Bon Jovi have announced their departure from Mercury Records after 13 studio albums and more than 30 years with the label – and have done so via an angry song on their final record for Mercury.
The title track of the new odds-and-sods album Burning Bridges features the lyric: “After 30 years of loyalty, they let you dig the grave / Now maybe you can learn to sing or strum along / Well I’ll give you half the publishing / You’re why I wrote this song.”
The band’s singer and leader Jon Bon Jovi told Billboard: “This hits it right in the head and tells you what happened. Listen to the lyrics because it explains exactly what happened. And that’s that.” He said the new album had originally been intended as a fan souvenir record to accompany a tour of south-east Asia. Instead it was refashioned into a collection to fulfil the group’s contractual obligation to Mercury.
Bon Jovi released their first album on Mercury in 1984, but became huge stars with the release of their third album, Slippery When Wet, in 1986. That album was No 1 in the US for nine weeks and featured the hit singles Livin’ on a Prayer, You Give Love a Bad Name and Wanted Dead Or Alive.
Over their career with Mercury, Bon Jovi recorded more than 80m certified album sales, with estimated total sales of around 100m, making them more commercially successful than Fleetwood Mac, Guns N’ Roses, Prince and Paul McCartney.
Mercury has changed enormously since Bon Jovi signed to the label. It is currently owned by Universal Music Group, but in the UK it was folded into Virgin EMI after that company was bought by Universal. The label is also defunct in the US, and has no presence on the “labels and brands” page of Universal’s website.
Jon Bon Jovi told Billboard he had been working towards a new album, which is likely to be released in spring 2016. “Believe me, the new record is good. It’s pointed,” he said. “It is something we are going to be very proud of in the spring when we put it out.”
