Aloha !

A big part of doing a Bon Jovi show to me is pissing off as many fans as possible. Some might say I’m a wanker because I’m saying that, but when I’m saying this I also include my brother, my niece, my friends, basically everyone who has decided to go to the same show as me. And everyone has the right to do the same to me, I can handle that. And everyone I'm with knows this, sadly.

It all started with the fake report on Jovitalk where I stated that I had a Backstage Pass (obviously rubbish, it rolled right out of my printer here) and that I was organizing the numbering system. This didn’t go over very well at Backstage, and Rebekka tried to find out who I was and if it was really true. She contacted friend X (I won’t say his name, he’s got 40 shows to go) and asked him if it was true. It wasn’t, but he kept his mouth shut. And because friend X didn’t say anything, some Backstagers decided to go earlier with the chance of getting there before me.

No way I was leaving on Tuesday to see a show on Thursday. Not this tour, I’m a busy man nowadays with a life and since all those Backstagers are butt ugly, there’s no point in leaving early as I’m not planning on giving them some taste of my hot bratwurst throughout the cold nights on their self made camping sites. No ****ing way. I was leaving on Thursday morning after I had properly shaved myself (the Liam Gallagher sized sideburns were gone) and had given myself a fantastic meal (peanut butter always works well before a long ride). It was a quality drive in the car that had no CD player, so all we had was a 10 year old cassette tape that came from the time that Seb didn’t have a CD player in his room yet. There was a bonus though; a 10 year old cassette tape meant no songs from Crush, Bounce blablabla you’ll get the picture. We drove to the center of Holland to get picked up by some women from the Dutch board that haven’t completely lost track and do have some common sense, and finally we were on our way to Gelsenkirchen. The sun was shining, there was not enough room on the backseat for 3 persons and with all the singing they did they soon were soaking wet.

Anyway. We arrived in Gelsenkirchen, wondered where Thierry was and shock horror: we found him while he was buying fast-food. Of all places where you could find Thierry, we found him there. Absolutely mind-blowing. It was nice seeing him again though for a short while I think he disagreed with me because when I gave him a pat on the back he spilled ketchup all over his sleeve. Oh boy I have never seen someone looking so mad at me because of ketchup on his sleeve, but luckily he recovered and we started chatting a bit. He told me both Bed Of Roses and Always had been soundchecked and that some idiot told him that Seat Next To You had also been done, but because of the idiot telling him that, he didn't really believe it. He also told me some I hadn’t made friends with some of the Backstagers, but I wasn’t there to become friends with Backstagers anyway so I didn’t care and found it funny that people still believe all the crap I post on Jovitalk. I heard Rebekka wanted to know what I looked like, so here’s a couple of pictures of Me, my brother, Thierry & Tom. I'm not sure if the girls want me to post pictures of them so I'm not going to bother.



Now that that’s sorted, on to the next chapter of this brilliant story. Getting inside. Eventim absolutely didn’t have a clue of what sort of tickets they sold, so thanks to the brilliant organization close to 100 people with FOS tickets queued in the wrong line. Or snake, as Eventim think the English word for queue is (slänge apparently is queue in German, so Snake is English for queue. Brilliant). When the doors opened, all Backstagers were already inside and we were queuing for the wrong entrance. We had to put our ticket over some scanner that read the zipcode but soon found out that it didn’t work when some kraut started screaming and cursing in the face of a poor little girl that didn’t have a clue of what she did wrong. Right. Onto the next queue. We had asked several Germans if this was the right queue for the FOS tickets and they all said no, so now Seb + cohorts would not have been Seb + cohorts if he didn’t think he had the right for a better spot in the queue thanks to those morons that had send him away. So, after we parked ourselves right in front of their faces, we got in earlier than them, got into the pit and they didn’t, so all was well in the end. So far so good.

The support act was horrible, so we started singing some Dutch slagersongs instead. We were surrounded by other Dutch people and finally we found people that figured that it was cool to have fun during the waiting and didn’t give us a look of “ssssh, thou shall not talk when we wait”. We made it through the support act, she went off, goodbye, **** off and may you never return Giannananniin Nanninninanoooooni.

By the way, I haven’t mentioned yet in this review that I am cool as ****, so there and anyone who disagrees is wrong. Now that that’s sorted, you’ve just wasted some time to reading a lot of crap that’s completely unnecessary and doesn’t have anything to do with the show itself. But, Seb wouldn’t be Seb if he wouldn’t make it up to you, so I’ll start reviewing the show now.

When the lights go out the intro music starts to play but it’s too long. It gets the crowd excited but there was no action, just some cyber noise. Some light effects, but no build up apart from some booms here and there. The intro for the HAND tour was better, as was the intro for the Bounce tour.

The band came on stage, kicked into Lost Highway and I was wrong about that one (oooh Seb says he’s wrong, somebody quote me now and put it in his/her signature). Lost Highway as an opener works. I don’t know why, but it does. It’s miles better than Last Man Standing and it’s a fun song to hear. Born To Be My Baby sounds fresh again and I think it’s a little bit faster than on previous tours, let’s hope they’ll extend it again in Europe because singing nanananana for 2 minutes is a lot more fun than singing It’s Alright it’s alright for 2 minutes, but we’ll get to that later. Because Bad Name didn’t come second but third it finally changes things a bit in the start of the show. So all was well, but obviously Capt. Crash needed to be played or the ****ing Backstagers couldn’t throw around their confetti and couldn’t wave their arms. ****ing horrible crap shit song. Every person that likes Capt. Crash is gay, and now we got that sorted, we'll move on to Older, one of the better songs from Crush and Jon’s fish-faces were all over the place during the chorus. He nailed the song though and it again sounded like a fresh song.