It was difficult not to notice that something was amiss when Bon Jovi played at Wembley Stadium in 2019. That something was Jon Bon Jovi’s voice – top notes went awry, melody lines fell flat. Not always, but often enough to be unsettling. The girl next to me - who would have once forgiven Jon if he'd accidentally driven his motorbike into her as long as she’d got an autograph – suggested we leave before the end.
Jon, who doesn’t talk much, and says even less when he does, has been surprisingly candid of late: Thank You, Goodnight: The Bon Jovi Story, a four-part documentary airing on Disney + and Hulu, charts his journey to combat his atrophied vocal cord and the major surgery to fix it. As he told The Sunday Times recently: “If the singing is not great, if I can’t be the guy I once was, then I’m done… I don’t ever need to be the fat Elvis.”
