Live review · Montreal · Centre Bell

Thirty Years Later, The Smashing Pumpkins Open the Mellon Collie Time Capsule, and It Is Still Loud

Two sets, thirty songs and a double album that shaped my teenage years, played in a building that holds twenty thousand people. On the Rats in a Cage tour’s only Quebec night, Billy Corgan turned Centre Bell into a stage play about 1995.

By Axel CalderonOctober 9, 2026Photos and video: Axel Calderon / TNR

A night built like a play

When the band announced this tour, Corgan said a Mellon Collie show was something they had talked about for more than a decade, and that they would only do it on their own terms. Now I understand what he meant. This was not a greatest hits night with a nod to an anniversary. It was a show in two acts: the first one for Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, staged like theatre, and the second for everything else, a set that changes from city to city.

The stage was dark, framed by a huge screen, and when it lit up it was filled with a towering robed figure in acid yellow and violet, the kind of image that looks like it walked straight out of the album’s artwork. Corgan in black, guitar low, under all that colour. From my place on the floor, it looked like a cathedral built for one record.

Shot on my phone

TNR

Set one: the album, from the inside

They went straight for the throat with “1979” and “Bullet With Butterfly Wings”, two songs most bands would save for the end. Then came the part I was really there for: the songs that never get played in arenas. “Cupid de Locke”, “Porcelina of the Vast Oceans”, “Jellybelly”, “Bodies”, “Galapogos”, “Thirty-Three”. Hearing “Porcelina” grow and grow in a room this size is something I did not think I would ever get to do.

“Tonight, Tonight” landed exactly in the middle of the set, and it felt like the whole building took a breath at the same time. After it, the heavy side of the record: “Here Is No Why”, “To Forgive”, “Fuck You (An Ode to No One)”, “Zero”, “Muzzle”. They closed the first act with “By Starlight” and the album’s title track, the quiet piano piece that opens the record, turned here into the curtain falling.

“It felt like a cathedral built for one record, and for the whole first act, all of us were inside it.”

From the floor, set one

From the floor, set two

Set two: hits, rarities and a few surprises

The second act opened with “Machina, Machina” and “Sojourner”, a reminder that this band’s catalogue goes much deeper than the singles. Then “Edin” and “Pentagrams” before the turn everybody was waiting for: “Disarm” and “Ava Adore”, back to back, the two songs a whole arena knows by heart.

From there it was a run through their best years: “War Dreams of Itself”, “Mayonaise”, “As Rome Burns”, “Today” and “Cherub Rock”, the riff that started it all for so many of us. They finished with “Jesus Is the Sun”, “The Everlasting Gaze” and “Superchrist”, ending on noise and distortion instead of a ballad. A Smashing Pumpkins way to say goodnight.

Setlist: setlist.fm. Tour details: Blabbermouth.