Billy Joel

IN A way, it's like admitting I sleep with an inflatable girlfriend, but what the hell; I'm going to out myself. When Billy Joel's fifth album The Stranger came out in 1977, I thought it was brilliant. I was only 15, and Joel seemed cool to me then. God knows, it wasn't how he looked. A stumpy little ex-boxer with big hands, a mop of oily black curls, a broken nose, big goldfish eyes and a belligerent little sneer of a mouth, he was no oil painting. He was more like a cartoon by someone trying to personify working class New York.

But he sounded great to me. He was a street-wise serenader, a tough guy with a heart of gold. On faster songs, his voice had an aggressive little snarl to it, and on the ballads, he sounded as sweet and sincere as his musical hero, Paul McCartney. No wonder his 1977 theme song, "Just the Way You Are", conquered the world.

"It did, didn't it?" says Joel from his New York home, his voice a rugged Bronx drawl. "Everyone in my band hated that song. Initially it had this crappy little cha-cha beat to it. It sounded like a chick's song, and we were a bunch of tough guys. Eventually the producer suggested a kind of strange backwards samba beat for it. We still didn't like it and almost left it off the album."

Fortunately, friends convinced him it was a potential hit, and sure enough, "Just the Way You Are" became one of the biggest pop songs of the 70s. And it's likely to get the biggest cheer of the night when Joel plays here in December his first New Zealand performance since 1998, and he sounds genuinely excited by the prospect.

"I never thought my music would ever reach people that far away from home," he says. "I've loved seeing all these far-flung parts of the world, and there have been so many highlights along the way. I was the first western rock'n'roll artist to play in the Soviet Union, and I also played in Berlin on the night East and West Germany reunited. I've provided a soundtrack when some amazing world events have happened. Sometimes I feel like the Forrest Gump of rock'n'roll."

Joel was brought up in a place called Hicksville, in Long Island. His father was a German Jew whose family had emigrated to escape Nazi Germany. His mother grew up in the Bronx. Joel's father returned to Austria when Billy was eight, leaving his mother to raise him and his sister, Judith. A few years later, Joel had evolved into an odd mix of sensitive artist and juvenile delinquent, learning classical piano by day, then running around with teenage street gangs at night. He remembers feeling conflicted over the best use for his big meaty paws: playing piano or punching people.

"My piano teacher also taught ballet, so these neighbourhood tough guys would hassle me on my way down there, like `Where's your tutu?' I was just a little guy and I got tired of being picked on, so I took up boxing. I immediately kinda liked it, 'cos I was a crazy kid with a lot of hostility to get rid of. I did it for about three years, and I wasn't sure if I should be a boxer or a piano player, then the last fight I had, I fought some guy with no footwork, no technique, no science to his boxing, but a crushing right hand. He caught me on the nose and I went down, and afterwards I thought, you know what? No matter how bad you think you are, there's always gonna be someone badder. I decided at that point to pay a little more attention to the music."

After years in the wilderness, playing piano in cocktail lounges and slogging it out in underwhelming rock bands, Joel reinvented himself as a sensitive singer/ songwriter and eventually became an "overnight success" in 1977, at 28. He has since sold more than 150 million albums.

Most of his output from the 1980s and 90s is sentimental rubbish, but early songs such as 1973's "Piano Man" or 1977's "Scenes From an Italian Restaurant" still impress with a sound somewhere between a Broadway musical and the romanticised working class narratives of Bruce Springsteen. Listening to these high-points, you can almost forgive later abominations such as "Uptown Girl" or "We Didn't Start the Fire".

Running parallel to Joel's career has been a turbulent personal life: a string of lawsuits against former managers, a failed suicide attempt (he drank a bottle of furniture polish in 1970), three marriages, including one to model Christie "Uptown Girl" Brinkley, several car crashes, and a couple of spells in rehab for alcohol abuse.

Now 59, Joel hasn't released a studio album in 15 years, but still tours extensively. His fan-base is huge, but most rock critics write him off as a middle-of-the-road schmaltz merchant.

One outspoken critic of Joel's music is sardonic New York chef and author, Anthony Bourdain but even he was no match for Joel.

He explains: "After I read he had this rule that there was to be no Billy Joel in his kitchens, I went to his restaurant and left him a signed 8x10 photo with the words: `Well, so much for no Billy Joel in your kitchen.' Anthony would have loved that, I'm sure."

Billy Joel plays Auckland's Vector Arena on Sunday December 14. Tickets on sale Friday July 25 via Ticketmaster (09) 9709700, www.ticketmaster.co.nz.