A Shirt on Sunday: Billy Joel – 5/11/2013 – Hammersmith Apollo
Despite the pervading tone of my t-shirt collection, it’s not about the guitars, it’s about the songs. Hence Billy Joel. If Joel played guitar, he’d be looked on as another Springsteen – Another young man from the east coast rising writing songs of the working man and his perpetual search for love, work and money. There are times when Joel attacks the piano like a guitar player. Take a listen to the start of ‘Angry Young Man’. Yes, there’s the rock and roll style stretching back to Jerry Lee Lewis and beyond, but there’s also that harnessing of ‘the riff’ that also appears on ‘It’s Still Rock & Roll to Me’, which is where I became a fan. That single came from the album ‘Glass Houses’, which I desperately wanted when I was kid. The opening song ‘You May Be Right’ is one of the great boy-meets-girl songs of pop music – the character is confident, but aware of his flaws and able to twist them into a desperate advantage: “I may be crazy. But it just may be a lunatic you’re looking for.” It could have been written by Jim Steinman, and for a young metal fan like me it was an introduction to an astonishing catalogue of songs that paint a picture of New York State that still held good decades later.
Twenty years after his last album of new songs (we’ll ignore the regrettable classical album that all pop/rock piano players churn out at some point in their career), Joel had reached a point where he just played occasional tours and had begun a residency at Madison Square Gardens in New York. This is the equivalent of playing Wembley Arena once a month, for years, without any new material and always selling out!
We’d seen Joel a couple of times before in much bigger venues and this was billed as a trip to play the smallest venues he’d played in decades. I love the Hammersmith Odeon. I’ve said it before and look forward to saying it again. We were about half way back in the stalls, a little closer to the side than I like, but we were THERE!
The stage was rammed with instruments and countless screens – presumably squeezing in an arena’s worth of gear into an old cinema is tricky. The band came on stage, launched into ‘My Life’ and proceeded to deliver a blinding show. When you’ve stopped writing new material, your concerts are basically greatest hits sets with a few obscure numbers for the fans. As a result we didn’t get a lot of the songs I was hoping for, but did get a couple I’d forgotten and a bunch from ‘Glass Houses’, so I was stoked. I don’t have many specific memories of the night, but I do remember leaving with a big grin on my face.
All concert photos by Janet Gover (who had a really good camera for concert photography at the time)