Welcome back Billy Joel, piano man and dad dancer supreme – you were always much better than we made out

Derided for much of his career as a naff lightweight Springsteen who produced music that sounded ‘like a dentist drill’, the ‘Uptown Girl’ singer is about to release his first new song in 17 years. Ed Power says it’s time to celebrate an ‘Innocent Man’ who produced moments of subversive genius he’s never got credit for

Billy Joel, pictured here through the years, has always been his own harshest critic, with no interest in that traditional rock star pursuit of self-mythologising (Getty/iStock)

Is it time to admit we’ve been wrong about Billy Joel? Going back to the early 1980s and the doo-wop juggernaut that was “Uptown Girl”, it has been fashionable to deride the singer – who has just announced his first new song in 17 years – as a naff lightweight ranking somewhere between a diet cola Elton John and shoddy Springsteen knock-off.

“He’s the sort of popular artist who makes elitism seem not just defensible but necessary,” began a notorious New York Times review of one of Joel’s early shows at Madison Square Garden. “Anodyne, sappy, superficial, derivative, fraudulently rebellious,” agreed Slate in 2009. “A terrible piece of music… it’s like a dentist drill,” another prominent voice told a documentary maker in 1993. And that was Joel himself talking about one of his defining hits, “We Didn’t Start the Fire”.

Has hindsight revealed that these critics were speaking nonsense? Joel, shortly to embark on a US stadium tour with Stevie Nicks and Sting, was undoubtedly out of order in dismissing his own 1989 smash in which he breathlessly zipped through the entire history of 20th-century America and further afield. How could anyone find it in them to dislike a song that juxtaposes Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land and the foiled CIA incursion at the Bay of Pigs. Or which rhymes “Malcolm X” with “British politician sex”?