Aloha !

It’s a Sunday afternoon and it’s been a week ago since I was in London. Much has happened there, and what you’re about to read will be mostly useless information about my trip. It’s taken me very long to type it out, mostly because I had to finish my school in the last 2 weeks, and I’ve been busy with
erm, someone else. But more about that later. This will be the longest review Jovitalk has ever witnessed and I’m pretty sure you don’t care about more than half what’s written here, but I’ve typed it out anyway.

It all started last year in November. It was a bit of a rough year and I decided to spend my money on what I thought would be really cool; a trip to Berlin for me and my girlfriend. As it turned out: the trip to Berlin would be the last holiday Seb would ever spend with his girlfriend. When we got back, I told her I was sort of broke (no surprise there), and wanted to stop spending money on fancy things for a while as I wanted to go see Bon Jovi in London with her. She couldn’t really appreciate that since she broke up 4 weeks after Berlin, claiming that I was never willing to spend money on her. Yeah well if a ****ing Holiday isn’t enough money for you, go **** yourself then, I’m gone. A few months later Thierry told me that Tom had a spare ticket for the first night in Twickenham. I was still feeling a bit miserable over November, but Thierry and Tom both said that they’d love to have my company. It had been way too long since I had spend some quality time (talking rubbish for 24 hours a day) with Thierry so eventually he convinced me to go. What even better news was, was that Tom had another spare ticket for the second night as well. I bought one for the other night as well and it looked like for the first time in his life Seb would be off to London alone to meet his cohorts over there. I Booked a plane ticket and all was well.

So the tour started, it was a bit shit in Gelsenkirchen, but as soon as they got on fire in Germany I started to get excited. It’d been a little too long since I got excited over Bon Jovi with that terrible Have A Nice Day Tour, so things looked pretty good. When having in depth conversations with Thierry on MSN he was still the negative one and every time Bon Jovi were supposed to be playing somewhere in Europe he was always like “Tonight’s going to be shit”. And we saw shits set passing by. Shit sets from Stuttgart, Hamburg, and Barcelona. All bloody brilliant, so I started to get excited for London. We were thinking “If Frankfurt, Hamburg, Amsterdam and Brussels can be this good, London must be ****ing amazing!”

A day before my trip I went to see Tesla live and I came back at 1 o’clock at night, which was a bit late as I needed to get out of bed at 6 in the morning, but still. Got up at 6, took a shower, shaved myself properly (all for Thierry, obviously), packed my bag and I was off to Amsterdam to catch my flight. I flew with EasyJet and met someone at Schiphol, started chatting and she just kept complaining how rubbish EasyJet was. Well yeah, we did get a half hour but I didn’t care. Thierry probably did though, his flight plan was changed and he flew 1 hour earlier. He decided to wait for me on Stansted so I kept thinking “poor Thierry…” Actually I didn’t but this might make me look like am a very social and loyal friend so there. I had an easy flight, and met up with Thierry at Stansted who looked pretty knackered because of all the waiting. Right away he came with his “They’re going to play this they’re going to play that, I hope they won’t play the entire Lost Highway album what do you think Seb Seb Seb?” and I replied that I just wanted to hear Put The Boy Back In Cowboy and nothing else. “But they never play bonus tracks Seb”. Well if they don’t, what’s All I Want Is Everything then? Right, Thierry shut up with his pointless banter about what songs they were going to play, we got on the train, went to our hotel that actually was a pub with a curfew and didn’t open before 12. Nice, we were there at 11 in the morning but were so lucky as right across the street there was this fancy restaurant called McDonalds. Brilliant. We had, erm, “lunch”, dropped our bags at the pub and took the underground to see some of London. Thierry had all these brilliant ideas of where we could eat (I just finished my ****ing nuggets) but he desperately needed to get a beer, so at 2 he was off for his first beer, which he really enjoyed. Seeing Thierry smile like that was worth the trip alone. It didn’t last long though, as Thierry was, according to him, wearing the wrong shoes for the day. The longer we walked, the more he complained, and near the end of the day he walked like a cripple duck. This needed to get sorted though, as I wasn’t planning on carrying Thierry on my back for the rest of the weekend.

We met up with Tom and had a healthy dinner ( a burger and some potatoes) and were off to see Whitesnake and Def Leppard at Wembley Arena. Thierry and Tom both already had tickets but I didn’t after seeing the shit
performance of Leppard at Arrow Rock. Whitesnake were alright though, so I figured that maybe I could buy a ticket from a scalper instead. When we arrived at Wembley Arena we came to the conclusion that our pub would close at 11 and we still didn’t have the key of our room. I thought we’d be back before that as Whitesnake were on first and I didn’t want to see Leppard anyway, but Thierry got so nervous that he sold me his ticket for 30BP, which was pretty stupid actually as scalpers sold theirs for 45, so me and Tom had a good laugh over it after Thierry was gone.


Seb's first wristband!!!

It was the first time I was at Wembley Arena and it really is a shithole. Shit acoustics, small accommodation and all that, I expected a lot more from it to be honest. When Whitesnake came on all was well. Their opening song was rubbish but as soon as they started to play the bigger hits things got better. Got a few of my favorites and they played some acoustic stuff as well. David Coverdale made the mistake of doing a big introduction for a song and then found out that they weren’t going to play it anyway, which was fun to see. He didn’t get pissed like a certain JBJ would be. In the middle of the show someone had blew up a condom and he asked the crowd to hand it over. He asked what it was and said “well this looks funny, I haven’t used one since I was…four!” Great banter, he was in a much better mood than at Arrow and we got a few different songs as well. 2 acoustic songs which were nice too. Near the end of a show he still relied a little too much on the backing vocals though.


I had a rather good view.

After Whitesnake I got a text message from Thierry that he was at the pub safe and well. Tom went home, I took a picture of Wembley just for the sake of it:



And I went to our pub, arrived, and found out that Thierry gave me the big bed, which was a pretty nice gesture. The TV was shit, they said it was cable but all we got was a lousy antenna and 4 channels so we started chatting a bit about life and stuff. It’d been a long time since we did that, and it sort of felt like the good old times again. At 1 o’ clock we decided it was time to go to sleep, and that was the end of day one.

Day 2 started earlier than planned with me waking up at 8 in the morning. I went off to buy something to eat and drink at the supermarket across the street, bought some drinks for the Bon Jovi show (see, I just mentioned Bon Jovi in this review!) and bought some blister plasters for Thierry. He felt so relieved when I gave it to him and started to smile again. “It’s really helping Seb, wonderful”. Yeah, whatever floats your boat man, they’re only plasters. I took a shower in what was a pretty dirty bathroom. Again, it was advertised as a room with its own bathroom so again we didn’t really get what we paid for but anyway. It was a bit of a small shower for Seb the tall Dutch-man, but I got myself washed in there anyway. I put on some clean clothes and Thierry asked me how many clothes I had with me. When I replied “just 4 shirts, a hoodie, clean underwear and one pair of pants” he looked surprised as he had 4 pair of pants, 4 shirts, 2 sweaters, clean underwear and 2 pair of shoes. So by now, ladies and gentlemen, I think it’s fair to say that Thierry’s the bitch of the 2 of us. When he was finally ready and had his make up on we went into London to see whatever would cross our road. Here’s some of the highlights:








I did see something of London! Honest!

Thierry was capable of walking again and said he almost didn’t feel his feet anymore but I wasn’t sure if that was really a good thing though, he got his first beer at 11 o’ clock and felt a bit tipsy (but was happy again) and in the afternoon we went off t have dinner at Wagamama’s for some Japanese food. Near the end of the day we met up with Tom again and decided to catch the train to Twickenham and were finally off to see Bon Jovi at Twickenham.


My second wristband! Whoohoo!