Billy Corgan playing Wembley Arena in 2018 Credit: Burak Cingi On September 4 1992, the British music paper Melody Maker ran a live review of The Smashing Pumpkins’ hometown show at the Metro, in Chicago, in which the then-influential writer Everett True called Billy Corgan, the band’s singer and songwriter, “a media slut [and] a corporate whore in the lowest and most pitifully sycophantic way.” He went on to say that Corgan “doesn’t have a trace of originality, of poetry, of soul inside of him. He is all smugness, all knowing steals and money-grabbing finesse. He is an irritation – a minor one, but one which grows with each passing sales figure.”