Billy Joel has announced two huge shows in Edinburgh and Liverpool.
The ‘Piano Man’ will play only two concerts in Europe in 2025, on Saturday 7 June, at Edinburgh’s Scottish Gas Murrayfield, and Saturday 21 June, at Liverpool’s Anfield Stadium.
The 75-year-old music legend hasn’t performed in Scotland’s capital city since he played the legendary Usher Hall in 1979, whilst he hasn’t played the home of The Beatles since 1980.
Tickets will go on general sale at 10am on Friday October 4, 2024.
The pair of shows will follow his sold-out concert at Cardiff’s Principality Stadium in August.
Joel recently appeared in a CBS concert film called ‘Billy Joel: The 100th Live at Madison Square Garden – The Greatest Arena Run of All Time’, which aired in April, to celebrate the conclusion of his long-running residency at the famed New York venue.
He performed at the Grammy Awards two months later and recently admitted he wasn’t thrilled to be involved in the televised production as he doesn’t like being onscreen.
He told Variety: “I wasn’t crazy about doing that either. That was a TV audience, and it was done in Los Angeles, which is a showbiz town, and it was all based around their presentation.
“We were up there on stage, like, ‘Do we sound bad?’ … Because usually that’s the biggest song of the night! So, me and TV, we don’t always get along.”
The ‘Uptown Girl’ hitmaker released his first single in 17 years, ‘Turn the Lights Back On’, in February, and explained the huge gap was because he had lost the “fun” of writing songs.
Speaking with his co-writer Freddy Wexler on ‘Audacy Check In’, he said: “It was fun. Music is fun. Rock n’ roll was fun. It was all about having fun — and I kind of lost that and I turned the lights off because it wasn’t fun anymore.”
Joel explained how other people encouraged him to get back into the studio but he “always resisted it”.
He added: “I studiously avoided it because songwriting had become painful. I have this high bar. I said to myself, ‘If I don’t reach that bar, I beat myself up and I punched myself and I hate myself.’ So, I stopped doing it because I got tired of feeling like that.”