Bon Jovi: teased the crowd with his acoustic intro to Livin on a Prayer

Bon Jovi, at Villa Park, Birmingham

Bon Jovi: teased the crowd with his acoustic intro to Livin on a PrayerJason Sheldon/Rex Features
The stage was dressed to look like the front of a 30-metre-wide Chevy, with headlamps the size of bedrooms. Jon Bon Jovi, when he appeared, was dressed in a Captain America jacket. Here is a man, we can be assured, who will never go through a European avant-garde phase. This show was always going to be 100 per cent corn-fed stadium rock, an unpretentious spectacle that recalled that other famous son of New Jersey.

Bon Jovi is a syrupy Springsteen: not in terms of songwriting - tracks such as Wanted Dead or Alive fell off the cliché tree and hit every branch - but in his ability to inflate the sound of blue-collar America to giant proportions without sacrificing its intimacy. “I think it’s time to turn up the heat in this joint!” he drawled. It’s not often that someone speaks in such terms of a Premier League ground.

A star-jumping 51, Bon Jovi also has Boss-like stamina, as he acknowledged towards the end of his mammoth set: “There’s not many people who would come out and play for three hours. A couple of guys from New Jersey and that’s about it.”

This time, he was without his old wingman, guitarist Richie Sambora. He apparently declined to tour - there are rumours of a return to the substance abuse that led to him leaving the band in 2011. But his replacement, Phil X, had a blinder, leading the tightly drilled band in a rollicking cover of John Fogerty’s Rockin’ All Over the Worldthat owed much to the Status Quo version.

Like Quo, Bon Jovi know their limits. In 30 years their music has evolved from hair rock (You Give Love a Bad Name) to power ballads (Bed of Roses) to the country tinged songs on their last album, What About Now. Yes, Bon Jovi has swapped his perm for the kind of sculpted barnet you might see on an advertising executive. But the core of their sound hasn’t changed: big, emotional songs and a voice that can sound bland on record but, live, has power and agility.

A grandstanding highlight was Bad Medicine, extended and paused for Bon Jovi to chat and sing snatches of Bob Seger’s Old Time Rock and Roll. Then, for the long awaited Livin’ on a Prayer, he teased us, delivering the opening verses and chorus solo, on acoustic guitar. When the band joined in for the full-strength version, the result was magnificent: the ultimate stadium anthem, played where nature intended.