November 7, 1979. The Atlantic City Expressway are on stage at the Stone Pony club in Asbury Park, New Jersey, performing a cover of Bruce Springsteen’s The Promised Land, when an audience member jumps on stage, grabs the mic and begins singing the second verse. It takes Atlantic City Expressway’s vocalist John Bongiovi a beat to recognise the interloper as the man who wrote the song.
“I’m a seventeen-year-old kid and suddenly I’m sharing a microphone on stage with the biggest rock star in New Jersey,” he – now Jon Bon Jovi – marvels, 45 years on, looking back on that night while seated on a sofa in an upmarket London hotel room. “I’ve got high school in the morning, and the teacher just sounds like ‘Wah wah wah, wah wah wah’, because I’m thinking Bruce will probably want me to come over to his house tomorrow, now that we’re friends. I had rainbows and unicorns in my head, like an acid trip, because now I had seen the world in colour.”
An astute, driven polymath, a music industry lifer with 130 million album sales to his name,it’s a long time since Jon Bon Jovi had his head in the clouds.
The singer/guitarist/band leader is in London to talk up two new projects: his band Bon Jovi’s forthcoming sixteenth album, Forever, set for release on June 7, and Thank You, Goodnight: The Bon Jovi Story, an insightful four-part Hulu documentary, directed by Gotham Chopra, who has previously made films about American sporting icons Serena Williams, Kobe Bryant, Tom Brady and others, which aims to shine a light on “a 40-year odyssey of rock’n’roll idolatry”.
It’s a measure of how hard Bon Jovi has been working during his four-day stay in London that this afternoon, mid-sentence, he’ll cast a glance across the River Thames, spot an iconic landmark on the South Bank, and exclaim excitedly: “Wait, is that the London Eye?” as if he’s only just now had a moment to take in his surroundings. But then as Thank You, Goodnight makes abundantly clear, JBJ has always had his eyes fixed on the prize. “There was no Plan B in my life, ever,” he states emphatically at one point. “It was all or nothing.”
With that said, the 62-year-old hasn’t forgotten what it’s like to be a rock’n’roll dreamer, hoping for
a break. At the end of our hour together, I ask him if he’ll record a video message for a friend, an aspiring singer-songwriter who’s ploughed thousands of pounds of his own money into recording two albums, encouraging him to keep the faith. Graciously, after quickly checking that his hair is looking goodit ishe does as requested, ending a genuinely touching inspirational speech with the words: “As you know, writing a song is the most euphoria one can ever feel, so keep writing ’em, bud, one of them is gonna click. And as long as they move you, fuck everybody else, right?”
As he passes my phone back,