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The Smashing Pumpkins responds to D'arcy Wretzky's exclusion claims
Contradicting claims are made by former band members.
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The Smashing Pumpkins pose with their award for Best Video of the Year at the MTV Video Music Awards at Radio City Music Hall in New York City in September 2004. The Smashing Pumpkins won a total of seven awards. (AFP/Susan Farley)
A
classic lineup reunion of The Smashing Pumpkins may not come to pass after all. With two days left on a countdown clock on the group’s website, the band responded to exclusion claims from former bassist D’arcy Wretzky.
“In reuniting The Smashing Pumpkins, the band’s dedication remains to its fans and its music,” read the statement issued by BB Gun Press. “To that, James Iha, Jimmy Chamberlin, and William Corgan haven’t played a show with D’arcy Wretzky for over 18 years. But it’s not for a lack of trying. For despite reports, Ms. Wretzky has repeatedly been invited out to play with the group, participate in demo sessions, or at the very least, meet face-to-face, and in each and every instance she always deferred. We wish her all the best, and look forward to reconnecting with you all very soon.”
Read also: Smashing Pumpkins Corgan sets stripped back solo album
Previously, Wretzky’s statements in interviews and social media posts showed her eagerness to rejoin the band for the first time since she left in 1999. “I was really looking forward to it—probably more than all the guys combined,” she wrote in a comment on her Facebook page.
According to Pitchfork, Wretzky recently told BlastEcho that she’d expressed an interest in “be[ing] a band again” to Billy Corgan. She claimed he told her they would “find the right way to have you involved,” but later took back that offer, and said the other members didn’t want to reunite with her.
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The Smashing Pumpkins have not yet officially announced their reunion, though Corgan has numerous times posted the band working together on Instagram.
If indeed they are making an album, it would be the first Smashing Pumpkins LP with Iha since Machina II/The Friends & Enemies of Modern Music (2000). (wen/kes)
