One of the great lost treasures in the current musical landscape is the band who were great at B-sides. It was an art form that just doesn’t exist anymore – “they’re such a great Bonus Tracks band!” just doesn’t cut it. Some groups were such masters of the format that albums collating their B-sides are up there with their best – think Oasis’s The Masterplan, Suede’s Sci-Fi Lullabies, The Smith’s Hatful Of Hollow, Nirvana’s Incesticide.
That’s a list for another day, though. Here we are honing in on the best Smashing Pumpkins B-sides with a few outtakes thrown in for good measure. The Pumpkins, of course, had their own imperious B-sides album in 1994’s Pisces Iscariot but were on such a profusely creative run during that decade that they could’ve had a few more. To avoid repeating what is already regarded as a classic, I’ll avoid anything that features on Pisces Iscariot on this list of the ten best Pumpkins B-sides and outtakes (songs included on the Mellon Collie…-era B-sides collection The Aeroplane Flies High are available for inclusion, I don’t want to snooker myself too drastically).
