During an appearance on a recent episode of The Mistress Carrie Podcast, Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan has explained why he asked people to call him by his birth name William. He explained, “Well, the way I see it in my brain is Billy is like my stage name at this point; it's how everybody knows me. And for anybody who knows wrestling, we mostly in wrestling call people by their stage names. Even if I know somebody's real name, I'll still call 'em by their gimmick name. So, to use the term, 'Billy' is my gimmick name, 'William' is my real name. So if you call me Billy, great; I'll still respond to it and it doesn't bother me. But my friends call me William. And I've asked people to call me William, 'cause that's, I guess, what I'm comfortable with at 56.”
He continued, “It's been kind of a funny journey how we got to William. But I kind of blame American rapper, actor, record producer, and record executive Puff Daddy. I thought it was kind of funny how he kept changing his name. So I was, like, 'Oh, I'm just gonna change my name and see what happens.' And it turned into this weird thing; people wrote articles making fun of me for changing my name from Billy to William, even though William's my real name. There were literally articles, like, 'Oh, he wants to be William now,' like I guess if I was being posh or something. So me being me, the wrestling promoter in me, of course I made it worse by adding to it. Now I'm William Patrick Corgan, which is my real, real name. That's what they call me in wrestling. But everybody calls me Billy. It's all good.”