Splitting Pumpkins

Despite transcending internal upheavals and personnel difficulties, despite the mass adulation for their streamlined, occasionally beautiful, spiteful Gothic metal (including Siamese Dream, Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness, Adore and Machina/The Machiness of God). Smashing Pumpkins will be splitting up as soon as they head hack to America. This will surely be of no comfort to their record label, but lovers of the band can worship at the foot of new downloadable material on the internet (Machina II/Freinds & Enemies of Modern Music; visit: www.spfc.org). Smashing Pumpkins play Dublin's Olympia theatre on Monday, a gig considered by many not just their last gig on this tour (titled The Sacred and the Profane) but quite possibly their last ever. You want tickets? Tough luck - it sold out weeks ago.