Perhaps, I think, it is after all better that a bloke is conducting this interview. “If Rolling Stone asked at this point,” he adds, “I wouldn’t do an interview. I couldn’t care less.”
Yet the trivia lingers on. Even Ally McBeal turned on Victor’s hair, accusing each strand of having its own stylist. Bon Jovi laughs long when I repeat the line to him. “I’m just glad I still have some,” he says when he stops.


The original Marie Antoinette do was actually an invention of his father, John Bongiovi, who owned not so much an old-fashioned barber shop as a new-fangled salon. A funny second career for a Marine, I say. But, Jon says, those were the times. Even in working-class New Jersey people were dressing better, dreaming bigger and getting the hair they wanted. “Was a plumber’s son from New Jersey supposed to grow a goatee and wear a leather jacket and run a beauty shop? Probably not. But he did.”

His songs have been hymns of possibility to his constituency of blue-collar fans ever since. They are, he says, “all about endless optimism”. But did America honour the promise of that era? He considers this carefully. Every Dick Tracy gadget his generation lusted after is now a reality, he says, yet 25 per cent of the population of Philadelphia, where he supports a homelessness charity, lives below the poverty line. “[The gap between rich and poor] is getting greater every day. They’re eliminating the middle class in this country altogether.”

He was a friend of Al Gore and the musical support act for John Kerry’s campaign two years ago. The title song of his last album, Have A Nice Day, is a sarcastic reference to Kerry’s defeat. In the end the only Democrat he backed all the way to victory was the fictional Matt Santos on The West Wing. Might he do an Arnie and run for office? “I will never say never. All the things I’ve done in my life I would have never predicted. I mean, Nashville! Going to the country music awards! I never thought I’d own a football team. But my intention’s no. I can get more done with a social conscience as a philanthropist than I can in politics.”

So personal morality comes first? “Trust me, I’m no saint. That’s another thing: skeletons in my closet.” How many would there be for the political press to find? “I’m a singer in a rock band. What do you think?”

I say that it must have been hard not becoming an arsehole. He pauses long enough to give the impression that he is checking to ensure that he hasn’t. Choosing to stay and live in New Jersey helps, he says. So does Dorothea. “She’s much less grand than I am; she could live in a box and be content. It’s my craziness that costs us money. It’s not her, ever. I’ll say, ‘We’re taking my plane to England’; she’ll say, ‘You arsehole’.” And he backs down? “Um, I consider her input and decide accordingly. Do we row? Rarely, to be honest. I just truly like her so much and admire her. I’m her biggest fan. She’s the reason I have four, I think, sane kids. It ain’t me. I am sitting around and going to the studio. She’s the one doing it all. So God bless her for it. I wouldn’t want to f*** it up.”

Paul McCartney has said his marriage to Linda worked partly because they never spent a night apart. “Is that true? Wow! I think part of our incredible relationship is that I have the freedom to go do what I need to do. And she’s a very independent woman. She doesn’t need to call five times a night. It helps.”

He says he needs to shower. I don’t disagree. I wait for him in the lobby. Once each strand of his hair has been attended to personally, he reappears, in a too-cool-for-school leather waistcoat, black jacket and gold sunglasses. He doesn’t exchange a word with me and vanishes after five minutes. Bon Jovi, I decide, is just rock’n’roll enough. He deserves his induction