u/Balfe

A couple of years ago, I put the piece below together based on my memories, an audio recording of the gig I found online somewhere and some newspaper articles and interviews from the time that I tracked down. It was written ahead of the band playing a show in Dublin in the summer of 2024.

Wrote it in one sitting and didn't end up doing anything with it, but if anyone has the patience you're more than welcome to wade through it. I posted this to the r/ireland sub and it got a good reaction, so thought I would do the same here.

Thank you.

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‘There are f*cking people backstage dying, do you care?’ - Inside the Smashing Pumpkins’ tragic Dublin show

This summer, Billy Corgan and his band will return to Dublin’s Point Theatre (nowadays the 3Arena) for the first time since a teenage fan’s death in 1996.

It’s a warm early summer’s evening in Dublin’s docklands and D’arcy Wretzky is pleading for calm. “There are fcking people backstage dying, do you care? I see people up here with smiles on their faces. It’s not fcking funny.”

About 30 minutes prior Wretzky, along with her bandmates Billy Corgan, James Iha and Jimmy Chamberlin, collectively better known as the Smashing Pumpkins, had taken to the stage in the cavernous Point Theatre as part of a world tour to support their mid-90s genre-defining epic ‘Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness.’

Fans, some 7,000 or so of us, had crammed into the arena in sweaty anticipation of a band known mostly in those halcyon pre-internet days from MTV screens and bootleg cassettes.

One would not return home.

It was around 10pm on Saturday May 11, 1996 when 17-year-old Bernadette O’Brien became seriously injured. An absence of effective crowd control inside the capital’s largest indoor music venue had contributed to streams of people abandoning the upper deck in the two-tiered arena in pursuit of a better, closer view of the band from the floor below.

O’Brien, like many others, had succumbed to the ensuing crush that had bottlenecked in front of the stage; each person powerless to counteract the swaying, heaving mass as more and more people surged towards the front, effectively restricting all escape routes. Some of the unlucky ones found themselves pinned to the floor.

Michael Nesdale would later recount his experience at the show. “I’m 23, six foot two and 12 stone,” he told the Irish Times five months later. “I still had no control over my movements. I leant down to get my jacket which was tied to the barrier. I realised the seriousness of the situation when it took all my strength to get back up.”

By now, the band had taken note and had begun issuing de-facto safety announcements to the crowd - each one with a higher degree of urgency than the one before. Security stationed in front of the stage had begun to pluck injured people from the crowd. Others, some with that unmistakable ragdoll effect of unconsciousness, were crowd-surfed towards safety – or at least away from danger – by concertgoers.

“Make sure you’re not standing on anyone,” Wretzky said, referencing the unfortunate few unable to immediately rise to their feet.

“Please make sure that there’s no one else that’s still down, OK?” Corgan implored the audience, by now involuntarily locked together.

“Is there anybody else that needs to come out?”

A little more than 24 hours earlier, Bernadette O’Brien had travelled from her home in the east Cork village of Shangarry to Dublin ahead of the concert. Her father, back then a chef and fisherman and her mother, who worked with people with disabilities, had arranged for their teenage daughter and a friend of hers to stay with her two cousins in Rathmines. All four attended the show.

Two days later Noel and Annemarie O’Brien made the agonising decision to switch off their daughter’s life support machine.

O’Brien had been one of the dozens of fans who had ‘needed to come out’ from the swollen crowd. A doctor who attended her at the scene immediately recognised that hers was a more severe injury than the other bloody noses and twisted ankles, arranging for her to be rushed to the Mater Hospital.

Hospital authorities would later say that she had sustained “severe internal injuries” in the crush.

“I feel very, very intensely for the family of Bernadette,” Corgan would say two years later on his – and his band’s – return to Dublin. “Just us being here of course is just a reminder of all that and brings that all back up. It certainly brings it all back up to the surface for me as well.

“It was the most terrible, horrible thing you can imagine.

“The thing I’ll say though is, the easiest thing to do would be to never come back. To us it would have been more disrespectful to not come back and pretend like it never happened, and just hide away in our limos.”

In June, more than 28 years after O’Brien’s death, the Smashing Pumpkins will return to the Point Theatre for the first time since the band’s darkest moment.

Much has changed in the intervening years. Corgan’s trademark shaved head, which had for so long prematurely aged him, is now accompanied by a greyed beard, more adequately displaying his 57 years.

Wretzky, who was said to have been deeply affected by the event and whose admonishments to the Dublin crowd served as a soundtrack of sorts to the tragedy, is no longer with the band.

Even the venue itself – now known as the 3Arena – is different, having undergone a facelift as corporate funding modernised the previously decrepit former train depot into a modern live music venue.

But close to three decades later, those of us who were there in 1996 can still sometimes feel the echo of that night every time we walk into the place; an evening on the doorstep of summer at a time when our futures stretched out in front of us in the hazy May sunshine.

It remains a part of all who were there, the band and, sharpest of all, the O’Brien family.

“We’ll never forget,” Corgan said in 1998. “There’s no forgetting, it will never go away.”