When Lou Reed passed away in 2013, social media lit up with tributes from people who'd worked with him.

Nearly all went along similar lines, pointing out that even though the former Velvet Underground member had no time for other musicians/music journalists/media personalities, he had been nothing but lovely to them when they'd met. Not only was it an opportunity to drop in the fact they'd met the great man - the obituary humblebrag, the most-sickening of all - it also gave them a chance to show off how they'd managed to melt the heart of such a famously miserable, abrasive man.

Put all those tributes together, however, and a different portrait of a person comes into view. Maybe old Lou wasn't that grumpy after all?

The same might be said for Billy Corgan, who, to say the least, has something of a prickly reputation.

He hasn't passed away, by the way, but over the years, since Smashing Pumpkins released their debut Gish in 1991, through the pomp of their second and third albums Siamese Dream and Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness, the frontman seems to have offended just about everyone.

He's been feuding with Pavement, among others, for as long as anyone can remember, and there have been rows with Marilyn Manson, Courtney Love and his own band (he's sacked almost everyone he ever worked with in Smashing Pumpkins). Even his own best friend and former Pumpkins drummer Jimmy Chamberlin apparently now finds it easier not to work with Corgan if their friendship is to endure.

In person, it's hard to understand where that reputation has come from - Corgan couldn't be more entertaining as an interviewee. He answers questions openly and honestly, with the kind of enthusiasm you'd never expect from a man who once said, "I don't mind playing a character that irritates people or makes them question my sanity".

But then maybe he's mellowed? He was pictured with both Love and Manson this month, and recently performed with the latter in London, putting to bed a 15-year period of communicating only via the press to trade insults.

His new album, Monuments To An Elegy, is Smashing Pumpkins' ninth, and the third since he reformed the band in 2005 after breaking it up five years earlier. It' s the second in a supposed trilogy - Teargarden by Kaleidyscope - which began with Oceania in 2012 and will finish with Day For Night next year.

Corgan says it was written quickly in a stream of consciousness, so quickly in fact, he doesn't know what most of the lyrics are about.

"I didn't have time to stop and think. It's strange, and kind of weird, to be out here answering questions about things I have no idea about.

"I can certainly recognise a bad lyric when it comes out of me - I've written plenty - but I like these lyrics and it was simple. I just let it be what it was."

He seems very content with the results though.

"I think I've let the past go with this album, and the next album will be moving on from that again. We're doing something new and not just doing things that you can hear on our other albums. But at the same time, I don't want this to be like a finger-poke in the chest, where you say, 'We're on an arty trip and YOU MUST LISTEN!'

"I've learned there is nothing wrong with music being approachable on first listen... It's not a time for rebellion," he adds.

He let his record label choose which single was going to be released from the album - something he'd always fought over the years, but finally admitted he has no idea what he was doing in that area.

"I can't comprehend what it takes to get on the radio, and can't believe that some of that stuff does," says the singer and guitarist, who was born in Elk Grove Village just outside Chicago. "But then I don't listen to new music. If I'm in a shop or somewhere and I hear the radio, I never hear anything that's going to change my mind."

The impact the album has, of course, has changed irrevocably since Mellon Collie was released and sold five million copies in the US alone. Corgan knows this, and while in the past he might've spent the time making an album with the thought, 'Why does the world want this?', lodged at the back of his mind, he's now stopped fighting.

"I think part of the reason that there's a bit of success going on around the band now is that I've just let all that go. I didn't want those feelings to poison a strong collection of songs, and I didn't want to feel I had to prove something. This, the interview, is the forum to talk about those feelings, and too often I've let feelings of bitterness spill over onto the grooves and hurt perfectly good songs. Or maybe I don't produce something as shiny as I should because I'm on an art trip or something."

He says he had to find a "more supple" place to work from, which partly includes working alone, without a band around him.

"I was fighting a lot of stuff that didn't need to be fought," he adds, "and I needed to focus on stuff that did matter; musical stuff, like how to get to the first chorus a bit faster or better, and things like that."

Corgan, now 47, says the biggest thing that's changed in the world since he first started making music is that no one has any time now.

"Songs are getting shorter again, we're going back to how it was in the Sixties. And I wonder if a band would bother making something like Siamese Dream or Mellon Collie now. It's hard for me to believe that if you had a young band on the rise, they'd bother with those nine months in the studio," he says. "Their time would be better served making one album and then doing chat shows. There'd be no return on their investment otherwise.

"I don't think the album is going anywhere, but it's lost its place in culture as a signifier. Yes, the media recognises it, but the public really doesn't, and the sales bear that out."

Asked if there's still a place in that landscape for a guitar band like Smashing Pumpkins, he laughs.

"You think so?" he says. "I'm not so sure. Honestly. From the inception of this band, it was meant to be a battering ram. I suppose, along the way, I should've given that up, but it's in my spirit not to let that completely die. The only thing I can do is carry on, and even if people are into the band again, remember that it's not time to get comfortable.

"If the sky opens and sun shines on us, don't get conservative. Don't run in with the same team and make the same album one more time like everybody else does. Get aggressive."

EXTRA TIME - BILLY CORGAN SAYS...

:: On Motley Crue drummer Tommy Lee, who plays on Monuments To An Elegy: "You have to have a certain constitution to have lived a life as full as Tommy's, and I don't have it. He has lived with his foot on the pedal, and you can only stand, observe and be in awe."

:: On being in a band: "There are times when it felt right to be in a gang, even if there are downsides. I don't think I can ever see a time when I'd be in a band again."

:: On disappointed fans: "It's strange to me, because the Pumpkins' sound was so particular, and some people seem to only want stuff that vaguely reminds them of that. The only time I can get around that is when I play acoustic, like it's a big enough change that no one questions it. Maybe I'll do an acoustic album?"

:: On greatest hits: "There's a greatest hits mentality, where people think they're owed a certain song or something. As a result, younger bands look cooler because they're not subject to that, wandering around in a new field, as they should, but you end up looking flat-footed and unwilling to move because you're expected to play the old songs."

:: On his success: "For a 6ft 3in guy with no hair and a whiny voice, I've done all right."

:: Monuments To An Elegy is available now