Photograph: Future Publishing/Getty Images ‘Joel is unique in that he’s essentially been touring a greatest hits set for the last three decades’ … Billy Joel at the MCG in Melbourne. He’s brought his family on tour, too – his two young daughters, aged 7 and 5, come out to look shyly out at the enormous crowd. There are little tweaks to the set for the occasion – Joel accompanies a Waltzing Matilda singalong and a small Santa hat sits atop the piano. But it’s what the people want – and it’s what the people get. It’s true: Joel is unique in that he’s essentially been touring a greatest hits set for the last three decades. The 73-year-old jokes about the “good news and bad news”: that he hasn’t recorded anything new in close to 30 years, so we’re going to hear “the same shit you heard last time”. Tonight, the banter is all scripted but it feels genuine, and so does he. Joel is, of course, a seasoned showman – this is the man who’s played a show a month at Madison Square Garden since 2014 (that’s 86 monthly shows so far), and promises to keep that residency up as long as the demand exists.
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But the mood tonight is one of joy, against a cloudless sky with a single star on a balmy night, La Niña finally taking a night off after weeks of weird weather. Yet of course there is another wave of Covid ripping through the country, despite what we might desperately wish to believe. The silver-haired man next to me – a diehard Joel fan, knows every word to every song – remarks that the atmosphere feels like an AFL grand final. Cynicism aside, there’s something magical about the sight of a sold-out MCG after the last couple of years.
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