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Supersonic's all mattering Bon Jovi in London review.
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. http://www.bonjovi-archives.com/Lond...tWristband.jpg 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. http://www.bonjovi-archives.com/Londen/Whitesnake.jpg 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: http://www.bonjovi-archives.com/Lond...yIveseenit.jpg 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: http://www.bonjovi-archives.com/Londen/Mc1.jpg http://www.bonjovi-archives.com/Londen/Mc2.jpg http://www.bonjovi-archives.com/Londen/Mc3.jpg http://www.bonjovi-archives.com/Londen/Sightseeing.jpg 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. http://www.bonjovi-archives.com/Lond...dWristband.jpg My second wristband! Whoohoo! |
The security at Twickenham was a joke. There were 2 queues for the general admission entrance at Gate C. One for people carrying bags and one for people not carrying bags. Still, if I would’ve brought a beer crate and would’ve claimed that it wasn’t a bag I would’ve gotten in without any problems. As soon as I got in Twickenham it surprised me how empty it felt. It was big, but there was not really any atmosphere at all yet. We had missed the first support act and when the second support act we felt a bit sad as we didn’t miss that one either. We started to look around for other Jovitalkers and now Kev’s favorite moment of the tour came and he met me. I met Carli, Yvonne and Deb as well, was nice meeting them and we were off looking for a good spot without a Kev hanging around us. We walked a bit to the front, got 25th row, I looked back and saw Emil at the barrier of the General Admission Area. I send him a text message about how he was probably jealous at me, showed it to Tom and he said “Have you seen the girl beside him? That’s probably his girlfriend. Who’s really jealous now, Seb?” and I told Tom to shut up. When the support act announced their last song the crowd cheered so loudly that the singer said something like “yeah **** off we’ll be gone and you can do whatever you like” after they were gone there was zero applause and people just felt relieved that they were gone. It wasn’t really music, it was just noise.
When the intro music for Bon Jovi came on at 8:20 me and Thierry realized that this was going to be a short show. There was a curfew at 10:30 so there was no way they were going to extend this show. During the intro music I realized that this stadium didn’t feel like it was anticipating a great show. It merely felt like Ostend 2003, a crowd that was just waiting for whatever was about to come. Something about it just didn’t feel right. The band came on, everyone cheered, but it felt messy. They were still picking up their guitars while David started the intro of Prayer and although it was refreshing to hear a different opener again, the magic just wasn’t there. Jon came on, did his usual stuff, delivered a proper vocal for the song, Bad Name followed, the crowd was awake, but as soon as Lost Highway followed the moment was completely lost. Right after song 2 it was just a silent crowd. Jon realized it though, and went into auto-pilot right away. He wasn’t into it at all anymore and it would take a little while before he picked it up again. During Sleep there was somebody putting up a sign for Mercy, Jon pointed at it and it looked like he was giving it a go but instead he started Twist & Shout, which was alright but didn’t really work as well as the other covers I’ve heard them do during the Sleep Medley. Start Me Up followed with Bobbies guitar still being a bit low in the mix so the intro went a bit lost. After Sleep the band were apparently about to do another cover as everyone looked a bit surprised when Jon went back to the usual “seven days of Saturday…” stuff. Sleep felt rather messy and not like it was planned. When Blaze followed Richie messed up the slide work several times and Jon almost messed up the end chorus but managed to do it without really failing it. He didn’t look too happy during the song and when Whole Lot Of Leavin’ followed he was completely back into the auto-pilot mode. He introduced Diamond Ring as a song that was “what they’d do best” but the crowd had lost interest during `Leaving so Diamond Ring was a bit lost. It was a very good version though, better than the one in Amsterdam, mostly because of Richie delivering very, very good backing vocals. With Richie having the louder voice of the two of them, and them both singing in the same microphone it was a bit hard to hear Jon sing and Jon really needed to give his all during the song just to be able to deliver the song as well as Richie did. So there, after 9 songs there was finally a highlight during this show. We hoped things would pick up but Always followed. Normally I’d say that it’s a good thing but when Richie was doing his ending guitar solo Jon gave the band the signal to end it, Tico did but Richie didn’t notice it and by then Jon looked even more upset. The band finished the song a bit later, Richie did a good guitar solo but not as smashing as in Amsterdam, and when the song had finished and In These Arms started Jon started to walk away from Richie and didn’t look at him at all during the entire song. I don’t really think that many people noticed, but Richie did when he tried to make eye contact with Jon and Jon just looked away several times. It looked a bit forced and pathetic to be honest. Thierry said something like “I bet we get a rare song like Dry County or Hey God to make up for the shit set so far, and I thought he could be right about it.” We Got It Goin’ On followed with Jon doing the usual banter about how he wanted to hear us scream and sure the crowd screamed and the overall performance was nice, but I just couldn’t get into the show at all anymore. Sure, it all sounded great but it lacked soul. It all felt empty, and Jon especially just looked like he couldn’t be arsed at all anymore. It’s My Life followed, more standard moves from Jon, and when he had to introduce Richie again it was the first time he gave Richie a look anyway. Richie’s version of There For You was pretty good again. Jon came back on and Dry County started. This was the first time I heard the song again after hearing it in Dusseldorf back in 2006 when it finally made its return to the set. And I’ll probably get a lot of shit over saying this, but the song didn’t do anything for me. And that’s not because I’m spoiled, I really love the song, but tonight the magic just wasn’t there. It felt like a compensation from Jon. Like “I give ‘em this song so I can satisfy the die hards” and it just doesn’t work like this. The overall performance was so much better compared to Dusseldorf, where Jon messed up the words several times, Richie was too drunk to realize what he was playing, but the atmosphere in the pit back in 2006 was so much better. Note for note the guitar solo was perfect, but the amazing feeling of getting the song just didn’t occur. Jon was good on it, but again, looked like he didn’t want to do the song at all. Have A Nice Day, Keep The Faith and Who Says You Can’t Go Home were all as standard as could be, they’re just not worth mentioning anymore, nothing special happened during the song, but during Bad Medicine I had some fun. Right in front of me there was this blonde girl with big boobs who was dancing all the time, and Thierry got that look in his eyes saying “Oh **** Seb, you’re not going to do anything silly, right?”. When Shout came on she started jumping and while laughing at Thierry and Tom, I was staring at her tits bouncing all over the place. Tom and Thierry were laughing too, but not because I was staring at her tits, but because the girl was there with her mum, and her mum was laughing at me. Whoops. I obviously made a picture of it though, which I will now share with you. And no, she didn’t mind, just in case anyone’s wondering: http://www.bonjovi-archives.com/Londen/Shout.jpg After Shout the band were off. Hmmm. During the encore break the crew put some lyric sheets on stage so we were hoping for something special, but it turned out to be Hallelujah. You’d expect Jon to know the lyrics of that song by now but seeing as he still needs lyric sheets for Mercy as well it didn’t really come as a surprise after all. Hallelujah was good, but the crowd didn’t really know what to think of it. Richie wasn’t on stage during the song at all, and when he came back with the double neck for Wanted we knew the show would be over, and we were all pretty pissed off about it. When he house lights did go on we just felt so disappointed by this performance. On paper the set looks pretty good, but the delivery of the band was so disappointing. I didn’t think I’d ever say this but Gelsenkirchen was a better show, just because Jon was excited during the first half of the show, and because it did have a better encore. After the show we felt tired, and although we wanted to go to the first Jovitalk meeting we Thierry was so incredibly pissed off by this performance and the fact that he was walking like a cripple duck again that I decided to go back to our pub instead. Thierry got even more pissed when we couldn’t find out how the bus connections worked and wanted to take a cab instead so I wished him good luck with that because there was no way I was going to pay for that. For a very short while it wasn’t really fun hanging out with Thierry and I think it’s a good thing that we’ve read each other’s manual very carefully or things could’ve gone terribly wrong right there. I let Thierry just rant on, tried to find out how to get back to our pub and I was actually still pretty happy despite the show. Thierry’s mood was completely the opposite of mine, so it was time for us to go to sleep. So sorry we missed the after party, but Thierry needed his sleep. We got in a night bus, made it to our pub but I’d gotten a bit hungry, and how lucky I was! McDonalds. Open 24h per day. So I got myself some nuggets and French fries, ate them in our hotel room (that smelled like McDonalds shortly after my dinner) and went to bed at 3 in the morning, but still kept on going on with our pointless banter. There were some serious deep discussions in bed, and the best one was when I asked Thierry how long it should take before you’d start having sex without a condom. He replied “Right away. Sex with a condom is like eating a burger with the plastic still wrapped round it”. Brilliant. End of day 2. |
Day 3 started pretty early. I got up at 8 again because I was hungry and went to the supermarket. Thierry was still a bit moody and sort of surprised that I was already up. I got back with some bread, something to read and after my lunch I went back to sleep because I realized that I still felt a bit tired after all. Roughly at 12 o’ clock I found myself awake again, took a shower in the bathroom that was even more dirty than before and put some clothes on. I was ready again, but it took my bitch Thierry a little longer before he was ready to go. I’d gotten him some new blister plasters which made him feel slightly better, and when he realized it was 12 o’ clock he was happy as he told me he expected me to drag him out of bed early in the morning. We went to Denmark street to check some music shops and Thierry explained a little bit about guitars because I’ve got absolutely no idea of what a guitar is and what isn’t, so Thierry was the man. We found a pathetic excuse just to play on some guitars (we are musicians after all), and went back to Wagamama’s to meet up with Tom and Laura. On our journey I made a few more pictures of the highlights of London again:
http://www.bonjovi-archives.com/Londen/Mc4.jpg http://www.bonjovi-archives.com/Londen/Mc5.jpg While sitting there, waiting for our dinner, Tom and Laura came in and said they just met Bobby at the entrance but he didn’t want to come in as there was a queue to get a table. During dinner we started thinking about ideas for banners, and Tom said we should make banners for Hugh instead. I started writing down whatever ideas came up, and here’s the brilliant list: http://www.bonjovi-archives.com/Londen/Requests.jpg We had a shitload more, and had great fun thinking of them. While having so much fun Laura pointed out that Tico came in, and in fact he did. He sat at a table, and Tom said that I should give him the list and say that I had a bunch of requests, which is what I did. Me, Thierry and Laura went over to his table and I said “Sorry sir, I don’t want to disturb your meal, but I’ve got a bunch of requests for tonight.” And I handed him the list. He didn’t really know what to think of it and probably thought I was serious with my requests, but I didn’t really care. We shook hands and Thierry asked if it would be alright if we could take a picture with him after dinner. It was alright he said, after dinner, so we went back to our seats and me and Thierry realized that of all times we meet a band member we did something silly like this, but it was a good laugh. When Tico left we got up and Thierry asked him once again if it’d be alright to take a picture and he didn’t mind at all. During our photo shoot Thierry kept shooting questions like “Are you going to play Lie To Me? Are you going to play This Ain’t A Love Song?” and Tico right away said “No, not This Ain’t A Love Song. I’m not sure about Lie To Me though.” Thierry asked him what the surprises for the night would be and he said something like “Just wait and see” and I said “you’re not going to spoil it for us anyway are you?” and he looked me straight in the eyes and said “alright then. Something To Believe In and I Believe”. Thierry repeated his words just to make sure if he wasn’t bullshitting us and he said “no bullshitting, Something To Believe In and I Believe”. Very cool. We took our pictures, when I was standing there beside him he said “get down here will ya?” and I got the only picture on which he’s actually laughing. It was a very cool moment. http://www.bonjovi-archives.com/Londen/TicowithSeb.jpg After dinner we went off back to our pub to get our things for the show and Tom and Laura already went to Twickenham. At our pub we took a quick inventory and Thierry sat down on his bed and the following happened: http://www.bonjovi-archives.com/Lond...dhelpmeSeb.jpg Pretty neat. He was absolutely clueless and didn’t have any idea of how to fix his own bed, so I did it for him, or he had to sleep in mine. I made up my own bed and sorted my clothes and I think it’s obvious right now who still lives with his mum and who lives on his own. http://www.bonjovi-archives.com/Lond...Illlieinit.jpg After I had fixed our hotel room we went off to Twickenham. On the train we started chatting with some fans who were going to see Bon Jovi the first time this tour, so we asked if they knew what was going to be played, and if they wanted to know it. They didn’t, so we said told them which songs they were not going to get. No Bad Medicine, no It’s My Life, no Always…to which the guy replied “Well that’s too bad, I was going to propose my girlfriend on this song but now it’s not going to happen.” We had a good laugh, an easy journey, made it to Twickenham again with its piss poor security and when I met up with Laura, Moron and Tom he offered me a drink of his bottle with Coke. Erm, coke? It was whiskey, and I only realized when I had taken a very big sip. Thierry and Tom were both laughing because they know how Seb never drinks any alcohol, and Tom told me they had 3 bottles of Whiskey/Coke with them. All thanks to the great security. http://www.bonjovi-archives.com/Lond...dWristband.jpg I let Tom take a picture of our group and joked that we were the Daltons: http://www.bonjovi-archives.com/Londen/Daltons.jpg Thierry said I was right as the tallest was the dumbest, which wasn't really a nice thing of him to say. Bastard. When we entered Twickenham The Feeling were already playing and they weren’t brilliant but certainly not god awful either. They went off and the crowd really loved them, so it was already a better start of the show than last night. I think that after the support act I met up with Emil and his friends who had GC tickets for the second show, and I told him about our meeting with Tico and how he would get one of the songs he’d been hoping for for such a long time. He said “Ah, must be 99 In The Shade then!”. No man, not 99 In The Shade. “Blame It On The Love” one of his friends said, and I thought “what the ****, no not that song” but then I saw his tattoo and laughed. “I Believe” Emil said, and when I said that was the one Emil got very happy, which was nice. Must be one of the very few times someone gets happy when I spoil a surprise for someone. He didn’t want to know the other surprise, so I kept my mouth shut. He went back to his old spot, and at 8:05 the intro music started so we knew the show would last 2 hours and 25 minutes long unless they would **** the curfew again. The start of the show was already better than last time. Jon came on with a guitar and looked like he actually wanted to be there. Rockin’ All Over The World started and was done better than in Amsterdam. It had many solo’s and this band looked like a rock band while doing it. It was a good start of the show, and I was hoping they’d keep it up like this. When Lost Highway followed, however, they right away lost the crowd again. Born To Be My Baby and Bad Name lived things up again, but when Summertime followed with it’s We Will Rock You thingy before it, they lost the crowd once again. Summertime just doesn’t work as a live song, but still Jon keeps on trying. It tanked every time I saw the band doing it, and there’s zero crowd participation during the song as well. Crash followed and with us being so bored already we decided to throw in some fancy dance moves during the song. This was seriously the most fun we had so far, simply because the band were so boring during the first 6 songs and Jon was on auto-pilot once again. I was glad Sleep followed, but there was no spontaneous stuff like what happened in Amsterdam, this again was pretty standard stuff. Again it looked like they were supposed to do more covers, but Jon cut it short. There was no reprise of Mercy as well, Jon just wasn’t into it. Blood Money was the first proper highlight of the show. I heard the song before this tour but still, me and Thierry were looking at each other and figured we both thought the same. “Jon nailed it”. Blaze obviously followed and again Richie messed up some slide work, and when doing so me and Thierry again looked at each other at the same time and said “Well, he didn’t really nail that one”. Blaze was alright, but not as spectacular as in Frankfurt or Amsterdam. Any Other Day followed Blaze and this song was just one big mess. During the song Jon struggled with the vocals a bit and when the final solo’s were supposed to be done he could not be bothered at all to do a proper band introduction. I introduced Bobby, introduced Lorenza and that was it. It was the attitude of “who gives a **** anyway I’m done with this song”. For the first time during both shows I saw Jon the front man who couldn’t be arsed about anything at all. In These Arms was done again, no need for that anyway but the crowd ate it and when We Got It Goin’ On followed so early in the set I figured that there should be a big encore coming up. While Jon might be done with Any Other Day, I’m very much done with We Got It Goin’ On. And It’s My Life. Both songs should get a rest. I know, It’s My Life was a big hit, but it lacks so much power live that it’s just boring to listen to. hen Keep The Faith was done me and Thierry were wondering if Jon would finally do some improvising which would be nice after 13 songs of auto pilot but it didn’t happen. Right after the guitar solo Jon went on with the song and it was a very boring version of Keep The Faith, no stunning vocals, just through the motions. Maybe Richie would save the show by doing Stranger In This Town? Nope, just There For You again. Have A Nice Day followed, very standard but nice, and then, finally, the first proper gem in the set. |
It finally was time for a proper speech from Jon, saying that they had done fan favorites on many shows, and this would be the first time they’d do the first track from the first album from the nineties, I Believe. Although it didn’t really come as a surprise for me, it was a brilliant version. I send a text message to Seem, one of my Dutch friends, and she called me back and heard the song on the phone. I’m still wondering how much that phone call will have cost me but we’ll see about that later. It really was a brilliant version with stunning vocals. This was Jon going for it. No, it wasn’t the best version I’ve heard, but the fact that they finally pulled out a rarity after such a long time slightly made up for the boring show so far. We were close to forgiving Jon the mediocre show so far, but he needed to do a little more for that. After I Believe, Who Says followed and with me and Thierry being so incredibly happy about I Believe even me and Thierry danced on this song. In a very gay way, but we thought no one noticed it anyway (how wrong we were, but more about it later). Bad Med. Followed, Prayer followed and they were off. We got together for our usual encore banter “what will they play? Well they’ve still got Something To Believe In to do” and Tom said “they won’t do it, Jon’s not up for it and only gave us I Believe to keep us happy”. We all figured he was probably right but hoped it wouldn’t be like that. I expected them to start with Something To Believe In, but they didn’t. It was Always. Well fine then, in my opinion an encore should start with a big hit, so they were off with a good song. When Wanted was next we got slightly worried that the show would be over, but luckily Sat. Night followed. Although, luckily? Jon rushed himself through the song, barely made any eye contact with the crowd, no improvisations in the middle of the song and we thought Sat. Night would be the last song. After Sat. Night the band sort of did a wave but got back together, teasing the crowd by pretending they’d be off. They got back together so we figured they would do a proper song then, but it was I Love This Town instead. Of all ****ing songs you can give your fans as an extra treat you do I Love This Town? Pathetic. After I Love This Town Jon went into Twist & Shout and by then me and Thierry were so ****ing bored that we actually wanted to leave. Out of 24 songs, only 2 songs were really worth it. I Believe and Blood Money. Twist & Shout ended the show, Jon extended the song a few times so he’d be just in time for the curfew, band did their wave and they were off.
Now before you all go like “Seb you shouldn’t complain, you’re spoiled/Seb you shouldn’t complain, you’ve seen too many shows” I’m going to explain why these 2 shows were pathetic excuses to end the tour with.
Just these 3 things made me leave with a bitter feeling, and when meeting up with several other Jovitalkers who´d seen them before this tour I wasn´t alone in this. Most of us really wanted to have a brilliant time during the show, but none of us really had it. I had most fun during Capt. Crash, and that was because I was just so bored by Bon Jovi that I decided to start fooling around instead. I´m also sure that for the casual fan or first timers this was a good show, but for the casual fan a show that would´ve lasted 1 hour and 50 minutes would´ve been brilliant as well. So this is why me and Thierry were so incredibly pissed about Bon Jovi, and it got even worse when we saw the real set. 1. ROCKIN' ALL OVER THE WORLD 2. LOST HIGHWAY 3. BORN TO BE MY BABY 4. BAD NAME 5. SUMMERTIME 6. CAPT. CRASH 7. SLEEP 8. BLAZE OF GLORY 9. ANY OTHER DAY 10. IN THESE ARMS 11. WE GOT IT GOIN' ON 12. IT'S MY LIFE 13. FAITH 14. I'LL BE THERE FOR YOU - RICHIE VOX 15. HAVE A NICE DAY 16. BED OF ROSES 17. WHO SAYS YOU CAN'T GO HOME 18. BAD MEDICINE 19. PRAYER ENCORE: 20. ALWAYS 21. WANTED 22. SATURDAY NIGHT 23. I LOVE THIS TOWN 24. SOMETHING TO BELIEVE IN 25. NEVER SAY GOODBYE Audibles: Hey God and I Believe So there. This was what was supposed to be played. It was supposed to be a fantastic show, but there was one guy who just couldn’t be arsed. Jon Bon Jovi. These 2 shows made me and Thierry decide that we’d never again come over to the UK during a tour as the best shows were almost every time given in Germany and Holland. Manchester was good this tour, but that’s it really. Right then, this was my review of the shows at Twickenham, I’ll now continue describing what the Jovitalk meeting what was like. After the show I was sending a text message to Seem and while doing so I lost Thierry. It turned out that he would meet me at Gate C again, and when talking to Tom how I lost Thierry he started laughing and told me Thierry would get lost on a soccer field, which is true, I guess. He send me a text message that said “see you at Planet Hollywood” and I called him back to ask him who had my train tickets. “****, he said”. Yes ladies and gentlemen, it was Thierry who had my train tickets. I met up with Moron again and we decided to meet up with Thierry at the train station. At the train station we saw him with a girl from Belgium called Vallie, and while we sat down in the train I asked Vallie if she still hated me (just to make conversation obviously) and she got a bit shy and said “well…I never hated you…” to which Thierry replied “well now that the ice has been broken I can hear the wedding bells ring!” Nice one, Thierry. What was more interesting was that Vallie actually had a very good looking friend sitting beside her. Hmm… When we were finally at Planet Hollywood I started chatting with Moron for a while and for a short while I thought that this Jovitalk meeting would be pretty crap with no tables to sit at. When we finally did get a table I met up with everyone. RichieW shook my hand, introduced me to his brother and Thierry introduced RichieW to Tom by saying that Richie’s the JBJ lookalike to which Tom replied, according to Thierry “No that can’t be, he’s too ugly”. Apparently that wasn’t what Tom said at all but we had a good laugh over it. Meeting everyone was really nice, we discussed Neil’s beard and how he really needed a haircut and a good shave, and had pointless debates about pretty much everything. RichieW said he had seen me and Thierry dance during Who Says, which was erm, slightly embarrassing. I really, really didn’t expect it to be this much fun, and it only got better when Vallie’s friend met up with me and just asked “So, do you still hate Belgian people?” Seriously, that was her opening line. I absolutely didn’t have any idea of what she was talking about, but apparently I had posted something like that on the Dutch board 3 years ago! I apologized (no I didn’t) but said I didn’t really hate people from Belgium (not if they had cleavage like that) and we started chatting. In fact, I chatted with her for the rest of the evening. And now we’re expecting our first Jovitalk babies! No we don’t, but it clicked very well. At 3 o clock a bell did ring though, final round which surprised me really. Here in Holland there isn’t really a curfew in the big cities and it disappointed me really. We were sort of forced to end the meeting, said goodbye to a few British people (and one yank) and decided to go off to find, maybe you guessed it, a McDonald’s. Sadly though, every ****ing McDonald’s in the centre of London had closed. |
While walking thru London we found out that everything had closed, apart from a Subway. Thierry got himself a sandwich which was way too healthy for him and he threw it away. It was a bitch finding a place to just sit down and have a drink again and we decided to call it a night. Me and Thierry were off to take the bus back to our pub and my lovely Belgian, erm, friend, said she’d text Thierry the next morning to meet up again on Sunday. At 5:30 in the morning we arrived at our pub, decided to skip McDonald’s this time, and just to go to bed instead. We had a quick chat about how great meeting had been and how, erm, nice, Ellen actually was. He replied “well yeah she’s really nice, but if you’d tell her the world was a square she’d believe you too”. Brilliant. End of day 3.
Day 4 started rather early. I was awake at half past 9 and decided to check if I could get some bread at the Supermarket. Thierry wanted 9 nuggets and they looked very surprised when I gave them my orders at the McDonalds. “sorry, but we only serve lunch right now”. Alright, no nuggets for Thierry then. When I came back with some bread we had lunch and went back to sleep. When I came back Thierry told me he had a text message from Ellen saying “Alright Dutch Bitches, we’re at Oxford street, see you there” and we thought good luck, we’ll see about that. We decided to pack our bags and check out which was actually pretty much impossible because our pub wasn’t open yet. There was an internet café near it so we decided to check Jovitalk reviews. Obviously most were positive because most of you shitheads are pretty clueless when it comes to a good Bon Jovi show, we posted our short reviews, and got back at our pub which was open now and checked out. “See you next time!” they said, and I thought “only of you clean the bathroom”. I had recharged my phone at the internet café as well and received two text messages. One from Emil saying “worst morning in the history of time”. He needed to get up at 6 in the morning in order to catch his plane. And he got back at 4 at his pub. I laughed about it, send him back that I thought Ellen was hot to which he replied “Awesome. Did you bang her?” Nice. But no, I did not bang her and all that talk about she giving me a blowjob at Planet Hollywood wasn’t true either. I’m saying this, because there are actually some fools who really believed this, and she got some complaints about it so there, I set the record straight. She did not give me a blowjob. Or did she? When we met up with Ellen and Valerie we went into a pub Thierry had seen (The boy’s got an eye for that) and decided to just sit there for a while, and in fact we had lunch there too. Or dinner, whatever’s appropriate. I had an, erm, special chat with Ellen, told a few of my brilliant Dutch jokes there (completely pointless) and when 4 hours had passed, numerous silly remarks from Thierry about me, we decided to go catch our plane. We said goodbye at the subway station way too fast and were off to Stansted. At this point it was obviously me and Thierry both were a bit tired because on our train ride from London to London Stansted it had never been so quiet. Me and Thierry shook hands at Stansted and said goodbye, which made this the end of Seb and Thierry’s tour. I landed at Schiphol and turned on my cell phone and it turned out that I had received a text message. From Ellen. Whoahey. I send something silly back, and she kept on sending me text messages. I called my friend Seem in the phone to tell her what it had been like and when I told her about Ellen she got all romantic “Oooh, Seb’s got a girlfriend!”. Erm, ****ing hell, no I don’t. When I got home at 12 in the evening Ellen was still sending me text messages, and when I went online I got a text message saying “will be home in half an hour”. We got on line and stayed on line for another 4 hours. It apparently clicked very well, and we repeated this on Monday night. I think it’s fair to say I’ve got myself a new very good friend and it’s a shame she lives so far away from me. We’ll see what the future brings, hopefully she’ll be able to spend some time with me and Thierry on tour next time, because we both enjoyed her company a lot. And that my friends, concludes this review. The tour ended with 2 shit shows, but I’m still a bit high from the fun I had at the Jovitalk meetings and all the MSN conversations with Thierry and Ellen. Hopefully I get to meet up with both of them really soon (I’d rather have Ellen first though, sorry Thierry), and I feel like this is the way it should’ve been. For me, the tour started rather odd with still feeling a bit odd after my split, but one month later so much has changed. Many things have cleared up in Seb’s life and I feel like I can really move forward this time. I think this really is the beauty of going on tour and experiencing so many things. This time Seb’s Bon Jovi tour wasn’t just seeing Bon Jovi. It was the whole package of meeting up with people again, meeting new people, and just finding out how much you like each other. We’ll see what the future brings, but I think it’s fair to say that right now, while typing this and Dire Straits’ Brothers In Arms is playing on my stereo, I can say that I’m the man I wanna be. I’m the man I wanna be. Now, how to rate these shows? They were good shows, but were they the shows they should’ve been? Absolutely not. And I will rate them for what they should’ve been, because everyone from the Bon Jovi camp knew that fans were expecting something special, and Jon just simply couldn't be arsed. Spoiled cunt. Night one: Rating on the Supersonic’s all mattering Bon Jovi review index: ***** The ****ing bollocks!!! **** Top show. *** Yeah, well that was alright... ** Piss poor performance. Nnngg!!! * Jon you cunt I hope you go bald within 1 day! Night two: Rating on the Supersonic’s all mattering Bon Jovi review index: ***** The ****ing bollocks!!! **** Top show. *** Yeah, well that was alright... ** Piss poor performance. Nnngg!!! * Jon you cunt I hope you go bald within 1 day! It’s been a pleasure. Thierry, Seem, Ellen, Miss, Tom, Laura, Emil, Carli and Moron. It’s been a ****ing pleasure. Hope to see you again next tour. Salaam Aleikum, Sebastiaan |
Is there any reason why you blank your faces out? Are you on the FBI's most wanted list?
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Aloha !
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Salaam Aleikum, Sebastiaan |
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Just imagine how much cd/dvd covers you could have made instead of typing this review :D.
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Fantastic review Seb. A great read!
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