Source: Irish Examiner

JON BON JOVI certainly enters the room like a rock star. He is wearing mirrored shades to mask the ravages of jet lag.

The first words he utters are a growled “F**k off”, when his PR informs him that he needs to have his photo taken.

He is preceded by his reputation — at least in the British and Irish press — as a sort of grumpy old man of rock. However, it soon transpires that, while Bon Jovi is still very much a rock star (perhaps even, if judged solely on album and concert ticket sales, the pre-eminent rock star of his generation), he is much less of a grumpy one these days. Today he is in full-on ‘charm’ mode; friendly and funny, with a habit of slapping you on the knee when he says something he’s particularly pleased with.

The night before our interview, he had appeared on The One Show, playing a glass armonica (an unusual instrument in which a series of spinning glass bowls produce musical notes) and looking slightly bamboozled by the show’s format (“We don’t have anything quite like that at home,” he says). Earlier in the day he had managed not to look too put-out when, at the press conference for the band’s July show in Hyde Park, many journalists ignored the band to ask a representative from the concert promoters AEG questions about volume levels (last year, several Hyde Park concerts were disrupted by poor sound). And after our interview, he and his band — the guitarist Richie Sambora, keyboard player David Bryan and drummer Tico Torres — will appear on Radio 2, playing their new songs live for the first time, despite a distinct lack of rehearsal.

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