Neil Daniels: Let It Rock – The Making Of Bon Jovi’s Slippery When We

Still slippery.

You can trust Louder Our experienced team has worked for some of the biggest brands in music. From testing headphones to reviewing albums, our experts aim to create reviews you can trust. Find out more about how we review.

There’s not much about the actual making of Slippery When Wet here: fewer than 10 pages of this 136-page book. That’s because the band have never really said much about it. If they had, then Neil Daniels, who has also written a BJ encyclopaedia, would certainly have found it.

There has to be a story to tell about what was probably a do-or-die record for the band after two pretty moderate albums. Producer Bruce Fairbairn is sadly gone, leaving no account of the two weeks he spent recording it in his Vancouver studio, and nobody else offers much insight.

There’s a bit about the talk-box Richie Sambora used on Living On A Prayer, and how Jon Bon Jovi didn’t initially rate the song, but that’s about it. The rest of the book is taken up with a track-by-track analysis, the back story, the follow-up story and dozens of people saying what a great album it is.

Hugh Fielder

Hugh Fielder has been writing about music for 47 years. Actually 58 if you include the essay he wrote about the Rolling Stones in exchange for taking time off school to see them at the Ipswich Gaumont in 1964. He was news editor of Sounds magazine from 1975 to 1992 and editor of Tower Records Top magazine from 1992 to 2001. Since then he has been freelance. He has interviewed the great, the good and the not so good and written books about some of them. His favourite possession is a piece of columnar basalt he brought back from Iceland.