Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan on why New Order’s “alien quality” landed with Generation X in America

The Smashing Pumpkins‘ Billy Corgan has appeared on a podcast that charts the history of New Order, where he explains why the band’s “alien quality” landed with Generation X in the US.

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In the latest episode of Transmissions: The Definitive Story of Joy Division & New Order, released yesterday (September 19), host Maxine Peake focused on how the band’s first-ever US tour in 1980 came to be. Corgan chimes in to contextualise the unique connection British music sparked with the Gen Xers who were coming of age.

Describing a generation of “latchkey kids” who had “too much TV” and “too much time alone”, the “alien quality” of bands like New Order began to resonate.

“Bands like New Order seem to find that, ‘Yes, you’re young, Yes, you wanna fall in love and ‘es, you’re having your heart broken, but the world kind of isn’t the way it appears to be,'” he elaborates.

Listen to the podcast episode below, which also features anecdotes from techno producer Kevin Saunderson and writers Andrew O’Hagan and Audrey Golden, along with interviews with current and former band members Bernard Sumner, Stephen Morris, Gillian Gilbert and Peter Hook.

A band like New Order, he continues, signified to kids like Corgan that “there was this other world out there that was cooler, had more depth of feel, had a level of sophistication even about teenage angst, that you certainly weren’t getting from America, particularly in the rock scene in the 80s.”

He likened discovering New Order as a teenager to feeling like “the kid who sits in the back of the class because ‘nobody understands me and I got my weird trench coat'” from a typical John Hughes movie.

“The minute you heard New Order, you were like, ‘They’re one of me’ or ‘I’m one of them’. It was instant,” he says.

Just this week, former New Order bassist Hook was seen performing the band’s 1981 single ‘Procession’ with Cold Cave’s Wesley Eisold. The veteran musician will tour the UK with his band Peter Hook & the Light in 2025 to perform the band’s 2001 album ‘Get Ready’ in full.

Meanwhile, New Order are prepping a deluxe box set reissue of their 1986 album ‘Brotherhood’, due for release on November 22.

The reissue includes a vinyl LP of the original album, as well as two CDs — one featuring a re-mastered version of the original album and one containing nine unreleased tracks and demos from a 1985 recording session in Japan.

Fans will also have access to two DVDs with TV appearances, including a 1987 performance on Top Of The Pops, and live sets from Brixton Academy in 1987, G-Mex in Manchester in 1986 and Glastonbury in 1987, among others.

The band have also included 12″ singles of hits ‘Bizarre Love Triangle’ ‘State of the Nation’ and ‘Touched by the Hand of God’.

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