It was difficult not to notice that something was amiss when Bon Jovi played at Wembley Stadium in 2019. That something was Jon Bon Jovi’s voice – top notes went awry, melody lines fell flat. Not always, but often enough to be unsettling. The girl next to mewho would have once forgiven Jon if he’d accidentally driven his motorbike into her as long as she’d got an autograph – suggested we leave before the end.
Jon, who doesn’t talk much, and says even less when he does, has been surprisingly candid of late: Thank You, Goodnight: The Bon Jovi Story, a four-part documentary airing on Disney +, charts his journey to combat his atrophied vocal cord and the major surgery to fix it. As he told The Sunday Times recently: “If the singing is not great, if I can’t be the guy I once was, then I’m done… I don’t ever need to be the fat Elvis.”
Time will tell how arena shows around the world will treat one of the best rock stars of the past few decades (argueis pointing him and his band in the right direction again. After the woeful, and pretty much solo, record, sounds like a Bon Jovi album. Rock songs, power ballads, it’s a big-sounding record designed to be played to big rooms. Admittedly it’s no but that’s like expecting to still fit into the T-shirt you bought on that late-80s tour. Time has moved on for all of us.
