discussing his favourite heavy metal albums to MusicRadar, Corgan opted for 1973’s Sabbath Bloody Sabbath: “Creepy, spooky, and heavier than God in brief, fleeting moments. This album always makes me think of the soundtrack Sabbath would make to a final day on Earth.”
Corgan delved further into his love for the band’s fifth LP to Wall of Sound: “In about ’74, ’75, Tony starts to take this kind of artistic turn. It’s almost an alternative Sabbath, if you really look at it. And I think that’s why Sabbath has so much street cred with alternative musicians, rappers, and stuff like that. There’s this other Sabbath. ‘Cause early Sabbath is more bluesy, heavy, doomy, but somewhere in there, it starts to get really out there, and that’s the Sabbath I love the most.”
Sabbath Bloody Sabbath is their most confident LP, at odds with the record’s genesis. Burnt out and blitzed on cocaine off touring Vol. 4, and Iommi suffering from writer’s block, the sessions were plagued with fractious beginnings. In need of inspiration, the band decamped to Gloucestershire’s Clearwell Castle for some arcane energy and Iommi credits its dungeon’s spectral energy with guiding the album’s title track’s gargantuan riff, establishing the rest of the sessions’ creative direction.
An essential entry in Sabbath’s impressive run and just before the magic started to ebb, frontman Ozzy Osbourne would reflect in his 2009 autobiography: “Our last truly great album, I think… And with the music we’d managed to strike just the right balance between our old heaviness and our new, ‘experimental’ side.”
