Billy Corgan expects a “magical” final concert from Black Sabbath.
The Smashing Pumpkins frontman is on the bill for the ‘Paranoid’ band’s farewell gig at Villa Park in Birmingham in July and is honoured to be sharing the stage with the Ozzy Osbourne-fronted rockers as they are his “favourite” group of all time.
Speaking to NME, Billy said: “Black Sabbath are my favourite all-time band in my heart. I’ve loved Sabbath since I was a kid. I’ve gotten to work with Tony (Iommi) on a solo album, and I’ve been around Ozzy many times.
“I’m just in total awe to be involved. When that line-up came out, I couldn’t help but be like, ‘Wow, I can’t believe I’m a part of this, this is so cool’.
“It’s going to be magical. There’s so much love out there for Ozzy. It all comes together on this one magical night. It’s what rock ‘n’ roll is supposed to be about.
“That’s kinda what I was harping about: it’s ultimately a celebration rather than, ‘Let’s talk about what happened in 1972’.”
Billy has recently launched his new podcast ‘The Magnificent Others’, where he talks in-depth to music legends such as KISS lead singer Gene Simmons, and explained that Sir Paul McCartney would be his dream guest.
The 57-year-old musician said: “I would certainly love to interview Paul McCartney. If you saw the series that Rick Rubin did with Paul (‘McCartney 3, 2, 1’) where they listened to Beatles tracks and talked about it, you see there’s so much incredible information that’s still there in this great history of 50-60 years of making music.
“But people tend to go towards all the low-hanging fruit and talk about his relationship with John (Lennon) or something, and I just think there’s so much that still hasn’t been covered.
“I would be happy to talk, even if we just talked about the last 20 years of music instead of the first 40. There’s a lot to be discussed there.”