Billy Corgan: “When I heard New Order I thought, ‘I’m one of them'”

Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins was a guest on the podcast ‘Transmissions: The Definitive Story of Joy Division & NewOrder’ led by Maxine Peake which traces the history of the New Order and focused on 1980, when the English band embarked on its first tour of the United States.

Corgan contextualized the connection to the British music of Generation X that was coming of age.

Describing a generation of kids with keys who watched “too much TV” and spent “too much time alone,” they empathized with the “alien quality” of bands like New Order. “Bands like New Order made you realize, ‘Yeah, you’re young, yeah, you want to fall in love, you’re getting your heart broken, but the world isn’t what it seems.'”

The frontman of the
Smashing Pumpkins
continues by saying that a band like the
New Order
to guys like
Billy Corgan
they explained that “there was this other world out there that was cooler, that had more depth of feeling, that had a level of sophistication even about teenage angst, that you certainly couldn’t get from America, particularly in the ’80s rock scene.”

Corgan compared the discovery of the
New Order
as a teenager to the feeling of being “The kid who sits at the back of the class because ‘nobody understands me and I’m wearing my weird raincoat’ from a John Hughes movie. The moment you heard New Order, you thought, ‘They’re one of me’ or ‘I’m one of them’. It was immediate.”