 his Farewell Yellow Brick Road. Mercifully, he wasn't trussed up in gold lamé like Elton at Glastonbury the other week – he might've melted, or suffered cardiac arrest. 'This must be the brightest sun ever,' he deadpanned amid soaring temperatures, 'and it's here in London.' Joel was always less about glitz, more about articulating Big Apple life alongside tricksy piano-based melodies. In the Seventies, he was emulating Brill Building giants like Carole King and Neil Diamond, applying lofty Broadway standards to rock songcraft, and he opened his show with selections from those initial days of struggle. These included 1978's pugnacious My Life, the brass-assisted Movin' Out (Anthony's Song) and The Entertainer, with its cynical take on showbiz, and each had the packed and sizzling park jubilantly bellowing out their zero-damns-given lyrics, revelling in Joel's legacy. 'There's good news and bad news,' the man himself quipped. 'The bad news is, I don't have anything new to play. The good news is, you don't have to listen to anything new.' Joel soon lampooned rock's superannuated onward soldiers: his limitlessly versatile combo briefly struck up Start Me Up, and he stood mimicking Mick Jagger's hip-wiggling; then, after checking that a heat-stricken audience member was okay, he lifted his thumb and joked 'I feel like Paul McCartney', winking comically. He also observed, pointing, 'Springsteen had some stairs going down there,){kind=link}
Sandwiched between two blockbuster Springsteen shows, Joel powered through decades of hits – but he should act prouder of his own legacy
Sandwiched between two blockbuster nights of Bruce Springsteen in Hyde Park, the appearance of New York’s reluctant 74-year-old songsmith – who gave up recording pop music three decades ago, but who scored 33 consecutive US hits in the Seventies and Eighties and still tours regularly to air them – was perhaps not the most pulse-quickening prospect.
Though back in the Nineties he co-headlined stadiums with Sir Elton John, the self-appointed “Piano Man” wouldn’t call this one-off European show (and his first time playing the BST Hyde Park festival) his Farewell Yellow Brick Road. Mercifully, he wasn’t trussed up in gold lame like Elton at Glastonbury the other week – he might’ve melted, or suffered cardiac arrest. “This must be the brightest sun ever,” he deadpanned amid soaring temperatures, “and it’s here in London.”
Joel was always less about glitz, more about articulating Big Apple life alongside tricksy piano-based melodies. In the Seventies, he was emulating Brill Building giants like Carole King and Neil Diamond, applying lofty Broadway standards to rock songcraft, and he opened his show with selections from those initial days of struggle. These included 1978’s pugnacious My Life, the brass-assisted Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song) and The Entertainer, with its cynical take on showbiz, and each had the packed and sizzling park jubilantly bellowing out their zero-damns-given lyrics, revelling in Joel’s legacy.
“There’s good news and bad news,” the man himself quipped. “The bad news is, I don’t have anything new to play. The good news is, you don’t have to listen to anything new.”