Marc ford

Martin Barre MCNIDDER & GRACE

Thirty years after its release, Billy Corgan looks back at the making of The Smashing Pumpkins ’ era-defining big, bold, bombastic masterpiece Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness .

From Black Sabbath awakening to jam band to Hanoi Rocks to decades-straddling solo artist, via Finland, London, NYC and beyond, he’s been up, down and up again, through thrills, spills, triumph and tragedy. You could say he’s really lived the rock’n’roll life, but that would be an understatement.

He turned down Hendrix, butted heads with Lemmy, was saved from a bad trip by Pete Townshend, present at a thousand pop-culture flashpoints… Ten Years After bassist Leo Lyons explains why he’s like “the rock’n’roll Forrest Gump”.

Rival Sons’ frontman on his solo album, songwriting, the call of the wild, storytellers, falling in love, destroying his past…

PETER GABRIEL’S TIME with Genesis in the Seventies — not to mention his early-Eighties musings as a solo artist — had granted him a reputation as a musical maverick who merged modern prog with all sor