Sunday June 26,2011
By Rob Garrett
BON JOVI occupy a strange place in the pantheon of modern music. Ridiculed by the rock establishment for their blow-dried mullets and no-brains choruses, they were never quite young or soft enough to make it as a rock n’ roll boy band.
Instead they found a niche as the rock fan’s guilty pleasure, and pop fan’s bit of rough rock. A niche perhaps, but a very large one. The New Jersey rockers are one of just a handful of bands who can not only headline Hyde Park, but can keep a 50,000-strong crowd on their feet and in song for three hours.
While 100 miles away Coldplay gently lulled Glastonbury’s mud-soaked Saturday night, Bon Jovi took to the stage at its polar-opposite in the festival world, brand-heavy Hard Rock Calling. It would be tough to find a better fit of band and gig; Bon Jovi made for the open air, they duly left no hit-shaped stone unturned. There were the eighties anthems on which they made their millions – You Give Love a Bad Name, Lay Your Hands on Me, and of course, Livin’ on a Prayer – alongside newer songs shrewdly modelled on the same aching chord changes and life-affirming lyrics, like It’s My Life and Have A Nice Day.
To enjoy this music, like an action movie or a whodunit crime novel, you need to check your suspension of disbelief at the gate. But there were perhaps two moments when the line to self-parody was crossed – a painful piano and vocal cover of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, and the decision to bathe the back of the stage with images of Martin Luther King during the faux-politics of We Weren’t Born To Follow.
Jon Bon Jovi’s “we’re going to be here until the cops drag me off” routine felt very tired on the 49-year-old’s lips, while out in the crowds all the talk was of “him”, not “them”, after a quarter of a century fans still mistaking the band’s eponymous front man for a solo artist.
As an incessant torrent of sing-a-long choruses bled into squealing guitar solos and formulaic ballads, a veteran of five Bon Jovi concerts taps me on the shoulder and confides: “I don’t know this one, but they all go the same.”
This was music lacking in all subtlety or imagination, and after three carefully-executed encores it was clear spontaneity was never an option either. To the band, no doubt vanishing on their private jet, it was just another stop on another world tour.
But as a pre-packaged experience of rock n’ roll fast food it hit the spot. Nearly 50,000 people came together for this celebration of the predictable and, leaving the royal park strewn with a sea of empty beer cups, their lives were left in some way touched.
3/5
3 of 5 REALLY??????????? That show was 4.5/5 (No Never Say Goodbye)
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