Gig review: Bon Jovi at Wembley Stadium, London

September 15, 2026

Live review: Bon Jovi at Wembley Stadium, London, Wednesday September 9 2026

By STEVE MASCORD

AS your reviewer was making his way up the stairs and out of Wembley during the final song of tonight’s encore, he found himself in rarified air.

Halfway up the tiered seating in the world’s most famous stadium, I was directly in line with the lip of the stage, which meant I could not see the band Bon Jovi, the cutting edge LED stage or any of the giant video screens. Straight across from me was one man singing a love song and that’s it. He had asked for the house lights to go on so he could “soak it up”.

Oh, and to my right were 90,000 well illuminated people singing “Always”.

Stripped of the spotlight, his band and the trappings of enormodome superstardom, Jon Bon Jovi was just a bloke like me – standing 30 metres away singing a song he daren’t not attempt for years as he battled to recover from vocal chord surgery. It was actually possible to imagine yourself there … massive but disarmingly intimate all at once.

It was a Rocky film – but a real one. A guy who had risked everything and, in announcing a world tour during tonight’s show, finally won.

There are so many issues to examine when you talk about Bon Jovi in 2026 and we will get around to that. But firstly, I want to divide the reason why this was the gig of the year into three broad sections.

The first is the newsworthiness.

I’m a journalist and news value adds to my excitement about any event – whether I go on to write a book about it or consume it alone. When I bought these tickets, I was not even sure if JBJ would be able to sing, if the concert would go ahead.

I was lucky enough to go to Rock In Rio in 2001 when Axl was relaunching Guns N’Roses with a different line-up. You didn’t have any idea of what to expect and walking in tonight – despite there having been previous shows on this ‘testing ground’ tour in New York, Edinburgh, Dublin and two here at Wembley – it was imbued with the same frisson. It wasn’t Live Aid but in its own small way, it was rock history.

(It was not rock history in the same way as Back The Beginning was, so mind-numbingly important that I didn’t have a single piece of food or drink nor go to the toilet once for nine hours. It was still ‘just’ a Bon Jovi concert, though a very important one … as evidence by a friend saying to me as the golden circle crowd thickened: “do you think this will be his last ever show?’).

Would be be able to do it? Yes, this was a sports contest of sorts….

The second aspect was the immersive quality of the experience.

At Wembley, the entire venue is the stage. You feel like a participant in any event, from the people posing for photos outside Wembley Park station to standing near the stage and looking back at what tonight one might might want to call “a million faces”. Here, the stadium is the show and usually the artist is as hyped as you are to be there. Everyone is high on adrenaline.

And thirdly was the actual music. Bon Jovi were once level-pegging it with Ratt and Motley Crue. Tonight they’re playing their third consecutive Wembley Stadium. If you were born at the end of the sixties or the start of the seventies, “Raise Your Hands” might take you back to your first crush, the inundation of teenage hormones, the first sip of alcohol.

This is what people 10 years younger get out of going to see Oasis: an undeniably religious encounter. Forget Jon’s teeth or the flashy videos or a perceived contrivance to write more ballads – Bon Jovi are 200 times bigger than Warrant because of how many better songs they have and the degree to which those songs are superior.

The songs. Tonight, that’s as clear as the crisp North London night.

So why do those of us who were there feel so much more charitable towards Jon’s voice than those of you who weren’t and have been slagging off the videos? It’s all three of the points above, really. With regard to point one, it felt like a triumph. “A Little Help From My Friends” was gone, because he didn’t need help from his friends to open the show. Instead he walked out with an acoustic guitar and started with “Blood On Blood”, which gives be goosebumps just recounting it now. The vocal perhaps sounds poor stripped of 90,000 people and the flashing LED, the giant video screens, the people with their arms around each other.

Luckily, we didn’t have to hear it that way. We heard it, yes. But we witnessed it. Without delving into schmalz – it’s just the best word – we FELT it.

This guy could have run tracks and AI filters. He didn’t. He risked humiliation and perhaps a lesser version of bankruptcy by taking 200 people out on the road and playing the Northern Hemisphere’s most famous venues when, as a cut-short MSG show suggest – he wasn’t ready.

I’m not a huge fan of “Captain Crash and the Beauty Queen From Mars”. I’d have preferred “Two Story Town”. But this was a night of pure joy, of one aging man triumphing before our very eyes in a very personal battle with nature, with the added attraction that his weapon of choice was art that changed our lives.

Jon caught the tube to night’s show, reportedly. He was nowhere to be seen catching it back, as Bon Jovi’s flock was herded like sheep up Wembley Way. Stop now. Go now. A crowd control worker held his mobile phone up to a loudspeaker and went to Spotify. “Woa-OOH, we’re halfway there….” came the message and we all sang along.

But had been halfway up the stairs inside the stadium, looking straight across at that one guy, that is the scene I’ll never forget. There so little between us that it was possible to discern a lesson from the evening we can all make use of:

If you are lucky enough to do something that enriches the lives of others, money and ego don’t come into it. Especially as you get older.

There is no choice to be made. You just must do it.

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