And so here we are. The final episode in our ‘Never Had a #1…’ week, and it’s the band with the biggest disparity between Top 10 hits and number ones: 18 to 0.
Bon Jovi – 18 Top 10 hits between 1986 and 2006
Interestingly, three of this week’s four acts have had remarkably similar chart careers. Depeche Mode, Janet Jackson and Bon Jovi’s Top 10s all stretch from the early-mid ’80s through to the early-mid ’00s. Why did artists from that era prove so durable? In Bon Jovi’s case it’s probably down to the fact that, of all the poodle-permed hair metal acts of the late eighties, they cut their hair just in time and recast themselves as everyman rockers. Here are their three biggest hits…
‘Livin’ on a Prayer’ – reached #4 in 1986
Once upon a time, Not so long ago… ‘Mr Brightside’, ‘Sweet Caroline’, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You’… All songs I have to some extent enjoyed, once upon a time, only for them to pale, then bore, then sour from over-familiarity. ‘Livin’ on a Prayer’ is possibly the ultimate overplayed anthem. It might have been good. It might still be good, for all I know. I never will know, though, for I’d rather lose a pinkie finger than ever hear it again.
‘It’s My Life’ – reached #3 in 2000
Bon Jovi’s Bon-Joviest song. Power chords and cloyingly earnest lyrics about it being ‘now or never’ and how we ‘ain’t gonna live forever’, while Jon bounces around like an excited labrador. I want to hate it, but dammit that chorus just clicks. What I notice from listening to it now is how many little nu-metal touches there are – the piano line is lifted straight from Linkin Park, for example – and how dumb the video is. Bearing in mind Bon Jovi were all pushing forty when this came out, why exactly is a teenage boy jumping off bridges and dodging oil tankers to see the old fogies rocking out in a tunnel?
‘Always’ – reached #2 in 1994
It’s a widely held fact that the moment Kurt Cobain first played the opening riff to ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, all the hair metal acts dissolved to dust like the Nazis in ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’. Except for one… Bon Jovi laughed in the face of the glam apocalypse, shook the debris from their hair, and scored their biggest ever hit with this monstrous power-ballad. I can’t argue with it. Nobody can argue with music this pompous and sincere. A giant with a sledgehammer would be more subtle than Jon Bon Jovi howling his way through ‘Always’. I will say, though, that if you’ve ever sat through someone other than JBJ trying to howl their way through this song – at your local karaoke evening, perhaps – then hell will hold no fears for you.
I’ve been a bit down on Bon Jovi, I worry. I like some of their stuff. ‘You Give Love a Bad Name’ is fun, while ‘Bad Medicine’ might be the ultimate hair metal anthem. Sadly, their three biggest UK hits are all songs I would jump off bridges and dodge oil tankers to avoid…
Thanks for reading and enjoying this detour into the biggest non chart-topping acts of all time. We’ll be resuming the regular countdown in a few days time!
The UK Number Ones Blog 
That’s exactly the trouble with some of the ‘greats’ – they get loved to death but familiarity breeds, not exactly contempt, but deja vu in spades. Re your comments on ‘Livin’ on a Prayer’, you could say the same about ‘Reach Out, I’ll Be There’, ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’, ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’, ‘Baker Street’ and others. All undisputed classics – but they verge on the ‘how can we miss you if you never go away’ syndrome at times. It’s just as well they all made other equally excellent but less played-to-death alternatives we can enjoy rather more.
The songs you list are such classics that their brilliance still shines through, despite over familiarity. (Though, hands up, I don’t love ‘Baker Street’… Sacrilege, I know…) The songs I mention in the post were fine for a while, but have crumbled under the weight of being overused and overplayed. And I’ve yet to hear thousands of drunk people obnoxiously belting out ‘Whiter Shade of Pale’ like they do ‘Sweet Caroline’. That would be something, actually…
I’m not a Bon Jovi fan…too slick..but I do respect him and he can sing really well…plus looking on the outside…he seems to be a really nice guy. And yes…I’m totally surprised that they didn’t get a number 1 there. Lord knows he was played here to death and back.
He does seem like a decent guy. And some of their less-overplayed songs are fine! Just these three… Never again, please.
I’ve said this before and know some folks roll their eyes. I think Bon Jovi have had some pretty good songs. Plus, 100,000,000 Bon Jovi fans can’t be wrong! 🙂
While all of these three tunes certainly haven’t suffered from underexposure, I can still listen to “Livin’ On a Prayer” and “It’s My Life”. I was never particularly excited about “Always”.
For sure they have some good songs that haven’t been killed by overexposure… Just not these three. ‘It’s My Life’ is the least offensive of the three, and ‘Livin’ on a Prayer’ was fun for a time. ‘Always’ has never not been awful : )
Okay, I won’t argue. At the end of the day, music is highly subjective!😀
I like Bon Jovi a lot. I don’t love them, but they’re a perfectly solid pop rock band that occasionally rocks hard. Several of their hits like “Wanted Dead or Alive”, “Livin’ on a Prayer”, “Runaway”, “You Give Love a Bad Name”, “Bad Medicine”, “Keep the Faith”, I really, really enjoy a lot. I didn’t grow up on classic rock – or rock in generally really besides Green Day and Linkin Park – so these overplayed songs like “Livin’ on a Prayer” and “Mr Brightside” and “Hotel California” and “Stairway to Heaven” are still relatively new for me.
I’ve listened to all their albums and besides the huge hits, they’ve got some good albums (Slippery When Wet, These Days, Keep the Faith) and some good deep cuts. But I’d still take them as a singles band. I think Jon Bon Jovi is a pretty great singer (in his prime) and he seems like a really nice person. Richie Sambora, who was the guitarist for all the big albums, is also a seriously underrated guitarist. Great blues rock guitar player. Tico Torres is a competent drummer. Alec John Such is listed as the bass player for the classic lineup, but he actually didn’t play on a lot of the albums. That was Hugh McDonald, who didn’t become an official member until the mid-2010s. His bassline in “Livin’ on a Prayer” is pretty damn great. David Bryan the keyboard is also competent too.
My only critique really about Bon Jovi is that Jon Bon Jovi thinks the band is far more deep and meaningful than they actually are. He thinks his band is the second coming of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band (they’re both from New Jersey and both rockers, that’s the only similarity). He doesn’t seem to realise his band is just a fun pop rock/arena rock band.
Yes, I think you last point is backed up by songs like ‘It’s My Life’ – the lyrics are hardly Springsteen, but it will go down well at a certain sort of party.
The anthems are great, and some of the more understated stuff too (but not Always), Prayer is overplayed but has a certain quality about it, Keep The Faith is under-rated, and It’s My Life was pure Britney Spears/Backstreet Boys/ Nsync – stand up take a bow Max Martin co-writer – and as great as their popdance anthems of the time.
Time for a plug – back in the 90s I got backstage as a Jon Bon Jovi concert appearance in Bournemouth (where I work still) when he headlined the Radio One Roadshow in the summer. It’s not what you know it’s who you know (and my two sponsors are now big wigs in Councils, then they were Recreation organisers).
So i filmed this:
enjoy, and this won’t sound cliched cos its just Jon and guitar acoustic Livin On A Prayer….
Ooh that’s cool! Did you get to meet the man himself?
I think I knew that Max Martin helped out on ‘It’s my Life’, but had discarded the information : ) It’s got the rock version of those power chords you hear in NSYNC and Britney songs of the same time.
Sadly no Jon was a bit grumpy that day, he’d had to fly in to Bournemouth Airport, get picked up in a car (with my future boss as co-passenger), drive to King’s Park, sit through the support acts and then get delayed by Simon Mayo the DJ for various radio reasons before doing a couple or 3 acoustic songs and back to the airport to move on to the next promo of his latest solo stuff 🙂