It's been a long road to get my voice back... I was ready to call it a day

AS the sun set over London's Hyde Park last July, few would have noticed the man in the black baseball cap being quietly escorted to his seat for Bruce Springsteen's headline show.

- TOM BRYANT

Even fewer among the 65,000 crowd would have realised the man should have been on the stage himself.

"I was meant to sing that day. But then I just said: 'I'm not ready"," Jon Bon Jovi explains. "It was my goal to be healthy for Hyde Park. But it got to that time, and I just couldn't."

While the fans missed out on a sensational duet that balmy summer evening, it marked another chapter in Jon's long, and often painful, recovery from the vocal surgery he had in 2022.

The star went under the knife after finally accepting that his voice was not up to the demands of touring.

Although it was his wife of 35 years and childhood sweetheart Dorothea, 61, who quietly had a word in his ear, Jon knew deep down his time was up.

"After a 15-show run where I couldn't even will my voice back, I was really ready to call it a day," he says.

He saw a doctor, who confirmed his vocal cords were atrophying and recommended a cutting-edge procedure.

After confiding in country sensation Shania Twain, who had the same surgery, he took the plunge in the knowledge that it really was his last resort.

"Shania was like a godsend," he says. "She had the identical procedure with the same doctor and told me: 'You'll come through it... but be patient."

Two years on and Jon cuts a sanguine, relaxed figure in his London hotel suite as he talks about his recovery.

It is the third time I have interviewed the singer and each time he has been on sparkling form.

This occasion is no different, with his mood clearly buoyed by rave reviews of his latest single Legendary, a thumping return to form for the band that bears his (stage) surname.

But it is hard not to detect a certain weariness as the 62-year-old reflects on what must have been a tough 24 months, not knowing if he would ever recapture his magic live.