THE list of living names in Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start the Fire has shrunk to a jaw-dropping three.
Three decades after the tongue-twister song topped charts around the world, most of its human landmarks are gone.
Out of the 59 people name-checked in the 1989 mega-hit, only Bob Dylan, rock n roll singer Chubby Checker, and “subway vigilante” Bernie Goetz are still alive.
The grim-but-fascinating fact has been doing the rounds on social media after Bardot’s death was announced on Sunday.
One shocked fan admitted: “This is how I find out Chubby Checker is still alive.”
Another said: “The kind of useless trivia I’ll be physically incapable of not repeating at the next dinner party.”
Billy’s catchy banger is a whirlwind history lesson.
It rattles through headlines and pop culture moments in strict chronological order starting the year Billy Joel was born in 1949, and racing toward the late 1980s.
One of the song’s most packed lines – “Bardot, Budapest, Alabama, Khrushchev” – covers 1956, the year iconic French actress Brigitte Bardot shot to global fame in And God Created Woman.
It also nods to the Hungarian Revolution in Budapest, the Montgomery Bus Boycott in Alabama, and Nikita Khrushchev’s rise to power in the Soviet Union after Stalin’s death.
Music also runs through the song like a second timeline.
Chart topper Billy, now age 79, kicks things off with Cry singer Johnnie Ray in 1949, one of the first modern pop stars signed to a major label.
He quickly follows with Bill Haley & His Comets, whose Rock Around the Clock sent rock ’n’ roll into overdrive.
Elvis Presley turns up in 1955, Buddy Holly marks 1959 and the tragedy of the Day the Music Died, Chubby Checker dances into 1960.
Bob Dylan appears in 1961 as pop music takes a sharp turn toward protest and social change.
By the time Joel hits the mid-to-late 1960s, it’s Beatlemania and Woodstock.
Bernie Goetz gets a mention after he became a household name in 1984 for shooting four black men on a train in New York after they allegedly demanded money.
One of the men was left brain damaged and paraplegic, and the shooting became a symbol of deep racial divide in the city.
Goetz handed himself in to police nine days later and was dubbed the “subway vigilante” by local media.