Lisa-Marie Ferla's verdict: Three stars
With Because We Can, Bon Jovi have picked the perfect name for their latest world tour. After thirty years in the business, it's as good an answer as any to why the Hampden Park stage is decked out like a classic car, complete with flashing headlights.
But compared to the gleaming teeth of the band's frontman, those headlights are nothing. In his skintight jeans and leather jacket, and looking only a flattering fraction of his 51 years, Jon Bon Jovi doesn't do subtlety. Once an obligatory new song is out of the way as the opener, he throws his heart and hips into a frenzied You Give Love a Bad Name and the crowd goes wild.
Raise Your Hands ups the ante, if that's possible, with a cheesy light show compelling Glasgow to follow the song's direction. It's followed by Runaway, the first song from the band's first album, before a detour into 2007's Lost Highway. The energy in the stadium flags a little during songs that sound a little too much like a band taking itself too seriously, although given Richie Sambora's well-publicised absence from the tour the parts of Whole Lot of Leavin that wonder whether it's warm in California seem layered with meaning.
It does seem at times as if something is missing, particularly during the set's second hour, but a scattering of tracks from Keep the Faith get the crowd moving again. It takes a shamelessly preposterous finale, in which Jon swaggers his way through a mash-up of Bad Medicine and Roy Orbison's Pretty Woman while a montage of skeletons that still manage to have breasts pole-dance in the background, to remind us all what we came for.
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