Billy Joel @ Acer Arena,Sydney (17/11/06)

Fri 17th Nov, 2006 in Gig Reviews

The frenetic fingering of Angry Young Man launched a flurry of light and sound into a sea of smiles. My Life is a portrait of Billy Joel. Dense musicality, borrows from the clinically classical while exuding the grit of the inner city. He does this with a mastery over melody and a jumble of jazzy key changes.

Joel humoured the audience by praising Sydney for “finally” having a decent arena. He chuckles about the Opera House where you can still hear his songs playing from his last tour thanks to the ‘good’ acoustics. Having established where the good and bad seats were, Billy Joel indicates to his grand piano – “I can’t throw this thing around like Hendrix ya know”. He turned the place on its head when his piano started revolving as he launched into Zanzibar and the autobiographical New York State of Mind.

Satellite keyboards on the left and right of the stage allow audience members to get close to the man during Don’t Ask Me Why. The pulsating Pressure is accompanied by a synchronised light spectacular that resonates hours after the show finishes.

We ‘all went down’ to Saigon together when the heavy sound of choppers and light – simulated blades dropped us in the heart of ‘Nam. The verses took us on a journey through the Mekong while the chorus assaulted our senses until the final chopper blades delivered us into the darkness from which we came.

The Instrumentalist left his stool to be met with a rush of fans at the foot of the stage. The Piano Man was noticeably richer in voice when divorced from his instrument. Innocent Man benefited from the attention.

Back on his stool the crowd sung along to an impromptu performance of Waltzing Matilda until elevating his congregation into Keeping the Faith. Swapping the piano for a guitar , Billy went up an octave of energy for energetic anthem Extremes. Billy Joel didn’t mean to “interrupt the flow of the evening with… a religious song”, but introduced crewman Chainsaw who indulged himself, and treated us, to a blistering rendition of Highway to Hell. (This is not a misprint). Coupled with We Didn’t Start the Fire this could have been Acer Arena’s finest moment. The Big Shot had homeboy posing and mic stand acrobatics to a fine art before declaring that It’s Still Rock ‘n’ Roll To Me. You May Be Right blew the whole joint up.

What started as a downtown jazz club was now a ferocious rock ‘n’ roll concert and Brooklyn Blues man Billy Joel was just the ‘lunatic’ we were looking for. The whimsical romanticism of Scenes From An Italian Restaurant provided a brief encore until the final moments ended in sing-a-longs of Uptown Girl and appropriately self-titled Piano Man.

“Sing us a song you’re the piano man/
Sing us a song tonight/
Cause we’re all in the mood for a melody/
And you got us feelin’ alright/”