Celebrating a Big Birthday with Billy Joel and Alexei Sayle
Key Highlights :
It was a big birthday for me last weekend. One of those special birthdays that ends in a zero. I had been doing a lot of performative moaning in the run-up to it, but in the end it was a lovely time. Friends and family came over and I had a great time.
As a post-birthday present, Radio 2's Zoe Ball interviewed Billy Joel on Monday morning. I have no shame in admitting that I love Billy Joel. He's the Erasure to Springsteen's Pet Shop Boys. Never quite as cool, but secretly I like him more. Zoe Ball's chat with Joel was a fluffy affair, but maybe that says as much about Joel as it does about Ball's interview technique. He is 74 now and clearly has a relaxed relationship with fame and success these days. He's even able to question why people are still interested in him all these years after his salad days.
The Radio 2 Joel playlist that accompanied the chat leaned heavily on the obvious, though it did throw in Zanzibar which, it seems, is big on TikTok. I'm not sure that I learned much, but it was fun to be in his company for an hour. We did discover that Joel is a big history nut. He told Zoe Ball that he had been to the Churchill War Rooms and that he was a huge fan of Churchill, saying "I think he saved the world, actually."
On Sunday night, Alexei Sayle took the 11.16am Avanti West Coast service from London Euston to Blackpool for the first episode of the second series of Alexei Sayle’s Strangers on a Train. The idea is that he talks to random passengers and learns why they are taking the train. In this episode Sayle met a Polish ballroom dancer turned judge, a South African women who had left her homeland because she thought it was going to the dogs, a doctor’s receptionist who had previously worked for The Financial Times and the managing director for Blackpool Transport.
Sayle is a man of a certain age (though he has a decade on me) and so his frame of reference is a bit Alan Bradleyesque as a result. Not everyone was quite on the same page. “I had a top 20 hit in the 1980s,” he told two women who were travelling up to Chester to meet their mates. “Hang on, was that Hello Tosh got a Toshiba?” one of them asked him, a reference to the ad that riffed on Sayle’s Ullo John! Gotta New Motor? “No. You’ve stabbed me to the heart with that,” Sayle replied. “That was Ian Dury.”
These days, rather like Billy Joel, Sayle is more of an avuncular figure than the angry young(ish) man he once was. But he is still keeping the red flag flying even in amiable time-filling shows like this. As the train pulled into Wigan he told us that the town’s most famous son, George Formby, once the UK’s highest-paid entertainer, was awarded the Order of Lenin in 1943 by genial Joe Stalin, prompting Sayle’s best George Formby impersonation: “Turned out nice again. Victory to the proletariat. Death to the bourgeoisie.”
Finally, listeners should check out Hip Hop 50 on BBC 6 Music, airing Monday to Thursday at 9pm. It's a great way to learn more about hip hop, whether it's east coast or west coast, Dre or Jay. It's another reminder that I'm getting on a bit, but it's still a great way to learn about this genre of music.
