The big hair and tight pants may be long gone, but Bon Jovi’s show on Saturday night at the Olympic Stadium was big in every other way: big sound, big visuals (including a very big car), big anthems – big enough to fill an arena with well over 50,000 people in it.
The final leg of the BECAUSE WE CAN world tour which began at the start of this year, the staging of the show is ambitious in every way, with a stage comprising huge screens, dozens of smaller televisions and an enormous Buick Electra 225 named “Sofia”, which, according to the program notes, took three cranes to construct and 26 containers to ship to Australia.
Not long into the gig and it becomes readily apparent why Jon Bon Jovi has become the de facto standard bearer for that period of popular music/culture of the 80s where too much was never quite enough and whatever the music may have lacked from a rock n roll purist’s perspective, the fashion and the sentiment more than made up for. At any rate, Bon Jovi is certainly the only act left from that era that can still pack out stadiums all over the world.
The other thing fans would have been struck by was how age has not wearied him, and at 51, Bon Jovi’s youthful vitality managed to sustain the show for well over 2 hours, despite the inevitable lulls.
So how did the music itself stack up? Bon Jovi has been performing for 30 years now and like most acts of this vintage the show combined the old with the new, or in this case the classics or the reason everyone was there and the newer stuff, including material off the latest album, What About Now.
The show started with a number off that album but then launched straight into one of those seminal classics, ‘You give love (a bad name)’, which set the tone for the rest of the night, and whilst the applause for the new stuff was there, it was the classics, several of them from 1986’s Slippery When Wet, which provided the highlights.
There were dull patches, including a period of slower numbers which, despite the mildly engaging ‘Dead or Alive’, kind of felt like filler.
Yet it was Bon Jovi’s adeptness in knowing just when to crank up the tempo which helped to sustain the gig, following a slower or newer number with a fist-thumping rendition of high-octane hits such as ‘It’s my Life’ and ‘Keep the Faith’.
It was in the last half hour where everything got cranked up to 11, starting with a particularly rousing rendition of ‘Bad Medicine’ and a medley which included ‘Jumpin Jack Flash’, ‘Great Balls of Fire’ and a gutsy rendition of ‘You Shook me All Night Long’ which brought the house down. It was during these numbers where the band (minus founding member and iconic guitarist Richie Sambora, who left the tour in April) really shone.
However, it was ‘Living on a Prayer’, the last song of the night, that biggest of all Bon Jovi’s anthems, which brought the entire stadium into a rapture, capturing the sheer joyousness of a whole era. I doubt if there was a single individual present, save for the odd security person, who didn’t join in the chorus, so to speak.
Bon Jovi’s show wasn’t great from go to woe but it had more than enough of those moments to make it a memorable night out for this reviewer.
Photo by David Bergman for Bon Jovi – Jon Bon Jovi performs with his band at Eden Arena in Prague, Czech Republic on June 24, 2013.