SOUND

It's Rome, it's hot, it's good. There's a party going on in a hotel, with people swanning around in togas and gladiator outfits. You ask somebody what the vibe is and they mutter something about Bon Jovi being Italian-American and when in Rome . . . etc. Fair enoughski. The crowd parts, females swoon and grab their cameras as the main man enters the arena.

As well preserved as he is, Jon Bon Jovi ain't getting away with lopping 17 years off his age. "OK, OK, I'm not really 21, I'm actually 38, but I do feel like I'm 21 again and I've just got a new record deal and I'm really excited about everything again." Excitement, he avers, is a good thing and is a quality that has been pitifully missing from his life for "oh, about the last 10 years". So you're up for it again Jon, I take it?

"Absolutely. We've just released our first album in five years, we're about to go out on a 50-date world tour and hey, we're back in the charts. Also, I'm in a film with Harvey Keitel which is number one in the US box office charts, so as you say, I sure am `up for it' again." Having gone AWOL from stadium rock arenas/the charts/the pages of glossy magazines for the last number of years, the amiable New Jersey rocker is keen to point out that he didn't succumb to a bout of "celebrity psychosis" or anything unduly sinister - he simply wanted "time out" far from the maddening crowd. He knew things had gone a bit funny when, back in 1991, he was a headline story on CNN news just for getting his hair cut.

It was all very apt, in a sense, because the band Bon Jovi scaled the heights back in the 1980s as leaders of the "Hair Rock" movement. With their distinctive blend of pop and metal - characterised by lighters-in-the-air megaballads and turbo-charged arena anthems, they were, at one stage in the late 1980s, one of the biggest rock bands in the world. Albums such as Slippery When Wet (1986) and New Jersey (1988) sold 15 million copies apiece and massive hit singles like Living On A Prayer and Bad Medicine ensured they were never off the radio. With their spray-on jeans, bandanas and extravagant live shows, they conquered all before them and became one of the most recognisable rock music brands.

By focusing on Jon Bon Jovi's camera-friendly looks they appealed to the teenybop market, and their songs - a mixture of Def Leppard's rock with Bruce Springsteen's blue-collar sensibility - had the sort of cross-generational appeal that simply doesn't happen today due to the myriad and fragmented "niches" in the marketplace.

One day, though, Jon Bon Jovi looked around him and saw how his one-time garage band had evolved into an "organisation". He decided a bit of down-sizing would be appropriate. "It was 1991 and we had sold about 80 million records," he says. "Suddenly, though, it seemed that we were spending too much time in merchandising meetings and talking to accountants. We really just wanted to be a rock band but all this `organisation' stuff was happening around us. So we decided to fire everyone we could and slim the whole thing down."

At the same time, and without telling any of his bandmates (guitarist Richie Sambora, drummer Tico Torres and then bassist Alec John Such), the singer hired an acting coach. He took acting classes anonymously because he was scared of being seen as just another rock star who wants to be in films. But developing a taste for his new job, he put the band on hold to see how far he could take the acting experience. "The initial reaction was the classic `rock star wants to be movie star' one," he says, "but then people got behind me and said I should ditch the music and become an actor. But now, they tell me that if I have a hit record then that would help my film career. It's a funny business."

Instead of parachuting himself into big-budget blockbusters, Jon Bon Jovi took the low-key indie route, beginning with the well-received Moonlight And Valentino and five other small-budget indies. He's currently starring in the hit film, U 571, a second World War epic that owes a creative debt to Das Boot and also stars Harvey Keitel and Matthew McConaughey. It's the return to music, though, that's floating his boat these days. Jon Bon Jovi's Crush is their first album for five years and although not a radical departure from their well-established sound, it does feature a nod and a wink towards new technology.

"On the first single, It's My Life, to give it an updated sound we used a drum loop, lots of different drum machines and a real drum kit to give it that classic Bon Jovi sound but also to keep it up to date," he says. "On the album, we tended to use new technology where we deemed it necessary and not just for the sake of it. We kept on trying different things in the production process and we were helped in that our producer, Luke Ebbin, is very technically minded. What stopped us going overboard, though, was that we really wanted to hold on to the integrity of the songs. There's a certain organic feel to the music we make and there was no point drowning that out with new effects."

So you haven't gone dance, or got groovy re-mixers in to overhaul your sound? "No, not really. We've tried that thing before and it never really worked. I mean, if we wanted to be fashionable we would be doing all these re-mixes and releasing the songs to a club crowd. But we were never fashionable to start with, so why start now?" But with Metallica talking about how they want to hand over the master tapes of their new album to someone like Dr Dre, to see what he could do with them, has he ever felt the same way? "It's never something we rule out, but I think all this time down the line we have a pretty good idea of what would work and what wouldn't," he says.

Born Jon Bongiovi 38 years ago in a small town in New Jersey, he grew up as a third-generation Italian immigrant with a father who worked as a hairdresser and a mother who worked as a bunny girl. Speaking like a character in a Bruce Springsteen song, he talks about where he came from. "You either worked in the factories or joined the military. It was a very blue-collar sort of background and while all my friends had plans to join the navy, all I wanted to do was be a rock'n'roll singer."

AFTER hooking up with Sambora and Torres, the band anglicised his surname to become Bon Jovi and soon were attracting plenty of attention in local New Jersey clubs. Signed to Mercury in 1983, the band's first two albums didn't do much for them so they brought in a professional songwriter, Desmond Child, as a collaborator on the songs for Slippery When Wet. Child added a sheen and a structure to their work and soon the band began to specialise in vast choruses (aided and abetted by strings and harmonies) and enormodome-friendly tunes. Placing themselves defiantly at the pop end of hard rock, the band were at pains to avoid the "Hello Cleveland" excesses of some of their more muscular metal contemporaries.

"We've always tried to emphasise the songwriting aspect of our work," he says, "and the lyrics are really important to us. Personally I really admire lyricists like Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen. And sometimes I wonder about what some people in the hard rock world are at in their lyrics - I mean, I'll be talking to some of my contemporaries and saying `those lyrics mean nothing at all', and they'll say `it's OK, it's only rock'. But that's not good enough for me."

With a new album on the shelves and a new film in the multiplexes, Jon Bon Jovi isn't too worried about confusing his day jobs. "I'm not going to give music up, but acting is still something I want to do. When you're successful in a different field and then go into acting, you have to try twice as hard to prove yourself. So it's a challenge, and that's what fuels me most. Especially now the challenge of the band and this new album and this world tour. It's a `life without the safety net' type of challenge, and I love it."

Crush by Bon Jovi is out on the Island Def Jam label. The band plays the RDS in Dublin on August 25th