I looked back down at the piano and just said ‘Thank you.’” (It was a timely meeting for Joel who’d just divorced his previous wife and former manager Elizabeth for whom he’d composed ‘Just The Way You Are’ as a birthday gift.
Recalling meeting MacPherson, Brinkley and Houston (then working as a model and unknown as a singer) in the Caribbean hotel Joel says he was playing piano in the hotel bar one evening when, “I looked up and there were these three gorgeous women looking at me from the other side of the piano. While ‘Uptown Girl’ is usually assumed to be about Joel’s soon-to-be wife, supermodel Christie Brinkley (who also appeared in the video), the song was actually begun sometime earlier when Joel was dating Brinkley’s supermodel colleague Elle MacPherson (and then entitled ‘Uptown Girls’ after he’d met MacPherson, Brinkley and Whitney Houston at a Caribbean holiday resort), however by the time he got around to polishing up the lyrics, he says the song was focussed entirely on Brinkley. Hubert Parry’s ‘Jerusalem’, not strictly classical I know, but not far from it either! For the wonderfully moving ‘Leningrad’ (1989 – written after he met a clown at a concert there in August 1987) he seems to have borrowed his intro from Brahms’ ‘Waldesnacht’ and finally, ‘And So It Goes’ (1990, actually written for An Innocent Man in 1982 but not fitting the concept and in fact a song Joel had enormous difficulty in completing and not lyrically finished until 1990) is decidedly reminiscent of C. Taken from his album An Innocent Man which was an homage to the music of his youth, ‘Uptown Girl’ was in the style of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons – Valli himself says he loved the song but wishes Joel had given it to them since they needed a hit at the time! Other tracks including ‘This Night’ and ‘The Longest Time’ harked back to the 1950s doo-wop period while there were also songs that reflected the late 1950s rock’n’roll era and the ‘Motown’ and ‘Atlantic’ soul sounds of the 1960s.īilly Joel has often borrowed melodies from his obviously large classical collection and many may not have noticed that ‘Uptown Girl’ has a chorus suspiciously similar to Ravel’s ‘Bolero’ while ‘This Night’ (from the same album) comes from Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No.8, the ‘Pathetique’. This was probably Joel’s biggest hit on a worldwide basis (Number 1 in Australia, his only UK Number 1 and Number 3 in America) and still remains a party floor filler and oldies radio favourite over 30 years on. Quote from The Girl In The Song, Michael Heatley & Frank Hopkinson (Portico Books, 2010) Recorded at Chelsea Sound & A&R Recording, New York City It had sold over 1.06 million copies by 2017.“I looked up and there were these three gorgeous women looking at me from the other side of the piano.” It was the second biggest-selling single of 1983 in the UK, and was the 19th biggest-selling single of the 1980s, selling 975,000 copies. It was a number three record in the US, and reached number one in the UK, his only number one in the country. The couple have remained good friends over the years while raising Alexa. They had one child together: Alexa Ray Joel, born December 29, 1985. However, the marriage ended in August 1994. Guests at the wedding included singer Paul Simon and members of the band Stray Cats. They first met in 1983 on the Island of St Barts, in the Caribbean, and were married on a yacht on the Hudson River, the second marriage for both of them. Are Billy Joel and Christie Brinkley still together?Ĭhristie Brinkley, Alexa Ray Joel and Billy Joel in 2010.The song's video shows Billy and his backup singers working as car mechanics.Ĭhristie arrives in a chauffeured Rolls-Royce, as Billy and his mates dance around her.Ī poster of Brinkley can also be seen in the garage, as well as on a billboard above the garage advertising 'Uptown cosmetics'.īy the end of the video, Billy and Christie ride off on a motorcycle.
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