Billy Joel, BST Hyde Park Friday 7 July 2023

 

“I didn’t think I’d be singing this song in my seventies… I didn’t think I’d be playing this gig in my seventies.” Seventy-four year old singer-songwriter is preparing his adoring Hyde Park crowd for a high note that he might not hit in ‘An Innocent Man’ from the eponymous 1983 album. Joel, who is known mainly for an apt autobiographical song ‘Piano Man’ was mostly known only for three or four songs which had British chart success. In a long and phenomenally popular career he has delighted those who love his work, but in this country has always seemed like songs your Dad likes.

And that’s fine. The man who used to climb on pianos and jump around, the man who had a headline-grabbing temper tantrum in Leningrad during the final years of the Cold War: he has mellowed from a punchy writer of elegantly-written, fondly rendered takes on classic American music styles and acts. So some of his biggest successes have belonged to Barry White or Garth Brooks. But now, with all his youthful excess behind him (and which provided songs like “Big Shot” and some ill-advised defences of Christy Brinkley) Joel takes pleasure in not having any new stuff to play. He jokes at mention of an album released in 1983—“Don’t bullshit me, you didn’t buy that album—nobody bought that album.” But the concert was an incredible drive through some early work from 52nd Street (“Zanzibar, popular again because of a Tik-Tok craze) and “Sometimes A Fantasy”. And, from Joel’s masterpiece album The Stranger, “Scenes from An Italian Restaurant”).

It doesn’t really matter if Billy Joel is pretending to be self-effacing and relishing his niche superstardom. (And he did make the note, incidentally, and has before now had another singer take the strain). His piano playing raises the crowd, and that voice—and the voices of a mix of old collaborators and new, with some special guests—is received from a standing, overheating Hyde Park crowd with waves of enthusiasm which amps up to adoration. Even after the ‘close’ with “Piano Man”, the band comes back and delivers “We Didn’t Start The Fire”, “Uptown Girl” with Joe Jonas) and a few more before closing… and sending his crowd joyfully into the London streets.