Smashing Pumpkins Mellon Collie Tour Opens With Rarities Unplayed for Decades

The Smashing Pumpkins Mellon Collie tour got under way on 30 September with a setlist that read less like a greatest-hits victory lap and more like an archaeologist’s field report, pulling songs from the vaults that hadn’t been heard live in anywhere between 15 and 30-plus years.

The opening night of the Rats in a Cage tour, celebrating the belated 30th anniversary of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, furnished exactly the kind of obsessive fan service Billy Corgan had implied was coming. ‘Fuck You (An Ode to No One)’ hadn’t been performed since 2007, while both ‘Cupid de Locke’ and ‘Galapagos’ had been absent from setlists for 18 years. ‘By Starlight’ hadn’t been aired since 2010. That alone would constitute a generous evening’s work for any band willing to excavate their back catalogue so thoroughly.

Live Debuts and Long-Bootlegged Rarities

The second set pressed further still. ‘Machina, Machina’, drawn from Machina II/The Friends & Enemies of Modern Music, received its live debut, as did ‘Sojourner’ from the 2023 rock opera ATUM. Neither had previously been staged, which places them in a different category of rarity entirely, not songs the band played and then retired, but songs that had never crossed over from record to stage at all.

The Gish-era ‘Jesus Is the Sun’ is a case unto itself: long circulating on bootleg recordings, it wasn’t officially released until 2021. Hearing it performed live carries a particular charge for anyone who spent years tracking down a clean copy on a cassette dub. Also in the mix was ‘As Rome Burns’, which has never appeared on a studio record and was last performed on the Pumpkins’ 2008 and 2010 tours.

Frontman Billy Corgan had set expectations with characteristic deliberateness. ‘Staging a Mellon Collie-themed show is something we’ve discussed for over a decade, and finally the stars have aligned and exactly on the terms I’d set,’ he said previously. He also flagged that ‘there’s a decent amount of variance as to what songs we’ll play from night to night’, which suggests subsequent dates may yield their own surprises.

The Smashing Pumpkins Mellon Collie Tour Line-Up and Dates

Corgan is joined onstage by James Iha on guitar and Jimmy Chamberlin on drums, the rhythm section that anchored the original Mellon Collie sessions, alongside guitarist Kiki Wong and bassist Jack Bates. The combination of original members and newer collaborators reflects where the band has operated across much of the last decade, though the presence of Iha and Chamberlin gives the anniversary shows a genuine ceremonial weight.

Rats in a Cage continues through to 12 November, closing at Kia Forum in Los Angeles. Two days later the Pumpkins are scheduled to appear at the Darker Waves festival in Huntington Beach, California, on a bill that also includes Morrissey, Simple Minds and the Psychedelic Furs.

New Butch Vig Recording ‘Coming Out Soon’

The tour announcement sits alongside a piece of news that will interest anyone with a stake in what the Pumpkins do next rather than what they did in 1995. In a recent interview with 98 Rock Sacramento, Corgan revealed that the band had recently logged studio time with Gish and Siamese Dream producer Butch Vig for the first time in 33 years, and that one of the recordings is ‘coming out soon.’

Consequence has reported that the track is ‘98% done’ and is expected to arrive this year. Meanwhile, 98KUPD reports that the unnamed song was recorded for a ‘specific purpose’ and is due later in 2026.

What that specific purpose might be is unspecified, but a reunion with Vig, the producer most closely associated with the band’s early sonic identity, that compressed, layered guitar sound that made Siamese Dream feel both enormous and intimate, is not a trivial gesture. Whether the resulting material gestures back toward that era or represents something else entirely will only become clear when it surfaces. The Rats in a Cage run provides the context in which any such release would land: an audience already primed for nostalgia, but being offered something a little more complicated than a simple anniversary celebration.