Wednesday 25th June 2008 @ Ashton Gate Stadium, Bristol
With Support From: Switchbladeuk

Bon Jovi! God, we were excited. We got there as the gates opened at four thirty to make sure we had good seats, along with hundreds of people with standing-room tickets. It hadn’t occurred to us that no one else in the ‘press seating’ would rock up until the show began – we were alone in our seating block for nearly four hours. Still, we had an exciting time. My plus-one got all flustered waving at someone in the distance she swore was Jon Bon. It turned out to be an old lady with a blond perm. We drank too many bottles of Carling – at four pounds a throw.

Switchbladeuk, the support act who won the Evening Post’s ‘Rock the Gate’ contest, were pretty dire. Still, it must be deeply intimidating to play to a huge crowd who are specifically not there to see you – maybe they would be better in a smaller venue. If you fancy checking out their Misfits-meets-eighties-guitar-riffs tunes, you can get there through the Evening Post website.

Ashton Gate is not a venue designed for music – it’s designed for football, in its real life incarnation as Bristol City FC. The stage is built festival-style at one end of the pitch – which they have covered to protect the grass. There are standing-room tickets in front of the stage and seated tickets in three sides of the stands. In some ways this is an excellent design. The standing audience has the opportunity to dance and have that part-of-something-big elation that wells up in you when you are all standing together, hands in the air, singing the same song; concert venues with rows and rows of seats just can’t deliver that experience. It did mean that many of the standing audience stood for four hours before anything happened though, to maintain their place in the crowd and none of them could get right up to the front – that area had been fenced off for the ‘golden circle’ tickets, whoever they were. Some of them were sporting some lovely prom dresses. Not very rockin’.

Then Bon Jovi happened and it had been worth waiting for. Jon Bon was tireless, and as a band, Bon Jovi understand how to really engage an audience. It was their 90th show of the tour but there was no hint of boredom. We got the whole repertoire of Jon Bon’s rock showmanship; punching the air, falling to his knees, the most impassioned facial expressions on the close-up screen. The man was rockin’ out!

Seated as we were in the press seats in the stands, near the stage, but at the side – along with a lot of other people who had paid for their seated tickets – I can tell you that we really noticed the acoustical design flaws of a football ground. The sound quality was close to dreadful. Sometimes we didn’t recognise a song until halfway through. One of us would say ‘Hey, I think he’s doing Sleep When I’m Dead!’ and the other would say, ‘No, it’s something new – no, wait, it is!’ and we’d finally join in, singing. Hopefully it was a less cacophonous experience for those people in front of the stage.

Regardless, it was a really good show. As well as a lot of their new stuff we got most of the classic tunes we’d hoped for and they encored with Cowboy and Living On A Prayer. It was a real, classic rock show. It made everyone put their arms around the people they were with and sway. It was Bon Jovi. Proper.

www.bonjovi.com

Anna Freeman