(Credits: Far Out / Man Alive! / YouTube Still)
Tue 3 February 2026 4:00, UK
We can often become so engrossed in the world of celebrity that we forget that behind the bravado, they’re real people, and Billy Corgan from Smashing Pumpkins loves a Sunday roast.
I mean, of course, he does. What’s not to love about a Sunday roast? However, there is something inherently strange built into the realisation that the rockstars you worship when they’re on stage live extremely ordinary lives when they’re off it. It’s quite sweet to think of the frontman tucking into some stuffing and gravy in between tearing up stages around the world; if anything, it adds to his musical mystique.
Appreciating these normal lives that a lot of celebrities live can often make their work a lot more difficult to comprehend, as the piece of music that has changed you as a person, it turns out, came from someone completely ordinary. However, there are other instances when understanding someone’s life a lot more can heighten their work in the eyes of the public.
Billy Corgan grew a lot closer to Sinéad O’Connor over a period of six or so weeks when the two of them sat down for Sunday dinner together every week, and while he was already a fan of O’Connor, these meetings gave him better insight into her as a person, and as a result, when he hears her work now, he understands it on a much deeper level. Knowing more about the human side of O’Connor helped him appreciate the human elements that are foundationally built into her sound.
The dinners in question took place when O’Connor moved in with the drummer Matt Walker. Walker and Corgan were friends as he had played in Smashing Pumpkins for some time, but O’Connor knew him as the percussionist for Morrissey.
“I’d met Sinéad once at a show,” recalled Corgan. “We talked a little bit, but I can’t say I knew her. So now she’s living at my friend’s house, where I go for Sunday dinner. Four or five, six times I was over for Sunday ham, and Sinéad would come down and have dinner. And then I finally got to know her as a person. We talked about her children a lot and relationships in life, and her struggles.”
The main thing that Corgan took away from his visits with O’Connor was her honesty, as she would open up a lot about herself, the world around her, and how the two intertwined, and it gave him a deeper appreciation for her as an individual and her as a performer, with him saying, “She was very, very honest, I mean, almost to a fault… This bare-your-soul honesty, such a beautiful woman, such an incredible talent – just in awe of her talent.”
Corgan looks back at her life and finds a strange feeling in the fact that her passing seemed to give a lot of people the same insight he got when he met her. It’s a sad fact that a lot of the time, people don’t get the praise they deserve in life, and O’Connor falls into this group. It took her passing for people to respect her as a person, Sunday dinners and all, and once people respected that and got a better idea as to how she was as a person, they also started to respect her more as an artist.
“Sometimes it’s [sad] it takes a passing for people to come into contact with how they feel. People realise now that we lost someone who probably should have gotten more attention and support when she was here,” said Corgan, reflecting on O’Connor’s passing.
Concluding, “Because her gift was so rare. And her gift had a lot to do with her pathos. Her incredible gift of singing had a direct line to her heart. That’s so rare in singers. Most singers are actors. Sinéad was not an actor.”
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