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Singer Billy Corgan says of their debut British hit 'Disarm' - "It's me coming to terms with cats, dogs, chickens, people and rock!"
Spoken like a man who's been asked that question a few too many times already, perhaps? In another source, Corgan is quoted as saying that he wrote this song as an alternative to killing his parents. For the record, the Pumpkins had already had a Top 40 hit with 'Cherub Rock' and two other singles had made the Top 75 - but this was certainly a big breakthrough and indeed only two of their singles ever got higher than this. They did establish a solid enough run of hits to give the lie to the received notion that Britpop killed off grunge commercially (and yes, I know some people would dispute that the Pumpkins ever were a grunge band, but they were marketed as one anyway).
Despite this success, though, not that many people would have got to to hear this song at the time: it wasn't a big airplay hit and was famously excluded from Top Of The Pops due to controversial lyrical content. I was introduced to the band a couple of years later when they were the talk of the sixth-form common room, and I even bought one of their albums, but for a long time I'd heard of this song but not heard it. When I did eventally encounter it a decade or so after it charted, it was far from what I'd expected on the basis of the title and the knowledge of their other early hits; ironically, that means the title was apt after all because it subverts expectations. In some ways it's quite pretty musically, but it has that slightly empty sound as if a couple of the instruments were left out when they mixed it, and that lends the whole track an unsettling tone. Which I'm sure was the intention all along.
Available on: Rotten Apples: Greatest Hits
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