Billy Joel offers tribute to Vienna during Eurovision final

Billy Joel paid tribute to “the musician’s town” of Vienna during the Eurovision live final.

The annual song contest is taking place in the Austrian capital, which is also the name of one of the singer’s biggest hits.

The anthem, which uses Vienna as a metaphor for growing old and taking it easy, originally appeared on Joel’s 1977 album The Stranger, and was released as the B-side to the single Just The Way You Are.

It has gone on to be one of the piano man’s most indelible tracks.

Billy Joel (Yui Mok/PA)PA Archive/PA Images - Yui Mok

Speaking in a pre-recorded video during the final of the Eurovision Song Contest, Joel said: “Vienna is known as the musician’s town. You think of Beethoven’s Ninth, but you also think of the waltz and Strauss, which is wonderful, happy music.

“Then I also think of the cafe orchestras that play outdoors. It could be an accordion, a violin, and a piano, it could be a very small ensemble.

“The music is there in so many different ways. You can even see it in the architecture.

“You look on some of the buildings and there’s a little angel playing a violin coming off the balcony of a building, and you don’t see that in other cities.”

He added the song was inspired by his half-brother Alexander Joel, a critically acclaimed classical conductor, who was born to their father, Howard Joel, after he divorced Billy’s mother and relocated to Vienna.

He said: “Well, I found out that my father was living in Vienna. He and my mother had broken up in the late 50s, and that he had married again and had another son who was born in Vienna. So I had to go and meet him.

“When I wrote ‘Vienna waits for you,’ I meant that it’s a place where you close the circle, where questions that you have become answered.

“Suddenly things started to make sense in the world for me, which is really what the song was about – slow down, and look around you, and have some gratitude for the way things are in your life, the good things in your life.

“That’s what Vienna represented to me.”

Austrian singer-songwriter Cesar Sampson then performed Vienna during the voting in the final.