REVIEW: BON JOVI AT Hard Rock CALLING
Sunday June 26,2011
By Rob Garrett
BON JOVI occupy a foreign position in the pantheon of new music. Ridiculed by the rock establishment for their blow-dried mullets and no-brains choruses, they were never quite young or soft enough to do it as a rock n` roll boy band.
Instead they establish a recession as the rock fan`s guilty pleasure, and pop fan`s bit of rough rock. A niche perhaps, but a really big one. The New Jersey rockers are one of simply a handful of bands who can not only headline Hyde Park, but can prevent a 50,000-strong crowd on their feet and in call for 3 hours.
While 100 miles away Coldplay gently lulled Glastonbury`s mud-soaked Saturday night, Bon Jovi took to the present at its polar-opposite in the festival world, brand-heavy Hard Rock Calling. It would be hard to determine a best fit of lot and gig; Bon Jovi made for the clear air, they duly left no hit-shaped stone unturned. There were the eighties anthems on which they made their millions - You Give Love a Bad Name, Lay Your Hands on Me, and of course, Livin` on a Prayer - alongside newer songs shrewdly modelled on the same aching chord changes and life-affirming lyrics, like It`s My Life and Get A Nice Day.
To love this music, like an action movie or a mystery crime novel, you want to see your suspension of unbelief at the gate. But there were possibly two moments when the line to self-parody was crossed - a painful piano and vocal cover of Leonard Cohen`s Hallelujah, and the determination to bathe the game of the present with images of Martin Luther King during the faux-politics of We Weren`t Born To Follow.
Jon Bon Jovi`s "we`re passing to be here until the cops drag me off" routine felt very commonplace on the 49-year-old`s lips, while out in the crowds all the lecture was of "him", not "them",after a quarter of a hundred fans still mistaking the band`s eponymous front man for a solo artist.
As an incessant deluge of sing-a-long choruses bled into squealing guitar solos and formulaic ballads, a warhorse of five Bon Jovi concerts taps me on the shoulder and confides: "I don`t know this one, but they all go the same."
This was music lacking in all subtlety or imagination, and later three carefully-executed encores it was clear spontaneity was never an alternative either. To the band, no doubt vanishing on their private jet, it was merely another point on another worldwide tour.
But as a pre-packaged experience of rock n` roll fast food it hit the spot. Nearly 50,000 people came together for this celebration of the predictable and, leaving the imperial park strewn with a sea of empty beer cups, their lives were remaining in some way touched.
3/5
3 of 5 REALLY???????????That show was 4.5/5 (No Never Say Goodbye)
No comments:
Post a Comment