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22 June 2003 - Glasgow, Scotland, UK Concert Review 29 June 2003
Bon Jovi

A review by Times Online

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,1-245-723447,00.html />
June 24, 2003

Bon Jovi
by Stephen Dalton
Pop
Glasgow Ibrox Stadium

SHOWING scant compulsion to slow down as middle age looms, despite having sold more than 100 million albums and carved a respectable acting sideline, Jon Bon Jovi took Glasgow by storm on Sunday night.
The latest Bon Jovi album, Bounce, was reportedly written as a defiantly upbeat response to the events of September 11, 2001. This would certainly explain the incongruous sea of stars-and-stripes flags in Glasgow, but mercifully there were no crass attempts by the New Jersey quintet to dignify their Springsteen-lite rockers with the gravitas of real-life tragedy.

Most of the new album tracks, from the rousing Everyday to the plodding ballad The Distance, could have been culled from any time in the band’s 20-year history. Light on their feet, untroubled by intellectual ambition or musical progression, they fit the well-worn Bon Jovi formula perfectly.

As the feverish Ibrox crowd punched the sky in unison to early set highlights such as You Give Love a Bad Name and an explosively dynamic Keep the Faith, the temptation to deride these towering anthems of jaw-dropping banality was as strong as ever. But in fairness, Bon Jovi’s Glasgow show was grimly impressive in its sustained barrage of mass hysteria and brutally efficient chorus hooks. An apparently endless supply of massive hit singles and soundalike cousins were stacked up like airliners over a busy runway, just waiting for the photogenic New Jersey singer to wave them down to land.

Also impressive, in a perverse way, is how Bon Jovi himself has spent 20 years as a multi-platinum songwriter without ever once revealing anything that could be mistaken for genuine emotion. Instead, his lyrics are a compendium of hackneyed B-movie Americana and blankly affirmative slogans that could have been culled from a middle management motivational manual — stunningly vacant exhortations to follow your dream, give life your best shot and sleep when you’re dead.

These inspirational nuggets reached some kind of sublime plateau in Glasgow with a rousing version of the former single It’s My Life, during which Bon Jovi proudly boasted that “I just wanna live while I’m alive”. A commendably wise choice.

And yet there is something oddly comforting in the shallowness and immutability at the core of the group’s soulless stadium roadshow. Empires may crumble and the new world order may shift under our feet, but give or take the odd haircut, the spookily ageless New Jersey rockers remain one of life’s few unchanging landmarks.

Jon Bon Jovi often likens himself to Tom Cruise, and his live performances undeniably boast the same cheap but potent allure as populist Hollywood blockbusters.

You may feel soiled and hollow afterwards, but for two hours you are thoroughly entertained.

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