It’s 1986, and a Mexican restaurant called Break For The Border in Central London is the location for a celebration. It’s time for to get due credit from their record label, Mercury, for the fact that third album has turned them into household names. After the first of multiple sold-out nights at the Hammersmith Odeon – now the Apollo – the assembled media, hangers-on, musicians and general glitterati of the English rock scene have been crammed around snaking tables, drinking margaritas and downing tequila shots.
No expense has been spared. Suddenly, the creaking PA system is cranked and the familiar strains of blare out, as the band arrive, surrounded by label types and security. From the midst of this pushing, shoving, self-important crowd, lifts a hand, clenches it into a fist, and waves it triumphantly at the journalists who’d supported the band from the beginning.
“We did it!” he shouts, unable to stop the tidal momentum that takes him ever closer to the VIP area, from which all save for a chosen élite would be excluded for the rest of the night. Right then and there, you feel that the ‘we’ isn’t merely a reference to Jon, the band or the label. But to everyone who’d believed for so long.
Bon Jovi had made it into the big time, and things would never be the same again. It had all been so different just a few months earlier, when I jetted out to New Jersey, to listen to what would be the album, and find out how close Jovi were, this time, to the br.