(Credits: Far Out / Billy Corgan)
Tue 20 May 2025 20:00, UK
Live music is a powerful thing. The tunes themselves are often besides the point – it’s all about the magic in the air. The energy of the crowd, the feeling of being in a collective and sensing the excitement in all the bodies around you. It’s all about the rushes of adrenaline, shared amongst the hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands. But that’s also how things can get dark, although at one special gig, Billy Corgan wouldn’t have minded so much.
While best known for being on stage with The Smashing Pumpkins, no musician ever got anywhere without being a music fan first. All the best musical heroes started out like any other fan; in the crowds, buying the records, listening and watching in awe. The spark for all new music has to come from somewhere, and it’s so often right there, at some gig, being inspired by some other band.
Corgan’s most memorable moment of being completely overwhelmed by that powerful collective energy came in 1982, several years before he’d decide to start Smashing Pumpkins and truly make his own name. Despite this moment inspiring that move, it was also a moment that meant it nearly didn’t happen, as Corgan was so swept up in the excitement that he thought he might not make it out.
It happened while watching a band he calls “criminally underrated”, stating that no level of praise and no crowd size could do justice to a group that truly “forged their own path”. The band in question are Judas Priest, the metal pioneers who formed in 1969 and by the 1980s were at the height of power.
The makings of them as a band were also the makings of them as an electrifying live act. They’re celebrated for opening the doors to a new age of metal, one that was more dynamic and interesting rather than just being loud. Robert Halford’s voice stood out amongst the genre’s landscape so far, and when paired with KK Downing and Glenn Tipton both raging on their guitars, it created a wall of sound that was as powerful as the genre always demands, but more textured and gripping than the standard stuff that first introduced heavier rock.
Corgan was a fan. As someone who would go on to lead a different musical charge, helping to shape alt-rock into a new direction in the 1990s, this earlier experience with Judas Priest and his love for the group feels like a blueprint for the pioneering he would later do, but he almost didn’t make it there.
At a gig in 1982, Corgan was in the depths of the crowd, caught up in all the bodies jumping up and down in the excitement of the show. As everyone moved and swayed and desperately tried to get closer, the young musician had a moment where he worried for his safety. One thought calmed his brain, “If I’m going to die, I’m going to die watching Judas Priest.”
His love for the band has stuck around. Later, when his own group were making it big, he found himself in the odd situation of seeing his name above theirs in a lineup. To him, that was a crime: “I should go to some kind of court for that and be punished, because we should be opening for Judas Priest.”
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