Article by: SPfreaks
Update by Arthur van Pelt
Sourced by Now News (Shi-Jie Lin), China Times, CTS, The Liberty Times & Apple Daily
Additional translations, material & photo by Ed & Geng Hao
Our long time friend and contributor of SPfreaks.com Ed reports, in his unique English style, from Taiwan, where Smashing Pumpkins kicked off the Twinkle Rock Festival last night in Taipei at the Taipei World Trade Center (Hall 2).
‘2012 Twinkle Rock Festival’ running from 10th started by The Smashing Pumpkins to kick off the 2012 show, members including lead singer Billy Corgan, drummer Michael William Byrne, bassist Nicole Fiorentino, and guitarist Jeff Schroeder. They not only got numerous awards such as Grammy, their albums hit breakthrough astonishing sales record of 30 million globally.
Chicago band Smashing Pumpkins was extremely popular back in ’90s, recently they launched a new album and world tour also, they had a concert in Taiwan last night for the first time.
It seems the group members had done homework about attractions of Taiwan before they came, right after their arrival on 9th, they immediately asked to go to Shihlin Night Market, some fans followed the group all the way asking autograph, the group members done whatever fans asked happily.
In the night market, the four members had a happy time nibbling lots of Taiwanese snacks including ‘wonton noodles’ and dumplings. Billy enjoyed a variety of ‘Jianbao’, he took pics right after he found ‘stinky tofu’, he posted to Twitter immediately and said it’s so delicious. Michael was willing to try to eat ‘pig’s blood cake’, ‘pie enfolding small pancake’, ‘pearl milk tea’, sausages and other snacks, and also diligent in shopping and spent all NT$ he had.
Before the concert, Nicole went to ‘Longshan Temple’ to worship, in addition to experience Taiwanese style, and also prayed for the concert to be successfully.
Last night concert, lead singer Billy Corgan no longer go the dark route, he led the three young members to re-light power of life, mixed with new album tracks and familiar old songs that led fans to return to the golden age of 90s music, just like a enthusiastic rock feast and it brought great joy to the audience.
The group performed a total of 22 songs (or 21?). Billy’s special voice remains the same with opening ‘Zero’, after 2nd song “Bullet…”, he pointed to the audience and forced to split, this caused wholehearted screams everywhere. The 3rd song “Today” is their classic that led the fans through time tunnel back to ’90s. After 4th song “Luna” finished, Billy said ‘thank you’. When the prelude of ‘1979’ appeared, the whole audience were caught in madness again, the superb performance shook & turned the scene, all fans got totally high. If memory is well, they did not perform Stand Inside Your Love but it was on the setlist.
The group will leave and fly to next stop South Korea this noon.
Last night the box office was not as expected, only sold 30% (about 2,000 audience), the organizer ‘Very Aspect’ feel discouraged, they worried that if Taiwan concert market continue to slump, the industry no longer willing to bear the risk of performances of foreign artists to come to Taiwan, this no doubt is a great loss to local fans. On a side note I think ‘Very Aspect’ didn’t promote the concert good enough, I didn’t know it either ’til several weeks ago when I saw the promo flyer.
By the way, I went to Bob Dylan Taipei concert last Apr., that night later lots of concert video clips were uploaded to YouTube, but soon all were removed by some kind of ‘web cop’ next day morning, same happened to The Eagles/Santana/… Taipei concert clips, so perhaps you guys would like to download these Smashing Pumpkins Taipei clips before they disappear.
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