The mid-80s. Rock music. A time of big hair, big choruses and men wearing eyeliner. Ratt, Poison, Cinderella – they came and went.
Bon Jovi, though, never left us. They’ve ridden every storm and continued to sell records and play stadia all over the world. No wonder guitarist Richie Sambora is eyeing the Rolling Stones and thinking, "What if?"
“If that’s a benchmark, why not?” he booms down the line from California. “As long as the band is still evolving and still having fun on a friendship and family level as well as a musical and creative one, there’s no reason for stopping. I just played with Les Paul recently and he’s 90. It’s all relative.”
Does he feel that the climate is right for Bon Jovi to put themselves back in that position?
“Absolutely,” he says. “Over here in America there’s been a young rock ‘n’ roll movement that’s semi-punky, some with social issues, some writing about love – which can also be a social issue in a way. They have a lot of aggression yet they’re also writing very good songs. I’ve been enthused that we can make this record a bit heavier and aggressive than some of our other ones.”
The record in question is Have A Nice Day, one that sees the band in rawer form than we might have come to expect. For Richie, it’s not just a question of a music industry more susceptible to rock music and loud guitars.
“Beyond that, the songs could house them,” he maintains, “I learnt many years ago that you have to service the song, and on this particular record we wrote songs that could take those heavier guitars.”
Did the Metallica documentary Some Kind Of Monster ring any bells?
“We did a therapy thing a long, long time ago and it really worked for us,” Richie reveals. “From what I hear it wasn’t as wild as what Metallica have gone through. It was about us putting the band back together again as friends. Those guys had a lot more disdain for each other. We were a relatively young band at the time and we had rode the rocket ship to fame and fortune and everyone experiences that at a different speed. It’s a lot to handle. Some of us wanted to keep going, some of us wanted to slow down the speed of life. That pissed each other off but when we got into therapy we realised that we were just going through growing pains and forgave each other. From that point on we started to manage the band ourselves and low and behold here we are, a hundred million records later”.