A fan captured Brinkley dancing to the hit song during her ex-husband’s Billy Joel concert at Madison Square Garden on Friday, April 26.
A fan captured the model, 70, dancing to her ex-husband’s hit “Uptown Girl” while enjoying his concert in the crowd at Madison Square Garden on Friday, April 26.
The TikTok video showed Brinkley smiling brightly and dancing along to the song with a friend as she appeared on a jumbo screen for the whole audience to see. She gazed up at the stage, presumably at Joel, 74, as he sang.
“Billy Joel wrote ‘Uptown Girl’ about his then-partner Christie Brinkley,” read text over the fan video. “Tonight she watched him sing the song he wrote about her to all of Madison Square Garden.”
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In the caption of the video, the fan wrote: “40 years later and your ex man is still grinning at you like that while he sings the song he wrote about how rich and hot you are?”
Joel released the hit in 1983. Per supermodel Elle Macpherson, the singer was dating her at the time he started writing the song, but he broke up with her mid-process and it was Brinkley who starred in the music video.
“I think it’s [about] all the uptown girls, put it that way,” Macpherson, 60, said of the song in a 2018 episode of Watch What Happens Live, adding of Joel, “He liked tall girls.”
Macpherson also said that the musician “ousted” her from a Manhattan apartment when he began dating Brinkley exclusively.
In his 2014 biography, Billy Joel: The Definitive Biography, Joel confirmed that he originally wrote “Uptown Girl” about all of the models in Manhattan, but changed the title of the song from plural to singular when he began dating Brinkley.
Brinkley and the “Piano Man” singer went on to marry in 1985 and welcomed their daughter Alexa Ray Joel in 1985 before divorcing in 1994.