Today Is...Billy Joel's Birthday

With Billy 'Uptown Girl' Joel hitting the big 74 today (Happy Birthday Billy by the way), considering that he has banging out tunes over a 50 year career, he doesn't seem very appreciated in Britain where he has only had 5 top ten hits and 3 of them came in 1983 from the Innocent Man album so not a great return for him but two people who did appreciate him were my parents and it was an unusual day if we went without hearing a belt of Piano Man or My Life coming from the record player.
As my parents were fans, i sort of fell into his music by osmosis as i grew up and whenever i heard one of his songs in a Supermarkets, i always found myself singing along to his ditties as i priced up the cleaning fluids.
Before Uptown Girl reminded everyone that he was still around, his big song was Piano Man and it was only fairly recently i discovered it comes with a music video although it didn't help it much in the UK charts although it was probably the best number 136 we ever saw.
Probably my favourite Billy Joel songs is 'Scenes from an Italian Restaurant', mainly because halfway through singing about Brenda and Eddie in the summer of '75, it changes to a completely different song and then ends up back where it started and the two in one songs always seem to appeal to me.
So there we have it, i have a soft spot for Christie Brinkley's ex-hubby (a magnificent bit of punching above his weight) and could probably happily sing along to most of his records and i blame my parents although it could have been worse, they could have been Country and Western fans.